They physically dont have time to solve all of them, which leads to overwork during the week, regular work during the weekends and a lack of relaxation, even on vacation. But none of this helps, and tasks start to get stuck on a waiting list, and some of them get lost from sight forever in favor of more urgent and important ones. Meanwhile, the manager understands that the problem they themselves dont solve might result in serious losses both for the whole company and for themselves personally, leading to a state of constant stress that the manager or boss begins to project outwardly. This is especially true for those employees who inform them about new problems or are in any way, shape or form party to them. As a result, a confrontation between bosses and their subordinates begins, which only worsens the situation, since the manager must now spend their energy on that, too.
Slow problem solving
Meanwhile, the organizations real problems begin to get solved more and more slowly. After experiencing an inappropriate reaction from their managers, subordinates share information about new problems less and less frequently with the higher-ups, while lacking the necessary privileges and resource to solve them at lower levels. Whats more, due to the fear of having the dogs set on them, information starts to transform in order to protect the person sharing it or, when such shielding is impossible, it gets completely stuck without ever reaching the boss. Interestingly, decisions traveling in the opposite direction experience their own losses as well. I conducted an analysis which showed that in transitioning from one level of management to another, around 30% of information gets lost. This means that if only 70% of information remains when an order gets to your direct subordinates, then in transmitting this order to the next level of management, you have to take 70% of these 70%: 0.7 × 0.7 = 0.49 = 49%, or less than half! Unfortunately, the information doesnt merely get lost, but also gets twisted: this means that the remaining 51% is filled with something else, often contradictory to your thoughts, words and desires.
Task 3
Multiply this 0.7 by as many layers of hierarchy there are underneath you, and understand how little of what you say gets through to those who will have to directly carry out your orders, and how much distortion is introduced in the process.
Is it clear now why nothing ever happens the way that you planned it?
Now lets look at the situation from the clients side, who has encountered some insignificant, minor problem and lets your subordinate know about it. Your subordinate cant solve the issue themselves and escalates it higher what else can they do, when thats always how they act? But the problem isnt critical, you have more important and urgent tasks, and as a result, you put it off over and over again until at the end of the day you simply forget about it altogether. Then the exact same client runs into the exact same problem half a year later and understands that nobody even tried to take care of him. They tell the exact same employee, now with some surprise, that the problem could have been solved over all of this time. Your subordinate justifies their behavior, saying that they passed the clients wishes along to their bosses and assures them that theyll bring up the issue again. But even if they do exactly that, the result will be the same: you just wont get around to it. And after some time, the exact same client will run into the aforementioned problem. Now put yourself in that clients position: its not hard to imagine what they think about your company and its attitude toward its customers
Demotivation of rank-and-file employees
All this time, your subordinates find themselves in a very unpleasant position of being wrongly accused. If they report up, then they can be turned into a sacrificial lamb; if they conceal the information, they can be asked at any moment why such a problem exists, but nobody knows about it. As a result, the poor fellow is in a constant state of stress, and even if their manager still had some power to influence the situation, then the subordinate will only lose motivation, stuck in a position of dependency.
What happens as a result? We hire specialists to work on motivating our personnel and pay them salaries, but in actuality, everything that they concoct doesnt work for long. Theres some mysterious important reason that demotivates people within the framework of a traditional management system. This reason is learned helplessness. Well talk in more detail about this reason in the fourth chapter. Now Ill just say that the essence of this phenomenon comes down to the following: if we take an employees rights away, but nevertheless continue to ask as much of them as before, they will start fearing responsibility of any kind and begin to avoid it by any means necessary. This gives a person who is extremely demotivated and dodges responsibility as best they can, lacking any desire to make decisions. Meanwhile, its very important to understand that we are the ones who made them that way. After all, in everyday life outside the workplace, everything in this persons life is the polar opposite: they take responsibility for where they live and what they eat and if they have children, theyre responsible for their lives, too! So why in the world do they turn out to be "insufficiently responsible" to be worthy of the permissions necessary to make the simplest decisions for the company?
Mass irresponsibility
Whats going on inside the organization? Both managers and their subordinates are becoming hostages of a system of management under which its best not to be responsible for anything at all. This became the reason for an unbelievable dearth of good managers, despite a surfeit of qualified specialists. After all, who would be clamoring to take on additional responsibility for other people, too? In such a situation, those who are solely interested in career growth and power begin to flourish. As a result, the situation gets even more complicated: after all, such people consciously surround themselves with others who cant compete with them and intentionally inflate their staff numbers to seem like more significant managers.
Meanwhile, other employees initially protest at the sight of such phenomena but then, when they understand that their concerns are not being heard, they also begin to lose responsibility, asking themselves, What, do we really need this? Why should the buck stop here? They pass the requirement to figure problems out onto their supervisors, who ultimately have no time to do so, since theyre already so busy in the first place
Wars between divisions
Twilight zone of rights and responsibilities this is a zone between two or more divisions, where nobody in any division has the necessary rights to solve the problems that inevitably arise and nobody wants to take on the responsibility for doing so.
In a situation where nobody wants to take responsibility, wars unavoidably begin to brew between departments and divisions, which also has a negative influence on the overall results of the companys work. For that matter, it is the divisions that have to work most closely together in order to achieve their common goals that fight the most often! Its not hard to guess that the reason also lies in the management system.