I'm a BSME with copious design and MFG experience that realized that technology needs to change the way that we work. Through many companies, including 3 that I owned and founded, I've learned that the needs extend far beyond the engineering group.
Once upon a time, there was a company, and in this company was a group. The leader was a...well he was a bizarre sort, very technical, not much in the social skills and certainly not great in terms of management skills. But he was pretty damn good at what he did and he was in charge of the group. Under his tutelage, the group flourished, knocking down significant backlogs, increasing the value to the clients through a variety of initiatives. This group earned kudos from their clients, admiration from their vendors, and the group was used as a primary differentiator against competitors.
The upper management of the company then decided that this group belonged under operations, instead of technical, and moved the group to another functional silo, another wing of the org chart, and they were now direct reports to the President. The president did have all of the management skills (or so we assume) and indeed had managerial experience, but was in no way technical. The group started on a downward slide, but still managed to stay afloat.
The upper management intervened again, deciding that it would be more cost-effective to move this group to another state, to the operations center (away from the founder of the group). Along with this move, all of the group members would now become direct reports to a mid-level manager who was a direct report of the President. The new manager had little or no management experience, but used to be technical, having moved to another technical area of the company a few years earlier.
In fairly short order, the group started to slip. Call backlogs raged, clients raged even louder, vendors became incensed with the volume of complaints that they were receiving about their "star."
A few of the articles and books that I've been reading have made me ponder this situation and what went wrong. The mode of operation of this group in their heyday, was one of self-sufficiency. Since he had very little management or people skills, the group leader positioned himself more as a group mentor, allowing (or even insisting that) the team members make their own decisions. When they couldn't make their own decisions, or ran into a technical problem that they couldn't solve, they would go back to the team leader who would walk them through the logic to help them understand the answer, the logic leading up to it, and the reasoning behind it. When the group was thrown across silos, they still remained in the same physical location, and they still relied on that same mentor, even though he was no longer a part of their group. So while the group did start to falter, even more when the President insist that the leave the mentor alone so he can work on other initiatives, they still had that crutch to lean on to keep them out of a jam. Once they moved away from the mentor and received a middle-manager, they made the move from being empowered team members to being "direct reports" and the bureaucracy of hierarchy hit them hard. They lost the freedom to act in the best interest of the client or the company and had to start waiting on management to develop "corporate lines" to address every situation.
There certainly were a lot of other factors involved, personality clashes ensued (these seemed more difficult and cumbersome once the bureaucratic process was imposed on them), some of the technical management tools used to keep the group together fell by the wayside, and so on. Upper management decided to add yet another layer of managers and now the direct reports were buffered from the owners by two brick walls of management. And the owners were now three levels away from their clients.
A lot of talk these days centers around hierarchical structures getting so obscene that the upper management is so far removed from their clients that they have no idea of what's going on out there. I've seen three layers of management introduced in companies of less than forty employees. As I said in an earlier entry, ye olde one manager to six direct reports theorem is only still valid if you hire people that cannot be trusted to make decisions.
The Opinion section of the May 2005 HBR by Frank Furedi entitled "Treat Employees Like Adults" addresses the dumbing down of organizations that is fueled by paranoia and an aversion to risk. Furedi goes on to point out that overly restrictive employee codes are formulated by lawyers to "protect the company", but the net effect that they have is that every comment and action that occurs between two employees, is immediately put under the microscope to determine if (based on the code) they should be offended or if they should initiate sub-management notification process 14? The net result is that people censor themselves and simply aim to fly below the radar and not make waves, lest they get crucified as described in the handbook or as they've seen the fate of others in the past.
These robots that have been created will strive to keep their jobs, and that's it. While management shields them from information about what's really going on in the company ("that's strictly on a need-to-know-basis, now get back to work"), the employees soon realize that they are not allowed to make their own decisions and the primary source of the truth becomes the rumor mill. They have severe demotivators preventing expression of free thought, developing any kind of working relationships amongst colleagues, and certainly against innovation or questioning any of the company's assumptions.
Hierarchy are a great way to run a 1912 Ford Assembly line, but they just don't hold up in today's innovate or die eConomy. Companies focus on hiring the best and the brightest, you need to let them shine.