Functional management is a management composed of
managers who each have an aspect of the organization under their authority,
based on their specific knowledge, eg finance, HR, operations, logistics, etc.
This is a very common practice, and apparently for many leaders of
organizations it is a guarantee that they take all angles into account when
making decisions. This should indeed be the case, because a good policy
decision takes into account all information, limitations, objectives, ... of
those different sub-areas. Management as a team must guarantee that this happens,
because that is a condition for good practice.
However, the results appears to be rather
disappointing in reality. By organizing management functionally, the management
scope is split up into sub-aspects of the organization. To express it in system thinking: every
functional manager manages a ‘system aspect’ of the organization, not a
subsystem. By linking these aspects to specialization, a great
deal of management expertise is created, but the policy will only succeed if
those aspects are properly integrated back into decision-making, each at its
correct value. Because the focus of each functional manager is on its own aspect, there
will be some sort of competition between the aspects, and perhaps also between
the people. Because everyone defends their own terrain, authority,
importance, insight, conclusion, etc. The final decision is therefore very
often a game of influence and power. The balance will therefore very often lean
over to the people who have the most power in the system. This is not only determined by their
personality, but also by the pressure from above (Executive Board, legal
guardianship, etc.)
Shared leadership will not solve this. Because of the composition of the team,
they have opted for 'divided leadership'. Shared leadership assumes that the team
members pursue the same goal and focus in finding the right synthesis and
balance between all perspectives and aspects of the problem. Only then can they complement each other
in forming a healthy decision. However, this is severely handicapped by
the situation in which each of the team members has legitimately withdrawn into
a sub-aspect (expertise, insight, involvement) and therefore does not have to
take any responsibility for the whole. One cannot form a reliable picture of the
right balance between the partial aspects from one's own sub-aspect, because
they do not belong to the area of attention. The more the specialized areas
are treated as a monopoly or a territory, the worse the integration results
will be. The same effect is created by the lack of knowledge on certain
relevant aspects op the situation, due to specialization.
A management consists of people who are by definition
working on the whole of the system or organization. Their role is to integrate all
aspects in the right balance into good policy decisions. In addition to their specific area of
responsibility, they must therefore have sufficient insight into the whole. And there will always be areas of
responsibility because every board member is supposed to lead part of the
organization. The question then becomes: how can we determine areas
of responsibility that guarantee as much integration as possible, without
violating the limits of personal expertise and talents.
This will usually amount to a small executive group
consisting of a general manager who leads the team, a director who manages the
operational units (the 'core business') and an organization director who takes
care of all supporting departments and the mutual cooperation within them. At the level of the operational units, we
try as much as possible to put all aspects of the performance in the jurisdiction of the
operational team (budget, quality, administration, ...) Alongside these
jurisdictions, each director is expected to be adequately informed of the
functioning of the whole of the organization, without working outside his own
mandate in the daily management.
The requirement that executives must make on directors
as a result of this vision is that they are capable of dealing with great
complexity. Mastering technical knowledge of one aspect is insufficient. Judgment in weighing the non-measurable is
essential. Every board member should have a strong commitment to
the mission, a clear insight into the strategic choices of the organization and
contact with all aspects of the operation to properly assess an argument of a
colleague or of a specialized (aspect) manager.
The same problem arises in the operation of multi-disciplinary teams. If the team members limit their view on
the problem to their specialty, there is competition between the aspects, which
is very difficult to balance. It then becomes crucial to have a strong
commitment from each team member to the mission and
objectives, and a great willingness to function in complementarity. A lot of trust and discipline will be
needed to value the weight of the arguments of colleagues from another
discipline, even without being convinced on the basis of insight. In organizations with complex assignments
(eg the healthcare sector), multidisciplinary
teams are a necessity for quality. If a multidisciplinary team can provide
the discipline to work integrally, why would that not be possible in a
management team? This appears to be much more difficult in practice,
presumably because the distance from reality (eg customer) is greater with the management team. As a result, there is more opportunity to
'bury' oneself in one's own discipline; but perhaps the pressure is also bigger?
Hugo Der Kinderen
March
2018
No comments:
Post a Comment