Managerial System Tuning

  

Elliott Jaques and Kathryn Cason studied managerial systems over the past 40 years. They found that personal and group behavior problems in organizations are caused by the managerial system and not the other way around. Dramatic changes in behavior can be achieved by tuning the managerial system. They also discovered that there was a natural organization or as they named it a Requisite Organization. Tuning the managerial system consists in bringing it closer to the Requisite Organization by working, as for all systems, on its goal, its interrelated parts and their relationships. Here are some of the main concepts.

  

          Goal:  The whole organization should have a goal, or as Bill Gates from Microsoft says, a dream. That goal is what in fact creates the system. Each role should also have tasks defined as an assignment to produce specified output within a targeted completion time, with allocated resources and within specified limits (policies, procedures, etc.). These tasks should be linked to the goal of the whole organization.

 

           Parts:  Organizational research by Elliott Jaques has shown that there is one, and only one, system of management layers, he called them strata, for all corporations, with boundaries between layers identifiable by time-span measurement. When managers and immediate subordinates are in roles in adjacent layers, things can work well. If both are within same layer, the manager is “breathing down the necks” of the subordinates. If they are more than one layer apart, the manager is “pulled down in the weeds”.

 

           Relationships:  Vertical or manager-subordinate relationships, as well as horizontal or cross-functional relationships, should be defined in details. They spell out managerial accountability and authority, and define managerial leadership processes. These relationships are essential because, as proponents of the system theory maintain: "The key to comprehending how a system works lies not so much in understanding the parts in themselves as in understanding their interactions with one another."

 

            Processes:  Processes are horizontal; they often cut across many functions of the organization. Dr. Deming has demonstrated that the process conditions the performance way more than the people operating it. He has defined how to control processes through statistical process control. He has also taught us the benefit to extend the process, as much as possible, to outside suppliers and customers.