Stage-4: Working with Values

To reiterate: embedding the rationalist mode is not about turning everyone into a planner. It is all about everybody taking the organization's values and objectives far more seriously, and at last using planners properly.

Rationalist decision-making occurred in previous stages. Planning and policy-making were then usually handled pragmatically or procedurally with a greater or lesser degree of success and satisfaction.

When the rationalist spirit is confined to planning departments, plans are liable to become over-elaborate and get divorced from action and commitment. Planning is viewed as obstructive and bureaucratic if operational managers do not own organizational values and objectives.

Official HQ plans have strategies and targets, but (if questioned) few pragmatic managers reveal awareness of what they should be trying to achieve for the organization and why.

when I wrote the text over 20 years ago. In the second half of the 20^th century, most management ideas were rationalist in one form or another.

Total quality management, focusing on customer needs, living with constant change, human resource management, business process re-engineering—all were largely built on rationalist assumptions.

The societal vision of management culture has moved on around the THEE spiral trajectory since then, and it is a tactic of those bringing in the new that they unfairly disparage the old. So rationalism often gets a bad press.

● Develop a genuine and persisting consensus on what is important and why.

● Emphasize and apply these values to ensure control from within the person.

● Recognize that any organization is a community in which everyone depends on everyone else.

● Values are the communal glue, so affirm those that overcome differences generated by role boundaries, hierarchy and tribalism.

● Use such values to get support for otherwise alien or distasteful decisions.

● Ensure that priorities shape ongoing action, rather than being converted into another task to be completed and then forgotten.

● Stop defining objectives only in terms of individual activities or role responsibilities and start defining them in terms of future states of affairs (outcomes).

● Choose outcomes over longer periods in accord with values and identify the organizational quality of achievement i.e. cross-functional and cross-departmental.

● Even perfectly feasible outcomes will feel challenging, so ensure adequate analysis of situations, activities and resource requirements.

● Emphasize results and actively block excess discussion on processes or tasks.

● Ensure meeting targets for a division (e.g. for cost reduction or sales) does not displace or harm wider organizational goals.

● Find opportunities to produce what is wanted by clients or customers, on whom the organization depends.

Projects & Strategies

A firm without a rationalist ethos can handle simple projects, but will struggle to implement complex projects that cover the entire organization—like major IT installations. It can even develop a winning strategy. However, most staff will not know or properly understand the strategy as it relates to their role. So they will not feel particularly responsible for pursuing it.

● Foster wide participation in developing and pursuing values and outcomes.

● Only full participation permits cooperation.

● Use participative team-work to prevent organizational directions being misunderstood, ignored or pursued with the wrong spirit.

● Blur roles at times to aid cooperation and to use the capacity to contribute.

● Value staff by recognizing their capacity to contribute outside their role or department and enabling such input sensibly.

● Harness personal energy and enthusiasm, and find organizational champions for particular challenging goals.

● Improve internal communications generally.

● Devise ways of giving everyone in the organization, simultaneously, an identical message on organization-wide issues, to avoid skewed communication by managers with biases.

● Aim for a two-way, evolving process of informing and listening.

● Take objections or complaints and suggestions about work seriously.

● Ban the 'give me solutions not problems' style of management.

● Keep everyone informed of plans and progress, where they are fully involved.

● Keep communicating on contentious issues until there is widespread understanding.

● See proper communication as the way to get cooperation in the internal customer-supplier chain.

● Dispel rumours and misconceptions rapidly.

● Ensure external public relations press releases are concordant with internal messages.

● Avoid letting people learn about their jobs through something they happen to read in the newspapers.

● Develop formal principles and policies that liberate managers to use initiative.

● Release people to act on agreed values and pursue shared outcomes in their own way.

● Reduce dependence on procedural control and non-negotiable, authoritarian directives.

● Foster equality amongst staff when it comes to organizational issues.

● Cut, correspondingly, the amount of regulation and centralization.

● Investigate and deal with situations where there seem to be inappropriate constraints or interference.

● Never lose sight of what is really important for the organization and what outcomes are being pursued.

● Doggedly persevere until obstacles are overcome, and positively resist pressures for mindless expedience.

● Concentrate on how you personally can contribute best.

● Actively recognize the significance of your actions for others.

● Reduce preoccupation with tasks, and do not place means before ends.

● Steer projects effectively and stop them being hijacked or going off track.

● Think long-term as well as short-term.

● Exert emotional self-control, and do not act impulsively or angrily.