Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Need of Vertical Knowledge by Corporate Strategic Decision Makers


  Need of Vertical Knowledge by Corporate Strategic Decision Makers

Hierarchical structures in organizations provides abstraction among the top management and the workforce. The formal leaders within the hierarchy are responsible to manage the workforce down the stream and to implement the corporate strategies. The formal leaders or managers abstract the pressure to the workforce applied by the top management and create motivational environment for the employees. Moreover, the managers are also responsible to manage the issues among the employees and let the top management only focus upon the corporate strategic decision making. The benefits of hierarchic structures of employees is a proven strategy and has no match with the flat organizational structure where boss is supposed to communicate with all the employees.

Human Resource Management experts are responsible to measure the employee performance through managers' feedback in order to decide promotions, benefits and future leaders. The human resource management department performs several activities to identify skillful people within the organizations as a human capital (or at least supposed to perform).

 If the organizational structures got messed up, it effects the employee performance. Several issues   evolve within the workforce like insecurity, lack of trust, and so on. On the other hand when any manager got overloaded it may also cause vulnerabilities within the system. It does not matter how efficient a manager is, the load will eventually effect either on his own progress or the relationships with his workforce.

 Whatever would be the nature of the problem occurs within the formal leaders, it will cause disorders in the system equilibrium i.e. organizational desires from workers vs workforce desires from  top management. This imbalance of equilibrium impacts on the viability and performance of the workforce. Consequently, the issues associated within the workforce or with managers may cause bottlenecks in the dissemination of the ideas, and the development of green environment within the organization.

 Here, top management of an organization need vertical knowledge with a degree of precision about 'whats happening down the stream'. This kind of knowledge could be a performance metrics of employees or work environment related knowledge. Performance metrics are generally qualitative in nature and mostly based on the managers choice (of course to some extend 'biased'). Secondly, methodologies or tools for measuring work environment indicators are rare in practice and very few knowledge management tools guarantees such results.

Here I am sharing my analysis results (powered by INS Network) over a group (at a financial organization) when trust measured within the group. We measured several other social interactions within the group, however, just discussing trust here. The following figure indicates several important aspects of the social/relationships. Regardless of the nature of trust i.e. social/technical, the impact can be understandable over the group performance.



Trust Network in a Financial Institution


 
In above figure it can be seen that the peoples are living in islands, within a single group there exists several islands, no bridges among them. This lack of trust contributes in the performance degradation specifically at the time of stress. What we found that the human resource managers, organizational development experts and the top management could not have accessibility to such results with a degree of precision. In such situations when appreciations and benefits being awarded by the top management, they fail to reach out the underlying facts. Most of the performance metrics and indicators  are measured by the managers. If the manager is inclined towards any of the islands (as shown in the figure) its really difficult for the others to receive the deserving appreciation and support.

Therefore, what we perceived that the human resource managers, top management, knowledge managers, organizational development practitioners, and trainers/coaches should include such 'vertical knowledge' tools in their best practices, otherwise their efforts could not be fruitful due to the 'invisible'.  Many more conclusions can be made upon this, you can share your remarks as well.

4 comments:

  1. nice article...unfortunately most of the companies have not yet adopted the strategic based performance management system. The system in most of the companies still goes the same old way... in which the one manager report to his/her vertical based on his own perception and inclination . Performance audit is the best way to analyze individual productivity.. which should be presented in the shape of the dashboard to the verticals making sure that it is calculated against the all performance metrics defined in the systems.

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  2. I am interested in learning how trust was measured. I have never seen a diagram that depicted trust within an organization.

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    Replies
    1. Would you kindly disclose your identity to further discuss the topic?
      regards
      Rauf
      www.insnetworksys.com

      Delete
  3. We performed quantitative analysis of qualitative research within an organization.

    Rauf Malick

    www.insnetworksys.com

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