Must Take Responsibility
This is a response to your March 2 Letters section, in which Edward L. Butterworth of Fedco commented on the John F. Lawrence column of Feb. 2, “Those Do-It-All Executives Can Do Great Harm.”
Like Butterworth, I couldn’t accept Lawrence’s executive as a model when he ignored the presence of too many waiters in the restaurant while only one clerk ran the swamped yogurt stand. We see the same management failures every day at banks and post offices. Long lines are ignored by managers who fail to train non-window workers for periodic window duty and fail to enforce a policy that all windows be manned at peak times. Butterworth said there were three ways for a chief executive to find out what is going on in the company: “One is informational reports from vice presidents and department heads; another is observation of what’s going on himself, and a third is extrasensory perception.”
There is a fourth way--the use of personal staff representatives to make periodic, unannounced spot checks. Many high-level business executives try to manage with only a personal secretary and possibly an executive assistant. (Gen. George C. Marshall knew how to use a personal staff--200 officers--and did quite well on four fronts in World War II with 11 million people in the Army.) I agree with Lawrence, who deplores monthly activity reports. Butterworth says: “If such informational reports are not adequate, why wouldn’t a CEO write back and ask for more information?” In many years of service in government and business, I have found written reports to be unreliable as a means of follow-up. No one ever indicts himself in a written report. Neither Lawrence nor Butterworth pinpointed a basic management fault. The executive who observes poor management at a lower level should think, “I’ve failed in my responsibility to train and motivate subordinate managers at all levels to use good management procedures. Why was I the first to observe these defects? Why didn’t a subordinate manager spot the problem before I did and take corrective action?”
Most managers consider themselves responsible for operational activities but would be surprised to learn they are also responsible for the quality of management by all subordinate executives. A basic cause of this ignorance is that top managers fail to set the example; many chief executives “delegate” management policies and training to the personnel department. Chief executives do not routinely follow up and thus do not discover the ineptness of management training and the poor management techniques of subordinate executives.
HOWARD L. SARGENT
Los Angeles
