Control for control’s sake

Control for control’s sake could well be the motto of many companies. A friend of mine, who has just been appointed as the managing director of an American multinational corporation, told me about his own frustrating attempts to improve the people management in his own company. He had aimed to present his strategic plan in person at the main offices of the company around the world. However, owing to the demands of innumerable meetings and videoconferences at the company’s headquarters, he was barely able to move from his seat! I fear that his experience is very much the rule, rather than the exception.

We’ve been speaking for years about managing people from a humanistic, rather than mechanistic, perspective. However, the fact of the matter is that very few companies have been impregnated with this person-centred approach. Instead, many companies are overwhelming their staff with demands for more and more information. No one would deny that information is crucial for effective decision-making. However, how much information do we really need? What is the opportunity cost of swamping different departments with demands for all kinds of reports? Time is a very precious commodity. If people are spending their time cranking out reports, as is the case in many organizations, then they can’t be devoting it to the customer. Quantum mechanics tells us that the observer affects what he observes. So, if as managers we are geared towards analyzing endless streams of data, we will most definitely influence the day-to-day work of our teams.

Years ago, I worked with a manager who insisted that all the purchase orders were input manually into the computer, simply because he couldn’t wait till the next working day to get the automatically generated report! His impatience meant that some poor soul had to spend three hours a day inputting duplicated information. Completely absurd, but all-too-common in many companies even today.

If we want to eliminate this control mania, we need to overcome two main obstacles. First of all, the fear experienced by many managers in these difficult economic times: the greater the crisis, the greater the need for control, which in turn leads to increased stress levels. Secondly, the large number of departments whose raison d’etre is purely to produce and analyze information.

Does control produce genuine added value for companies? We can only hope that the current crisis leads many organizations to re-think the systems which they use, and that they decide to prioritize those areas which create real added value, and not those which merely serve to sooth the anxiety of managers or to justify certain jobs.

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