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The Dark Side of Best Practices
Can the poster child of current management philosophy have a downside? In other words, is there a "dark side" of adopting a best practice? Ask anyone involved the academic study of management about the merits of selective and prescriptive use of best practices and you'll find reverence usually reserved for motherhood. But there is a subtle, profound risk lurking in something so agreeably virtuous. When you consider the delicate, critical balance between leadership and management (and the law of unintended consequences), the answer is a clear and unambiguous "Yes": Best practice can be hazardous to the success of any project or enterprise.
To appreciate potential unintended consequences of prescribed best practices, it is first necessary to understand the fundamental nature of leadership and management, and their relationship in any organization. Simply put, leadership and management are the two functions that provide direction and guidance within any system of human endeavor. Inseparable and intimately interdependent, they are, nonetheless, different. Leadership is the manipulation by one individual of others so that they will do, of their own volition, that which he or she would have them do. In an enterprise or project, leadership is the setting of objectives and the motivation of staff to achieve those as goals. It is guidance that positively encourages initiative and innovation. Management, on the other hand, is disciplinary, prescribing adherence to practices that are considered beneficial to the enterprise and proscribing others. There is, therefore, a natural tension between leadership and management. The former encourages initiative and innovation; the latter intrinsically constrains both.
In today's world, leadership is always exercised within an imposed management environment derived from the dictates of more senior levels of the organization, (outside regulatory mandates). A leader at any level, in turn, uses management devices to influence and motivate the staff within his domain of authority. The key is that, for optimum performance, leadership and management must exist symbiotically in a balance unique to each level of an enterprise, its objectives and environment.
The relationship between leadership and management can be viewed conceptually as a bridge with one end being pure leadership and the opposite end pure management. This "bridge" balances on a single pillar, "resources." Optimum flow of the enterprise's productive effort across the bridge requires that it be supported at the correct level by resources and that the bridge be evenly balanced with no tilt toward either leadership or management. A host of factors influence the relative weights required to balance the bridge. For example, a very small, highly innovative and entrepreneurial company may require little in the way of formal management practices to operate most successfully. On the other hand, a large, physically dispersed company with many projects will surely fail in the absence of an extensive body of standard management practices that provide efficient, cost effective communications, resource management, risk management, etc. Every situation is unique, but in every situation the bridge must be balanced or performance suffers. A primary executive responsibility is to find the locus of this balance and make the necessary adjustments to move the enterprise behavior and culture to the point of optimum performance.
It is fair to assert that, in American industry today, the typical organization is over-managed and under-led. Over the last 20 years, the investment of money and executive focus on management process has been huge. Witness the almost universal commitment to the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model (CMM) level and International Organization for Standards (ISO) certifications. The unfortunate fact is that all this investment in process has not yielded a statistically significant improvement in enterprise or project rates of success. (See Hamel and Volikangas - The Quest for Resilience, HBR, September 2003). Improvements in management process simply have not produced the expected benefits at the enterprise bottom line. The reason may be due in part to the lack of a commensurate focus on leadership. Corporate investment in leadership has not kept up with the investment in process. Across industries, the leadership/management bridge is tilted sharply toward management. When the tilt becomes extreme, the process can displace the product as the worker's objective.
This, then, is the dark side of best practices. With the imposition of each best practice, the balance shifts away from reliance upon leadership and toward management. However slightly, the leader's freedom of action is restricted. The unintended result of excessive prescription of best practices can be the erosion and de-emphasis of leadership thereby limiting motivation, initiative and innovation. This is not to say that adoption of best practices is bad, only that a "best practice" is by definition focused upon a specific risk or set of risks and may include a trade-off with more subtle and profound risks arising in the leadership and motivation of the work force.
Give that leadership and management are both vital to the success of every enterprise and that the development and standardization of best practices is a valuable management tool, what should corporate organizations do to avoid the dark side? The answer is twofold:
- Add weight to the leadership end of the bridge by recognizing that effective leaders are a commodity and undertake deliberately to replenish that resource. Though rarely practiced in American industry, leadership is subject to diagnostic measurement and methodical development. (Caruso and Gentry - Cultivating Effective Leadership in the IT World - Cutter Consortium Executive Report Vol 8. No. 1.)
- Embrace a minimalist doctrine in prescribing best practices. Limit the prescription of best practices to those instances dictated by regulatory requirements, or where consistency across the organization has significant value. Consider the potential dark side of each best practice.
In summary, leadership and management are symbiotic and indispensable to enterprise success. Balance between the two is equally indispensable. All leadership and no management breeds chaos. In the opposite case, all management and no leadership will achieve little for lack of motivation and initiative. In general, good leaders will always manage, but good managers will not always lead.
Kerry F. Gentry is the President of KFG Enterprises, a program management consultancy. Gentry is currently active in performing management and technical risk assessments and audits of multinational and domestic civilian and military programs, as well as in conducting project and program management training. He can be contacted at k-gentry@sbcglobal.net.
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