Monday, June 2, 2008
Policy implementors or People managers?
Managers in today's IT services organizations wear (or atleast, expected to) different caps at different times - policy implementors, people managers, field-managers to grow business etc. But, when it comes to it, the only cap often seen is that of policy implementors - has managerial responsibility in IT organizations narrowed down to being administrative in nature? Is it even fair for us to expect a single person to be able to execute so many roles, with fundamentally different perspectives? Will they deliver justice to all perspectives in the long run?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
If you look at it from a distance, it is not too many perspectives really. There are two, if we are talking about the current practices in the software industry.
Managers, barring those at the terminal levels, act like bothway valves, without much of a processing happening in the nodes. Of course, following the nature of valves, you cannot have both the directions open at the same time, or one cannot put on two hats at the same time, to go by your analogy.
So, demanding as it may be to deliver values at both the ends of yourself, it nevertheless, does not result into any residuals - experience, value or otherwise.
I think it is time for managers to stop being valves and introduce a loopback process into the sources, that way generating more for oneself and the community in question.
Agreed - but my question is still retained!
In any business, there are three fundamental activities which has to happen to keep the business running - LEDERSHIP, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, CONTROLLING. Managers typically contibute to the 'controlling' part of it. A good test of process implementation in organizations is to reduce frill - in terms of resources, and the bad implementation of this is 'overloading of managers' with controlling responsibilities. While, in the long run this sacrifices optimal performance, it also creates undesirable side-effects such as lack of innovation and no focus on 'people development'.
All I'm saying is that may be it is time to distribute responsibilities as opposed to 'hoping' that it would, 'by chance', get fulfilled by 'managers'.
Post a Comment