INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION “HANGOVERS” PART II: COMMAND-CONTROL MANAGEMENT

The Greatest Generation is typically defined as those who were born from 1901 to 1927. This group endured both the scarcity of the Great Depression and lived through World War II, either on the front lines or facing war-time shortages at home. The underlying truths for this generation were the sense of day-to-day survival and prioritizing the needs of the group over those of the individual.

In the years following WW2, the workplace was filled — and often led — by those who had served in the military. Command and control is a staple of military life — what the general says goes. And it’s the job of the lower ranks to follow suit, no questions asked. In wartime, this rigid management style is a necessity because it reduces confusion, enforces alignment, and enabled faster tactical action.

If you’ve ever wondered where the workplace terms “chain of command” and “front line workers” come from, they transferred over from as the Greatest Generation returned from war and traded in uniforms and C-rations for suits and corporate America. For them, command-and-control management was already engrained in their thinking. Historically speaking, it was a direct descendant of the railroad hierarchy discussed in the first blog of this series.

But as corporate America grew from its infancy into adolescence in the 1950s and 1960s, these practices became directly tied to the rules of the workplace. Many companies remain intoxicated by this top-down line of thinking — but is it still the most effective way to make decisions?

DECENTRALIZING DECISION MAKING

Command-and-control management can also be termed “centralized decision making,” where all decisions are made at the executive level and then enforced by middle management down to lower-level workers. In the railroad era, this style of management was necessary to reduce confusion, ensure quality control, and create consistency.

Since then, however, technology has bridged the geographical spaces the railroads had to deal with, and we’re now seeing how these rigid hierarchies can hinder rather than help productivity. The fact is — just because something worked yesterday, doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it today. The challenges of today’s world are different than the challenges they faced, so it’s logical to say the solutions must also be different.

When a decision needs to be made with a direct impact on the customer, who is more likely to have the best answer — the CEO or the customer service rep? Big or small, businesses have an opportunity to decentralize the decision-making process and move decisions closer to where they should be made — at the worker level. This doesn’t abolish the C-Suite, but rather allows executives to use their talents on strategic thinking and support.

So where middle management was originally created to ensure consistency and quality in both the railroads and military, it too often creates a barrier when decisions have to be moved “up the ladder” for approval. By decentralizing decision-making, middle management can evolve into a training and support function, enabling customer-facing roles to make more agile decisions.

The alternative is to keep the status quo, where employees feel like they are in a war zone, expected to follow the general’s orders without any discussion on whether the move makes sense. But is that really the comparison we want workers to make when they come to work? Because even in war, a scout is sent out to determine the true nature of things and provide feedback to the general so they can make a more informed decision. But somewhere along the way, companies forgot this essential piece of the strategy, clinging to the “command-and-control” piece, with its assumptions that executives must know best because of their job title and status within the hierarchy.

In the next blog of this series, we’ll look at the “hangover” of job titles and the notion of skilled/unskilled labor. But ask yourself, “How can we de-centralize decisions in our company? What kinds of problems and solutions are the customer-facing workers aware of that the C-Suite would never know?