NATURE OF OUR WORKPLACE AND WORKFORCE IS CHANGING.
I have been seriously looking at various questions that come to my mind when I think of the changing nature of our workplaces and workforce.
These include:
What do we want at our workplaces? Do we want to have more responsible, functional and adaptable workforce? Do we want to?
If these are some of our goals at our commercial and industrial enterprises then we are moving towards assertiveness but there is an irony in some of the objectives mentioned above.
Our new and successful managers have to be different from the mediocre and average supervisors of places, products and people (three Ps) and possess some other important and vital managerial and organisational skills and techniques. Our three Ps have changed to CPs, DPs and EPs ie Changed Places, Different Products and Effective People. So it is time for us to change as well.
The new managers cannot only be either controlling or acting as bosses or as remote authoritative figures or be a rugged individualists who decide things unilaterally and command the troops. My humble belief is that the neo managers should work with and through their peers, subordinates, superiors and their troops to negotiate workable and feasible solutions that produce better results and are more acceptable and satisfactory for everyone.
Believing that our workforce as well as our workplaces is changing, we will increasingly notice corresponding modification in our values as well as expectations. These in turn bring attitudinal reformation. Our individual achievements lead us to group performance because emphasis is being placed on building a collaborative work environment in which authority and decision making are shared for harmonious workforce and modified work places.
These introductory remarks lead us to the issue of leadership style. So the older hierarchical forms of organisation and the value system have to find relative adjustments and a new mode of managing the workforce and the work place has to gradually emerge to bring about greater success.
We therefore need a new breed of manager who still has to plan, organize, control, implement and evaluate but the style has to be modified from traditional management of direct and aggressive style to more teamwork and group decision making. The days of all- or-nothing outcome and expecting a clear win or lose situation have to be re-looked at seriously by every modern manager.
The new style of managing our workforce and work places has to be based on synthesizing, intuitive and qualitative thinking. Our new breed of manager has to exercise power flexibly according to context, with consideration for the various relationships involved. A serious look at the whole picture rather than a specific task has to be done.
When the new breed of manager learns to share all the internal resources and establishes apt interdependent relationships of support then the workforce and the work place become more attuned to the subtleties of human interaction. We then become better equipped to deal with the overwhelming challenges and changes that are now occurring and will continue to occur in our society and in our respective organisations.
Leadership in the future has to change from control to influence, from planning as prediction to planning as learning and from scientific management to entrepreneurship.
Planning as learning requires a tolerance for error and has multiple interpretations. Entrepreneurship requires responding to changes with openness, flexibility and intuition rather than relying on rigid or abstract principles of control.
So the entrepreneurial manager has to quickly learn to respond like a skilled captain of a ship on the open sea. When the weather is calm, the captain runs the vessel ‘by the book’ but when events are turbulent, the new leader is ready and prepared to develop new strategies for all unexpected twists and turns.
Therefore, in my view the key to success as a new manager lies not only in control, authority and power but in a new form of assertive management that is demanding influence, collaboration and free and open communication.
My final point is that there are no magic formulas and no specific rule books for the new manager. The best guide for the new leader at our fast changing workforce and work places will be the leader himself or herself and their own motivation, training, judgement, ingenuity, imagination and flexibility. Our willingness to change is vital.
The vital question that many economists and quality control personnel have been asking nowadays is ‘whether we can be more productive and profitable with fewer workers at our respective workplaces?’. The rightful and appropriate solutions to this aspect of workplace reform can be discussed by our current active business leaders because no textbook approach would fit every situation.
Surely then, the nature of our workplace and our workforce is changing and it is good to notice that our new breed of business leaders have been looking at various ways and means of adapting to the transformation. I have a lot of faith in the growing abilities and vast experiences of our modern leaders to meet the increasing changes.