How We Make the Management Flavor of the Month

Do you remember total quality management? Continuous quality improvement? Quality Circles? How about MBO (management by objectives)? Has six sigma come and gone yet in your organization? I can probably tell you how old you are depending on how many of these questions you answered “yes” to.

In any case, if you’ve been in the work force for more than a few years, you have probably seen some management, leadership, or organizational change approach come and go. Everyone talks about these fads or the management flavor of the month, but what makes them come and go and why are they superseded by the next big thing?

Some of these new approaches disappear because they aren’t practical or because they weren’t sound ideas in the first place. Sometimes when an organization’s leadership changes the approaches change too. But what about those times when the leadership is stable, and the ideas seem to make sense and are practical?

I have an answer – or at least a hypothesis. A new approach becomes a fad either because parts of it are unilaterally controlling and/or the approach is introduced in a unilaterally controlling way.

Those of you who are clients know that one of my pet peeves is feedback systems, so I will use this example to illustrate my point:

We have already started the feedback system fad. We now have 360 degree feedback, 450 degree feedback (add feedback from customers), and 720 degree feedback (360 feedback over 2 periods of time). Last week I read about a website that lets you send out feedback requests so you can get anonymous feedback from many people because, as the article said, people are always eager for more feedback. What the article didn’t say was that with the exception of the feedback you get from your boss, one reason people are always eager for more feedback is that the feedback that they do get isn’t helpful enough for them to improve their behavior. That is because most feedback systems are designed to unilaterally protect the people who give the feedback, by not having them identify themselves to you. This makes it difficult for you to validate the data and thoroughly understand it. That’s the unilateral control ingredient designed into almost every performance feedback system I’ve seen. If my hypothesis is correct, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we will see yet another feedback system, it too will have some unilateral control elements, and it too will fade over time.

The sad thing about these fads is that often the entire approach fades away, even though parts of the approach are useful. Because the organizational culture is still unilaterally controlling, leaders are drawn to other new approaches that are also unilaterally controlling or they implement them in a unilaterally controlling way. Over time, this leads to one unilaterally controlling fad replacing another.

I said my explanation was a hypothesis. To test it, we need to look at organizational changes that are congruent with the Mutual Learning model and see whether these changes have greater longevity than their unilaterally controlling comparisons.

Think about your organization. What were the fads you lived through? Did they have unilateral control elements built into them or were they introduced in a unilaterally controlling way?

Originally published March 2009