non-management, total quality, corporate culture, best practice

The following four cases all have something in common - and it's powerful medicine:

1. A plant in California became the most improved in Clorox's household products division after a woman manager asked the 100 workers to reorganise the operations. Her role was solely to ask a few questions as 'a team of hourly workers established training programs, set work rules for absenteeism, and reorganised the once traditional factory into five customer-focused business units.'

2. A disposable nappy company has given five managing directors equal power. Each has a functional role, but they share reponsibility for major decisions - which always depend on consensus (there's a venture capital firm which likewise insists on unanimity before making any investment). Sales grew by 24% in a year.

3. When S.C.Johnson Wax moved towards self-managed teams, the human resources manager took a small staff down to the factory floor to teach management techniques like statistical analysis and 'pay-for-skills'. The time taken in switching a line from liquid floor wax to stain remover came down from three days to 13 minutes - thanks to a worker team. The Racine plant overall came down to 37 middle managers instead of 140, and productivity went up 30% compared to eight years before.

4. The US outpost of France's Thomson electronics giant has a successful high-end line of TVs called Pro-Scan. Each member of a cross-functional team (from design, marketing, engineering and manufacturing) took turns as team leader, while continuing to perform in their normal jobs: 'all the team members subsequently moved on to bigger and better things. Says [one], "It made us all better generalists"'.

Such anecdotes should always be taken with a grain of salt, in the sense that somebody else's experience is never as valuable as your own. But the pattern of this new approach to management is clear enough. The manager's task is to make people offers they can't refuse, because they want to accept; and in circumstances where that acceptance will markedly improve the behaviour of individuals and groups. Today's best leaders don't lead in the traditional sense. Rather, they deliberately blur the distinction between followers and leaders.

The four cases come from a Fortune article which begins 'call them sponsors, facilitators - anything but the M word'. What's happening is nothing less than reform of the management process. 'Non-manager managers', in the magazine's phrase, manage by example: they are ceasing to function as part of an order-and-obey chain, and becoming instead links in a process that binds everybody together - from top to bottom of the company.

It doesn't matter whether this sea-change is known as 'total quality' or by some other name. The need is to find approaches that will prove highly effective in changing behaviours at both the company and individual level. For example, one chief executive liked to chew out two colleagues each morning as a kind of second breakfast. Leading a total quality drive worked wonders on the business - and on the personal relationships of the boss. Relationships are always a cardinal factor in corporate performance, as the change in management style recognises.

The change from invisible boss to highly visible facilitator is one of enormous proportions. 'This is one of the biggest planned efforts to alter people's behaviour since the Cultural Revolution', wrote one academic: he was describing developments at one of the world's largest companies, General Electric. Changing corporate cultures is notoriously difficult, with the emphasis on the 'notoriously': the difficulty is much exaggerated by the notoriety. While that's true, it's also true that a huge gulf exists between traditional management and GE chief executive Jack Welch's brave new world.

Welch is quoted as saying, 'We've got to take out the boss element'. In his vision, reported Fortune, '21st century managers will forgo their old powers - to plan, organise, implement and measure - for new duties: counselling groups, providing resources for them, helping them think for themselves'. As Welch puts it, 'We're going to win on our ideas, not by whips and chains'. Nothing here will be strange to exponents of what we call 'the management consensus'. Like Welch, the gurus of the consensus (meaning virtually every guru) believe you should:

1. Involve employees at all levels in making decisions.

2. Adopt 'best practice' ideas and methods from within and without the organisation.

3. Attack every process and procedure in the company with the aim of simplifying, compressing, economising and improving.

Thus, Fortune's distinction between the old and new manager notes that the latter 'invites others to join in decision-making', while the former 'makes most decisions alone'. The one hoards information, which the other shares. The passé manager is bound up in the cloak and chains of command. The new style non-manager, in fully uncloaked visibility, 'deals with anyone necessary to get the job done.' That means colleagues, people in other departments, and people in traditionally lower spheres: like 'workers.'

As work gets more intelligent, so the distinction between the worker and the manager (who presumably is also a worker) becomes even harder to sustain. Workers have long been known as untapped sources of valuable knowledge - like the Milliken textile man whose new boss, on a getting-to-know-you tour (a deliberate pursuit of visibility), mentioned a costly, long-standing technical problem. The veteran suggested a solution, which worked a treat. When had the brainwave occurred? Long years before...

Tapping an operative's skill and experience makes indisputable sense, but non-managers go further. They ask operatives what help they need to perform better. This isn't namby-pamby stuff: the targets for improvement are (and must be) pitched high and taken dead seriously. But the changed approach changes attitudes and takes the first step towards long-term and lasting betterment. This isn't Utopia: rather, it's the hard-headed reality of hard-nosed companies like GE.

What are the attributes of the highly visible non-manager? They include sincerity, fairness, ability to motivate, readiness to recognise achievement and abilities in others, responsiveness, and making time available for others. They sound soft. The issue of softness disappears, however, when you consider the opposite characteristics: insincerity, favouritism, lack of motivation, poor or no response - and spending far too little time with the people on whose contributions you depend. In a sports team, these traits breed disaster: the same is true in business.

The command-and-control hierarchy is the only environment in which low-visibility management can survive. But many companies are now proliferating team projects, which can't be managed by order-and obey methods. Somebody has to keep the projects on track and on target, true, and this management contribution is vital: but 'facilitator' is absolutely the correct description of a role which is by definition temporary and obviously can't be fulfilled without participative, visible leadership.

The 'manager' job, in this and other ways, is becoming more visible, less stationary and more flexible. If that's true of the job, managers have to follow suit. Becoming visible, mobile and flexible demands optimising their own performance. Corporate managers owe it to themselves and their co-workers to practise individual kaizen: continuous improvement. The admirable American guru Michael J.Kami calls this 'self-renewal' and offers an apparently intimidating 'personal checklist':

1. Are you fluent in two languages?

2. Do you read (a) one book a month, (b) four daily newspapers and (c) 30 magazines?

3. Do you attend one course a quarter?

4. Are you out of the office half the time?

5. Are you computer-literate?

6. Do you possess multi-disciplinary knowledge?

Any manager who can answer half those questions in the affirmative is exceptional. But all six Yesses are within anybody's reach. Not only should each facility improve personal effectiveness: personal development is the foundation of setting an excellent example. In top sport, good leaders may not match the world-class skills in their teams: but they will lead, among other things, in the visible application and effort they bring to developing their own games and their own skills - including those of leadership.

Effective time management is an obvious example. Shortage of time is the main excuse which managers, good or less good, offer for their low visibility, for their failure to see enough of their people or give them enough personal support. But poor organisation of time, rather than inadequate supply, is the real problem. In theory, the PC network will help: as mentioned earlier, one IT study indicates that managers can hope to save half the time they now spend in meetings, organising, communicating and gethering information.

That would free 40% of their hours for other priorities, like spending enough time with team members. That will still leave plenty of wastage, some of it self-inflicted: managers fritter away hours on totally unnecessary work, or work that could and should be delegated to others. They don't concentrate on what is exclusive and important to them, even when they have full control over their time - though that, of course, is rarely the case.

The organisation (for which read other managers) makes its own demands on the executive timetable. The more hierarchical and corpocratic the system, the more time will be preempted and wasted by procedure, rather than process. Non-manager managers are interested in process exclusively, and in procedure not at all. The American consumer goods chain, Nordstrom, has a corporate manual which differs radically from those of other companies. Its first rule is an injunction to all employees to 'Use your good judgment in all situations.' The second rule is that 'There will be no additional rules'.

That's the essence of non-managing: it saves executive time because the delegation is genuine and total. The facilitator visibly helps others to act on their own initiatives. The principle was demonstrated brilliantly by a speaker helping the Confederation of British Industry to launch its competitiveness campaign. After he had recounted the successes of his company (Short Brothers) in empowering workers to raise their productivity, a questioner from the audience asked how his firm could do likewise. 'Get out of the way', was the answer.

Non-managers don't get out of sight: but they don't interfere or try to take over the process from those to whom it belongs. What applies on the shop floor is just as relevant in the office. In Barbara Tuchman's book The March of Folly, it becomes painfully clear that gross mistakes aren't made by fools, but by very intelligent people. There's no point in hiring bright people, or selecting the best players, and then treating them in ways that guarantee stupid results.

One well-established path to this sorry end is the 'career structure', mapped out, not in terms of opportunities for achievement, but of steady progress up the ladders of seniority and hierarchy. One clearing banker, for instance, was heard to observe that modern ideas of career development, while splendid in themselves, didn't apply to his bank - because a recruit's path to eventual retirement was planned from the first months of service.

These days, exactly the opposite career strategy is required. That's the only way to benefit from the extraordinary achievements that relatively young non-manager managers can generate when given their heads with full-frontal visibility: like the 27-month creation of the very successful LandRover Discovery, or the 18-month construction by ICI Fluorocarbons of a plant that may have won the race to replace CFCs. All such examples show how highly visible, project-based, team-based management both uses managerial talent and develops it mightily in the process.

That is no surprise. To perform at their best, managers need opportunity and the space in which to seize their chances. If they are confined within 'structures' (career or hierarchical) they will conform rather than perform, manage rather than non-manage. Conformists will succeed to the summit in turn, and the conventional corporate wisdom will steadily clog the arteries. However much shareholders or top management may demand improvement, the necessary human material will already have been wasted. Decline and fall will follow - as at Hoover, the one-time king of European domestic appliances.

The misuse of human resources explains, but doesn't excuse, Hoover's greatest fiasco, in which deliriously happy shoppers swamped and almost sank the company with their response to its over-generous offer of free flights. Under extreme pressure to produce, the management went to extremes: the latest shambles came only two years after the US owners sent a special taskforce to Britain (under American leadership) to achieve 'rebirth, rejuvenation, stability and return to profitability' - a somewhat odd cocktail of objectives.

Companies can rejuvenate themselves continuously by promoting younger people, not to hierarchical ranks, but to team projects where they can create new birth, rather than rebirth, leading by example and visibility. Free-standing units, at home or abroad, offer the chance for younger people to run their own businesses within the corporation. Exploit that fact, and dynamism will replace excessive stability. Better still, the flow of excellently equipped achievers to the top will be the best immunisation against stupidity that any company could want.

Multi-disciplinary, cross-functional task-forces also provide focused and conspicuous roles that develop team as well as individual skills. The concept of vertical promotion thus gives way to the lateral rise. That sounds contradictory, but simply means finding the most exciting opportunity currently available, in which the task, rather than the organisational role, is the challenge and the chance. Already, successful taskforces are being rewarded with stiffer assignments - not as teams (for they are always disbanded), but as individuals (witness the Thomson case reported at the start of this chapter.)

Team winners and winning teams also need to be rewarded with money (a fact which has caused sports administrators endless and unnecessary problems). Since hierarchy is breaking down, hierarchical pay structures should be disappearing as fast as the middle manager's traditional role: sitting behind closed doors and passing messages up and down the system. The group which brings a new model to successful launch, on time and on cost, deserves exceptional pay for what will certainly have demanded exceptional efforts - and that's surely as it should be.

In most other walks of life, stars earn starry rewards instantly. Their reward is in the present as well as the future. Tomorrow's chief executives, and their colleagues, will have zigged and zagged their ways to the top. The zig-zag organisation will get the best of them - in both senses. It will get the best work from the best people, men and women with portable skills, who can work effectively in any country and with all other nationalities, and who are conscientious as well as intelligent.

On that last combination, Fortune reports exceptional career progress among MBA graduates who scored high both on their high-numeracy admission test and on 'a composite of how hard-working, thorough, efficient, reliable and ambitious' they were. Also, the highest fliers show an addiction to excellence in their personal pursuits - and excellent achievement in previous projects is the most valuable element in the portable manager's briefcase.

But the environment is crucial. What if the company (like most companies) is light-years away from the non-managing, high visibility culture, and persists in the set organisational ways that can be summarised as 'large company disease'? Honda's president has identified this crippling ailment in his own business. His remedy is one that (alas) must also be used with managers who can't adjust to non-managing in a new-style company. 'For those who are inflexible and refuse to do what they have to do, the only option is to fire them.'

At one Scottish plant which went over to the new ways of managing, half the top management left, unable to cope with non-managing. There's a highly symbolic example from GE which demonstrates the difference between this new world and the old. The company uses 'Work-Out' to uncover specific proposals for improvement from anything between 40 to 100 people, nominated by management 'from all ranks and several functions'. The Work-Out participants turn up for a three-day informal off-site conference under the guidance of an external facilitator.

They form some half-dozen teams, each given part of the broad agenda laid down by the boss: say, to eliminate unnecessary meetings or forms. On the third day, the teams present their proposals, which is where an equally interesting innovation appears. The boss, who may have 100 or so proposals on the table, must decide on the spot whether to (1) agree (2) refuse (3) demand more information - appointing a team to deliver the data by an agreed date.

The psychological pressure to agree must be heavy: in one quoted example, only eight of 108 proposals were turned down by a plant services head. His own boss was present for the Work-Out: but the boss lurked out of sight behind the manager, who thus couldn't seek for signs of approval or disapproval. The boss was visible, in the sense that he was there: he was invisible, in that he wasn't interfering. He was managing, and not managing - and that's the ideal, for good leaders and for companies which want to keep them. Non-managers won't stay where they can't non-manage.