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the business of any business is to respond to the demands and needs of its environment, and the need to be responsive is so important that it always leads to much of any organization being grouped in mission-oriented units.
decision-making in the central planning organization was so clumsy that it could not even respond to totally predictable changes in demand.
For middle managers to succeed at this high-leverage task, two things are necessary. First, they must accept the inevitability of the hybrid organizational form if they are to serve its workings. Second, they must develop and master the practice through which a hybrid organization can be managed.
To put a man on the moon, NASA asked several major contractors and many subcontractors to work together, each on a different aspect of the project. An unintended consequence of the moon shot was the development of a new organizational approach: matrix management.
To make hybrid organizations work, you need a way to coordinate the mission-oriented units and the functional groups so that the resources of the latter are allocated and delivered to meet the needs of the former.
our behavior in a work environment can be controlled by three invisible and pervasive means. These are: • free-market forces • contractual obligations • cultural values
if we bought engineering work by the “bit,” I think we would end up spending more time trying to decide the value of each bit of contribution than the contribution itself is worth. Here trying to use free-market concepts becomes quite inefficient.
When such values are at work, some emotionally loaded words come into play—words like trust—because you are surrendering to the group your ability to protect yourself. And for this to happen, you must believe that you all share a common set of values, a common set of objectives, and a common set of methods.
all a manager can do is create an environment in which motivated people can flourish.
An attitude may constitute an indicator, a “window into the black box” of human motivation, but it is not the desired result or output. Better performance at a given skill level is.
if we are to create and maintain a high degree of motivation, we must keep some needs unsatisfied at all times.
self-actualization stems from a personal realization that “what I can be, I must be.”
Two inner forces can drive a person to use all of his capabilities. He can be competence-driven or achievement-driven.
The third group, termed achievers, had to test the limits of what they could do, and with no prompting demonstrated the point of the experiment: namely, that some people simply must test themselves. By challenging themselves, these people were likely to miss a peg several times, but when they began to ring the peg consistently, they gained satisfaction and a sense of achievement.
if we want to cultivate achievement-driven motivation, we need to create an environment that values and emphasizes output.
at the upper level of the need hierarchy, when one is self-actualized, money in itself is no longer a source of motivation but rather a measure of achievement.
Assessing Performance
a supervisor should clarify in his own mind in advance what it is that he expects from a subordinate and then attempt to judge whether he performed to expectations.
we can characterize performance by output measures and internal measures. The first represent the output of the black box, and include such things as completing designs, meeting sales quotas, or increasing the yield in a production process—things we can and should plot on charts. The internal measures take into account activities that go on inside the black box: whatever is being done to create output for the period under review and also that which sets the stage for the output of future periods. Are we reaching our current production goals in such a way that two months from now we are likely
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as you review a manager, should you be judging his performance or the performance of the group under his supervision? You should be doing both.
Delivering the Assessment There are three L’s to keep in mind when delivering a review: Level, listen, and leave yourself out.
You must level with your subordinate—the credibility and integrity of the entire system depend on your being totally frank.
Let’s look at how the questions above fit into the four categories. Technical/Skills describe some projects what are your weaknesses What He Did With Knowledge past achievements past failures Discrepancies what did you learn from failures problems in current position Operational Values why are you ready for new job why should my company hire you why should engineer be chosen for marketing most important college course/project
a simple test that can be applied to determine the role money plays for someone. If the absolute amount of a raise in salary is important, that person is probably motivated by physiological or safety/security needs. If the relative amount of a raise—what he got compared to others—is the important issue, that person is likely to be motivated by self-actualization, because money here is a measure, not a necessity.
Let’s now look at the administration of base salaries. In the abstract, there are two ways to do it. At one extreme, the dollar level is determined by experience only; at the other, by merit alone. In the experience-only approach, an employee’s salary increases with the time he has spent in a particular position. A key point here is that any job has a maximum value; no matter how long an individual has been in it, his salary ultimately has to level off, as shown in the figure on the next page. In the merit-only approach, salary is independent of the time spent in the job.
There are two pure forms of salary administration; most companies use a compromise.
Merit-based compensation simply cannot work unless we understand that if someone is going to be first, somebody else has to be last.
Peter Principle, which says that when someone is good at his job, he is promoted; he keeps getting promoted until he reaches his level of incompetence and then stays there.
An achiever will alternate between “meets requirements” and
