In my corporate experience to date I have encountered a number of realities that range from the fun place to work to companies that follow policies based on fear.  To the former group belong companies where people are more than happy to work, often very hard, for the pleasure of sharing their experience with many other talented individuals while being part of interesting projects.  The latter tend to be organizations with high turnover of people and where the only incentives for them to stick around are the financial rewards they are getting and eventually the experience that can be sold to other companies at a later stage.

Control and command management style

The typical management structure based on control and command was first established when, in conjunction with the industrial revolution companies started to grow larger and larger.  The already existing agricultural model never needed to grow big and complicated enough to require articulated management structures: now industrial manufacturing, procurement, sales, stock management and various other functions needed a way to be pulled together.  Armies had at the time the only organizational models available, with multi level management system so similar structures and bureaucracies were implemented.

Control and command vs. coaching

Let’s consider two very different models of managing and getting results out of people:

With over 70% of workers in USA being employed in a so called knowledge work and a similar percentage in the UK I am here considering why and how control and command is still, today, the most used management style.  Often because who is managing doesn’t know an alternative way on inspiring and motivating her reports and ensuring they always perform to their best.  The simplest solution works out to tell others what they would do if they were you.

A coaching approach to management: quiet leadership

The concept of Quiet Leadership introduced by David Rock in his book with the same title, suggests that in an environment where most people are paid to think a coaching approach nurtures this concept and effectively inspire people to do exactly that.  When you are employing a broad range of top graduates, scientists, MBA and PhD you are aware of being surrounded by very clever people: these are people that can easily be inspired to think creatively toward their own solutions to their problems.  So the Quiet Leader is not a person ordering and commanding instructions to his reports but she enters short and powerful coaching conversation where she asks questions and manages to get the other person actively involved in the dialog in order to achieve her own conclusions.  This result is usually a guaranteed success because of the following reasons:

Benefits of coaching approach to management

A statistic available from the International Coaching Federation, reports the following benefits for companies where a coaching model as been adopted:

Conclusions

There are a number of jobs and activities that require a structured and sometimes strictly organized management system, e.g. in manufacturing or in building sites: the coaching approach, on the other hand can be (and is) successfully applied to situations where people are primarily paid to think, such as in designing or other creative jobs, finance, general management and it is great to address conflict resolution.

In the medium and long term an established coaching culture will help your company to function better as a whole, improving key people retention, ensuring they are happy and motivated to work hard for the ultimate success of their employer.

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