Here is a typical project. It involves going to the client’s offices and taking an inventory of the various assets and sprucing up their processes as such. You have a whole team of people working under you, and you send groups of people to each office to carry out this data collection task. As a manager, you have 0 incentive to actually get in there and get your hands dirty. Now, this, I have noticed is a very Indian characteristic. And my belief was bolstered more by an observation made by a senior director at a large construction firm, that has recently initiated operations in India. He said that the typical Indian managerial method is to sit in an office, get your tea or coffee delivered at your desk, pull out research reports, and get status updates from your subordinates. Which for a very great extent is actually true.
But how good a practice is this? Don’t you think that early on, a manager must actually know all about all aspects of his projects? Delegation is the key to getting work done. But consider this. If at a review meeting of the project I’d described earlier, if your boss’ boss needs some input on the way the data collection was done. She intends to spruce up our data collection activities, since she feels that we are losing too many man-days on this aspect. If I have never ever conducted such an activity myself, I for one will perhaps never be able to understand/ appreciate the issues faced on the job!
Like someone has said, ‘the devil lies in the detail’. B school churns out the next league of managers, armed and equipped with the latest management tools and techniques. But unless the mentality to do a thorough job without an elitist view towards work, is developed, we would never be able to go from good to great…
Excellent site, keep up the good work