Buying for your team? See quantity pricing. This is a copyrighted PDF. Add copies before sharing with your team. Product : RG. Pages: 6. Related Topics: Business communication , Business history ,. Newsletter Promo Summaries and excerpts of the latest books, special offers, and more from Harvard Business Review Press. Sign up. This Product Also Appears In. Buy Together. Related Products. HBR Article. By Charles H. Granger ,. View Details. Add to Cart. Details Pub Date: Mar 1, Discipline: Organizational Behavior.
Subjects: Business communication, Business history, Organizational behavior, Organizational structure and design, Psychology and neuroscience. Source: Harvard Business Review. Length: 6 page s. X We use cookies to understand how you use our site and to improve your experience, including personalizing content. Learn more. Perhaps because we want to be evaluated, and hierarchies offer us report cards in the respectable form of performance appraisals, salary increases, promotions, bonuses, and stock options.
We may grouse about unfair evaluations and meager raises, but most of us seem to want to see our grades. Hierarchies give us more than these somewhat questionable measures of our worth; they give us an identity. Just think of how it feels to be out of a job for an extended period.
Loss of income is not the only problem. When someone is jobless in an individualistic, high-achieving culture like ours, it takes a strong ego to maintain a sense of self-worth. Only the very young and the very old are permitted the luxury of respectable joblessness. And for the very old, it is still important to have been a division manager at DuPont, or a foreman at the local bakery, or a colonel in the Marine Corps. Of course, there are many people who thrive outside hierarchical organizations—artists, for instance, entrepreneurs, homemakers, and freelance professionals—but most of us who work inside hierarchies take comfort from them.
Like our families, communities, and religions, they help us define ourselves. They provide identity, a flag to fly. Hierarchies add structure and regularity to our lives. They give us routines, duties, and responsibilities.
We may not realize that we need such things until we lose them. One friend of mine, after he retired, took to keeping goats. For all these reasons, hierarchies can be very effective at providing some of the psychic nourishment we all need. Of course, many are even more effective at draining that nourishment from our minds and souls. Too often, we come to depend on these structures as a kind of protective parent guarding us against the dangers of the outside world.
Snuggled close to Daddy Hierarchy, our personhood is affirmed and our existential angst allayed—as long as we do as Daddy asks. Unfortunately, that sense of safety is illusory. What becomes of us when our seemingly indestructible guardian is destroyed, as on September 11, ? Or suppose we had been employed at Enron or Arthur Andersen?
When hierarchy fails us, we realize that what we trusted in was often no more than a projection of our own needs. In that story, he describes an enormous pageant staged by the Viceroy of India to impress a visiting Amir from Afghanistan. Thousands of troops, 30 marching bands, and countless draft animals have been assembled to participate in the great spectacle.
Thus it is done. He would not have been willing to sacrifice his autonomy and freedom for all the military discipline in the world. No one ever has. Even the most modern of managers must inevitably exercise some degree of authority some of the time. In multilevel organizations, messages get distorted as they travel up and down the ladder of command. It is not just a matter of noise or random error. Self-interest and self-protection drop in, and relevant information drops out, as messages make stops along that vertical route.
Sensitive leaders—aware of how difficult it can be for their people to speak truth to power—take steps to make speaking the truth as painless as possible. I was impressed, some years ago, by a counterintuitive method devised by a manager at Intel. Failures, that manager wanted his people to know, were an inevitable accompaniment of risk taking. They should be talked about openly, not hidden, papered over, or blamed on others.
Where does power lie? An executive can pay a high price for missing such hierarchical cues. It is one of the costs that the denizens of hierarchies must pay for the rewards they receive—and a debilitating cost it can be. Consider Mike, a rookie middle manager at a large technical firm. He attended a workshop some colleagues and I were teaching. He had enthusiastically grabbed on to the not-very-hierarchical participative concepts we had presented about empowerment, shared leadership, and teamwork.
Some months later, I happened to run into Mike. He was furious. You told me not to sit on top of every petty detail, not to micromanage, and the whole thing just blew up in my face. They were great. The problem was upstairs, with the executive committee. When I met with them, they quizzed me, like they always do, about every detail in my unit. I looked like an idiot! We should have done more than just warn Mike. Managers in hierarchies have no choice but to stay constantly alert to that reality.
Successful executives know almost intuitively how to be both engaging and authoritative.
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