The down side of management

When I was a management consultant, it was abundantly clear that managers frequently lose all control by attempting to micro-manage every process. They gave so many directives and so many requirements that it was not possible for their teams to follow all of the directions all the time.

Functionally, every employee had to decide for themselves what priority to give to each assignment – which items to follow closely and which could be ignored. As a result, every employee was making management decisions and the managers, by default, were shirking all responsibility.

I’ve recently become aware of a further extension of this problem. My wife recently started working in a large urban hospital and in her manager’s attempt to control employee scheduling, she has created a situation where employees cannot schedule their own vacation time –it is assigned.

The problem comes because she, and presumably most other employees, already knows that there is a weekend, months from now, when she will not be available to work. Because there is no system to request that time off, she has been advised by everyone working there to simply to call in sick when the weekend arrives.

As a result, the hospital will need to manage an emergency staffing situation, pay excess overtime or temporary staffing costs, and worse, likely be under-staffed. All of this could be avoided if management understood that the cost or pain in providing employees some input up front would avoid more costly “emergency” coverage and related problems in the future.

The ironic part s that the founding mission of this hospital is to provide appropriate preventive care across the community so that more costly emergency care can be avoided!

If only they would apply the same logic internally.