The solution is to shift to bottom-up and the reward for doing so is the unleashing of each employee’s full potential of creativity, innovation, productivity, motivation, and commitment. This will allow the company to beat its competitors and employees to love to come to work.

I know because in 30+ years of managing people, I learned that top-down creates the very problems it claims to solve while bottom-up creates managerial nirvana. Every executive can choose nirvana. To learn more read my articles.

Best regards, Ben

Most of them use the traditional top-down command and control approach to managing their employees. Top-down concentrates on producing goals, targets, visions, orders and other directives in order to control the workforce and thereby achieve organizational success. Focusing on giving direction prevents these managers from doing much of anything else. Thus top-down treats employees like robots in the “shut up and listen, I know better than you” mode, and rarely if ever listens to them. By so doing this approach ignores every employee’s basic need to be heard and to be respected. In addition, not listening to employees makes top management ignorant of what is really going on in the workplace thus making their directives misguided at best and irrelevant at worst.

In this way and others, top-down demeans and disrespects employees sending them very negative value standard messages. The standards reflected in this treatment “lead” employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with the same level of disrespect they received. No one can become committed to company goals while being treated so poorly.

This is the road to very poor corporate performance as compared to the results that would be achieved using a better approach. Authority is not the problem, but misusing authority as in the top-down model is a huge problem. Top-down managers are their own worst enemies simply because by their actions they “lead” employees to the very worst performance. (In “The Human Side of Enterprise”, author Douglas McGregor named this “Theory X” and named the other extreme “Theory Y”, but he did not provide how to achieve it.)

I could go on, but anyone wanting to understand the right and wrong ways to manage people might read the article “Leadership, Good or Bad”

Best regards, Ben
Author “Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed”

Thanks for the lead on this study by Randstad! Those are certainly disturbing trends related to communication between the generations.

To learn more about how these dynamics are affecting the Federal sector, please check out my blog: http://generationshift.blogspot.com

- Andy

Communicating to internal and external publics requires agreed upon terms for understanding. Communication becomes an ongoing process, a dialog back and forth managing the boundaries for communal understanding and a forum for clarifying misunderstandings.

Seemingly “understanding” is measured through behavioral actions of the receiver as intended by the sender.

Process must always drive everything. Understand your process THEN understand what resourcing you need, THEN understand how that resource will be organised

It’s the only way.

Good post!