Often people think that those at the top of the organizational hierarchy have all the power; this is not always the case. It's not always obvious but I have experienced this in my last job. To most people, it would appear as though the VP of our department had all the power and made all the decisions, but the truth was that the manager beneath her influenced most of the decisions. This manager was very persuasive and knew exactly how to get her way. This is an example of how the "who" of power isn't always evident. Many people in our department didn't even realize who was making all the decisions. If there were any problems, top level management assumed it was the fault of the VP.
3 comments:
I completely agree with your comment. People with higher titles do not always have "power". I have observed that the Director in my organization always consults one of his subordinates before making decisions. 99% of the time he will go with his subordinate's recommendations on a particular issue. Once I understood who really held power, I knew that if he subordinate liked my work then my Director would too. It takes time to really observed who is really in charge in an organization but it is very important to do. If I tried to make sure my Director liked my work then I would have wasted my efforts. Ideally, I would make sure that everyone in the organization likes what I do but with limited time and busy schedules it is just not possible.
I think that a good manager let’s their subordinates make a lot of the decisions. A team that feels confident about and accountable for their decisions is a strong team and a strong team makes a powerful manager. I believe that managers that spends all of their time thinking that their ideas are the best and should be the ones implemented lose the value of the collective knowledge of the team. They say that the sign of a great manager is the ability to delegate and trust a team to make the right decisions and do the work correctly. I am not sure how upper management gets to the top but quite often they are held up by a team that has done a lot to get them there.
I still believe that the real power lies in the hands of the people at the top, But intelligent people make their subordinate feel like they have been given the power. Why? Because if we believe that we have power and some room to make our own decisions then we would work more at ease and try to be more creative and thoughtful in doing so. I have personally experienced this at my workplace that when given a task and instructions to go by are given to me, and at the middle some problem comes up, I lean towards relying on my manager to provide me the solution, but if the same task would've been given to me, I would think of multiple different ways to solve a problem. So even to make your employee feel like having some authority of making decisions can raise his/her productivity.
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