That’s one of results of disconnection – lack of understanding the role executives should fulfill in specific situations (e.g. being sponsors of projects).

Sometimes it goes even further when they know almost nothing about how their company works and what motivates/demotivates their employees so they can’t even say whether the organizations uses the potential it has.

Can you, should you, bother Executives with The Details?

More On Executives (are Smarter than You Think; the 5 Biggest Misconceptions)

- In short, mostly harmless …

Execiutives spend most of there time and money on running operations. But more and more of their work is falling to project teams.

This is becasue organisations need to continually invest into systems and change initiatives that will support the organisation into the future.

You can’t just look after today and forget tomorrow.

As execuives sponsor projects, they are supposed to resolve critical risks and issues.

If they cannot understand the issues they cannot do their sponsor role effectively.

Of course this relies on the pm bringing the issues to light in a plain language way, but how many executives eyes glaze over when the IT folk walk into the room?

How many are focusing in and questioning until they understand the issues deeply?

the more I think about your post on top management seeming disconnected, the more I believe there are good reasons for their separation. I believe there are at least three degrees of separation.

http://alignmentinquiries.blogspot.com/2009/02/three-degrees-of-separation.html

Allow your people to bring their problems to you whenever they feel comfortable to talk. This is hard since being a manager it’s so easy to be busy all the time.

Exploit moments like meetings when people aren’t focused on work anyway. Even watercooler chit chat can be useful as far as a manager have balls to talk about people’s problems with no preparation.

It depends on a company size. I’ve seen that problem in companies where there are barely 2 tiers of management. Or even just one of them.

Talking about big organization I made my point in answer to Andrew’s comment. I don’t expect executives will know all technical details of work done by every employee in their companies. But I expect them to know what is the company culture and how people react while working in that kind of environment. These are basics even for executives. Other way they bold statements and official messages do nothing else but harm morale.

That’s disconnection too, but the other type. I should have split this to spearate posts I guess.

You’re right – writing the post I focused on small to medium companies where I see problem quite often. I agree that exec of 10000+ company shouldn’t know what exactly randomly taken person from his company does to pay the rent.

However there are people who comes to you talking how innovative is their company or how employee-friendly it is etc. They believe their companies becomes innovative, employee-friendly or whatever just by stating so. When you look deeper it appears that company culture supports safe play and unhealthy competition between employees.

Knowing nothing about company culture is a sin even for an executive of 10000+ company.

But yes, I packed a bit too much to the post. Disconnection in smaller organizations and above problem are two different things.

Most of what you have said applies well to first-level managers and even middle managers. The skills and focus required of managers at all levels are much different than the people who are actually doing the work for the customers.

The way I see it, management is there to support employees, who are there to support customers. The organizational chart should start with the employees on top, leads, then managers, etc. Each level supports the one above it in one way or another.

The best way for an executive to support their subordinates is NOT to understand the technical details of their work. The best thing they can do is eliminate obstacles for their directs, ensure harmony with other departments/subordinates, and lead them in alignment with corporate strategy.

Apply that to all levels of management from the CEO down to the front lines, and you’ll have an effective management team.

Enable the technical people. Encourage them. Recognize them. Empower them. That’s good management.

Josh Nankivel
pmStudent.com

you touch on an interesting subject and in the ideal world, executives would be able to do what you describe. In the world I’ve worked in at large companies (10,000+ people), you describe the problem accurately, but attribute this situation to the wrong reasons.

Executives have very time constrained schedules and rarely ever know more about the details of what is happening than the people working for them. This is not a cut on executives, it is reality. Let me explain why I say this.

When an someone comes into a company, they are brought in to do a particular thing. Maybe it’s technical, maybe its not, but at some level, junior employees are brought in to lay bricks. Determining who’s productive and who’s not is as easy as counting the number of bricks they lay.

Our brick layer is productive and get’s promoted. He’s now managing 10 brick layers. It’s still very easy to determine if he’s productive. But now, let’s promote him one more time. He’s now managing 10 people who are in turn managing 10 other people. You can see it’s a little more difficult to judge productivity, but his job is still focused around laying bricks. He is in middle management and is still responsible to know about brick laying. But let’s promote him one more time.

Now our man is an executive. One of his departments lays bricks, but he’s overseeing 5 other departments. One digs moats, another mines stones for the bricks, another ships the bricks, another handles the international taxes involved in importing bricks and exporting castles and then there’s this other god awful depart that does something called IT.

Our executive might have experience in one area, brick laying, but he is responsible and really needs to focus his time and attention on the four other areas. And when people working for him come to him to make decision, they spend all their life in the details and give him a 5 minute summary from which he has to make decisions consequential to the business about an area where he’s had 5 minutes of preparation. And there are 10 other things going on that he needs to prepare for.

Most executives would love nothing better than to be able to focus on things they know about and build deep relationships with people whose knowledge and dedication are crucial to the company. Unfortunately, that is not reality for executives in large companies that I’ve seen.