Three Ways How Top Management can Affect Middle Management

From World's Chinese Wiki

From the the Section "How Rulers can Affect Campaign" in Chapter 3 from Sun Zi Art of War, we can see that there are three grave mistakes the ruler makes that can greatly devastate his troops. And they are:

1) Interfering military command and movement.

2) Interfering with military internal affair like administration and provision support.

3) Interfering with the command system and authority.

Any one or more of these interferences from the ruler would greatly reduce the fighting capability of the troops creating advantage for your enemies, thus enticing them to attack you, as mentioned in the last part of the section.

BUSINESS APPLICATION

So the top management has staff the management posts with high caliber personnel, but he can still hinder the progress of each department. Let’s have a look at how we can relate the above paragraph from Sun Zi Art of War to Business.

Dictating Work Flow

In every department or team, there is a work process of doing things. For example, target market has to be defined, next is to state the aims of marketing campaign, do market research and then decide and structure marketing campaign.

Now the top management may sometime dictate the work process set out by the middle management. For example, top management requiring the team to come up with marketing strategies before doing a proper market research. This dictation of work process can be very disturbing to the team members and the team leader, especially when the team leader has a great wealth of experience and the work process has been there for a long time.

This could cause confusion because the team would have gotten ready the resources to start the work flow but now additional time has to be spent to get other resources needed for the new work flow and also adjusting to it.

Dictating Delegation of Duties or Internal Affairs

Top management actually dictates the job scope of individual team members. Now usually the delegation of duties is best done by the person who is familiar with the skill set of each team member, which would be the team leader. If the top management actually stepped in to meddle, this could cause confusion firstly, the person who is familiar with his old job scope would need to learn new skills and knowledge to fit into his new job scope which can take up a lot of time and secondly lose the advantage of specialization thus incurring huge costs to the company.

Internal Affairs in the team may also be affected as well if the top management also meddle into it, for instance, if the team leader has said that a particular team member needs to be sent to an essential training but when the top management sees that the training costs is too exorbitant, it disapproves. Thus extending the learning curve of the team member, reason being he cannot get a structured and proper guidance that can be provided by attending courses.

Giving Orders at the Same Time

Sometime two sets of instructions could be passed down, one from the team leader and the other from the top management to the same person. This can cause apprehension and confusion because the poor team member would not have any idea which instruction to follow especially when both sets of instructions in conflict with each other. And like most company culture, to follow either set of instructions will be detrimental to his future in the company. This can severely slow down efficiency because the team member would now have to think about which set of instruction to take so that it can be advantageous to him. Such time could be spend on how to deliver quality results instead.

Conclusion

As we have seen from above, all types of interference would greatly reduce the efficiency of the team, resulting in lost time and efficiency. All these will translate into costs to the company. So it is always important to leave decisions to people who have the best information set.