LEADERSHIP BLOG

A corporation’s core objective in conducting its business activities is to create and increase shareholder value. The activities of a directors in providing leadership toward Corporate Governance comprise decision making and oversight of the whole organization, which starts with the organizational level assessment, based on which they access and build personal capacity of middle management and leadership as well.

Organizational motivation takes one person at a time. Secret of governance is to merge corporate goals and individual needs (attributes of stability, clear job descriptions, and hierarchical career progression). Middle managers are not born but evolve through experience, nurturing and training with this experience (Julie Balogun) Middle managers usually know how to deal with the employees working in different enviornments with enthusiasm, organizational loyalty, achievement and innovation initiative, caring, nurturing, developing virtue, which ultimately would lead to better Corporate Governance. As MM’s usually are not part of the whole design but actual function is to implement the change which redefines their role in the organization. Which can be troublesome to some extent when it is a matter of brininging change, as it will just be an accountability job without an authority many cases in new format.

Mostly directors think that people have a natural resistance to change and this is what usually they convey to middle managers as well, without involving them in the core process of strategy making. Usually top management implement change on the basis that either people get bored with routine and seek out new experiences, or some real problem going within the business. But this is a strange fact that almost 70% of the change processes fail with most of the organizations or almost same percentage of companies remain unable to get the return of change as planned.

Mica Wulff Kamm in her guest lecture of Middle Management from real life perspective also elucidated the issue of change and middle manager’s key role in implementing change. The three values of Adding Value, Show respect and Making it happen; all require high commitment from middle management to play an improved role in the organization. Operational effectiveness means performing similar activities better than competitors can perform them and then Strategic Positioning requires the performance of different activities or the performance of similar activities in different ways. The concept of open organization and people involvement are similar with the Micro-dynamic theory explained by Westly who explained the role of leader in communicating the possible change phenomenon.

In his article J. Blogun while focusing on Reengineering explain what actually result from reengineering which are Growth in productivity, Products developed faster i.e., increasing the efficiency of the organization. Relating it with the middle management’s perspective we can conclude that the most effective way to change behavior is to place people in new organizational contexts, especially those through which the change is expected to implement, which can be done by providing new roles, responsibilities, and establishing new well defined relationships. Low morale, unit performances, discrepancies in performances, cost of HR and inadequacy of short term benefits are usually main causes of failure.

All this must definitely be based on the vision, mission and clarifying the mandate for the people working in the organization. The study by Quy Nguyen also suggests for richer knowledge of radical change can be achieved by including other actors, as radical change is strategic because its outcome affects the life chances of the organization. The article illustrates how emotional balancing facilitates adaptive change at the work-group level. It reveals how a number of middle managers formed a self-emerging social support group that attended to employees' emotional needs in an organization that is supposed to function on instrumental, unemotional routines.

Summarizing the discussion we can conclude that Participation, Communication and finally the Training of the middle management will definitely facilitate leader for successful implementation of change.

REFERENCES

• From Blaming the Middle to Harnessing its Potential: Creating Change Intermediaries by J.Balogun
• Middle Managers and Strategy: Microdynamics of Inclusion by Frances R.Westley
• Emotional Balancing of Organizational Continuity and Radical Change: The Contribution of Middle Managers By Quy Nguyen Huy
• All Changes Great and Small: Exploring Approaches to Change and its Leadership by MALCOLM HIGGS & DEBORAH ROWLAND
• Managers as change agents by Adrian Furnham
• Organizational Restructuring and Middle Manager Sense-making by Julie Balogun and Gerry Johnson