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Why top-down approaches don't work

I have experienced a phenomenon over 30 years: the people at the top don't know how to exert their management power on their employees. Most top managers have an exact idea of how to position their company on the world market and what strategic targets they want to reach. But after 30 years, they are still making the same mistakes when it comes to implementation.

Example:
A well-known German company with 10,000 employees gets a new CEO. He brings his consultants with him. The usual analyses are generated with the only-too-well-known results and 30 action areas are presented. The Executive Board chooses 10 topics and wants a project manager for each topic, naturally "the best". Each project manager establishes a 10-strong team, the project is given an English slogan "Change for XY" and the project is started with enthusiasm ("something new at last"). Each project team reports successes. The CEO is pleased. The controller waits for his forecast increases in productivity to happen. Everything looks great! But if you take a look behind the scenes, you will find a quite different picture of the project:

• 100 team members are full of enthusiasm about the process and encourage around another 500 employees to get involved in their work.
• 1,000 managers fold their arms, lean back and think: "Let the project boys go crazy. And we'll see how far they get without us."
• 8,500 employees don't find out anything about the project except for the project slogan. If you were to stop anyone at the factory gate at random and ask them: "What do you personally know about our project XY?", 99% would answer: "Nothing."

After 8 months, the first team runs out of steam, so that the project that the CEO said was "a total success" is discontinued after 1.5 years. Once again, the employees get the feeling: "Oh, was that it?" A new slogan, a new project, a new team is needed. The process flow remains the same as always. Why?

Why don't our managers learn anything from the experience?
Why do they repeat the same old errors again and again? Why is the top-down approach "I command – you obey" so magical to them? The answer is often simpler than you think: Because they haven't learnt any other way of doing it. Although it's been well known for years that 2/3 of all top-down approaches fail, people prefer sticking to the usual old approaches than trying new routes.

So what could change?
Involve all employees actively in the change process!

• Ask for a concrete suggestion for improvement from each employee.
• Give every employee the choice of whether they voluntarily participate in this change process or not.
• Be pleased that 95% of all the employees want to participate.
• Leave it to the individual employees to complete their own improvement measures.
• Train 5% of the staff as information officers on a voluntary basis, so that the change process sells itself.
• Give each manager 10 days of training and coaching a year until they have internalized their new understanding of their role (1/3 expert skills, 1/3 organizational skills, 1/3 social skills).
• Enjoy an increase in operating margin of plus 4% as a reward for all the effort.

The trick is in the combination of all sub-elements
You may be wondering what is so new about these approaches. Nothing! The individual elements are not really new. The trick is combining all the sub-elements into a combined top-down and bottom-up approach.

Do the top managers really believe that they can force their management powers through in practice against the will of the non-executive employees? Don't they see that the middle management have never successfully managed change processes because status is more important to them than progress?

These days, successful change processes are carried by the non-executive employees. There are innumerable ideas for improvements in the heads of our employees and we cannot get them out with our dusty old suggestion schemes. But many managers are convinced that no such abundance of suggestions for improvement can possibly exist in their company. The imagination of our managers simply does not reach far enough for them to envisage that

• Each employee could generate 1-10 improvement measures a year ("10,000 measures? Dear God, who would be able to guide them all through?").
• Each employee could take responsibility themselves for completing their improvement measures ("That will never work!").
• 7% of all employees could volunteer to learn how to train their colleagues about workplace organization, process optimization and teamwork ("No-one ever volunteers here!").
• Employees would be happy to be managed by them if the employees could only believe that something really was going to happen this time that was worth the effort.

The secret of the bottom-up approach lies in the desire of every person "to be allowed to learn something for themselves".