Organising and Staffing Programmes and Projects - Afforestation, Reforestation and Forest Restoration in Arid and Semi-arid Tropics - page 202

8.2.2 A Right Management Style

Every organisation has a management culture, good or bad. It could be the ways of
an old decadent bureaucratic institution, or it could be the culture of the new nimble
organisations that spring up and move ahead of the old giants in no time. For too
long, management has been wrongly cast as a science, which it is not. It is more of
an art. Modern day research in organisational behaviour and managerial excellence
has shown that there has been a rapid shift in the management paradigms. In today's
age an organisation must be 'alert' to terms of its values and its culture, or else it
must perish in the face of competition.
A central theme of a modern day organisation is to be straight—to have a bias
for action. Formal and stiff work methods codified in volumes of fat rule topics
are nothing but recipes for non-achievement. Action aimed at the core objectives
within the overall framework of value system should be unhindered at all levels.
Effective action should never be tied up in terms of rules and procedures. Procedures
are secondary, they waste energy, divert attention of people, and make them feel
constrained and burdened. People should be rewarded quickly for acting effectively
and achieving results, rather than for the elegance of procedural neatness. Non-
achievers should be counselled, coached, advised, and reformed; failing which they
should be expelled. Tolerance of inaction and procrastination can do a great deal of
harm to that vital guiding principle of the organisation—a bias for action.
The organisation must hold its values dear above all. Being a guiding principle at
every step, the basic values of the organisation should enable the people to come up
with their own rules, principles, and procedures, and cultivate habits and attitudes
which constitute the unmistakable stamp of every great organisation. No personal
biases, preferences, or influences, not even of the transformational leaders, can go
beyond the basic values of the organisation. Short-term goals may at times dictate
acting otherwise, but the path shown by the basic values is the long-term path of the
organisation, it must never be digressed from.
Pervasive communication is the hallmark of a good organisation. Nothing is ever
secret about an organisation when it comes to its own people. Informal communica-
tion should form the basis of the day-to-day working and of relationships between
the different layers. Events like feting, hoopla, theme songs, dramas, informal chats,
picnics, and the like, must cut across the ranks and must be widespread. Memos and
written letters should be kept off. They are a risky trap inviting into a quagmire of
bureaucratism, confusion, mistrust, and malice.
The old analytical rational model of organisation has long been proved to be
the wrong way of doing things. It is clear that people are the central stuff of any
organisation, and they are neither analytical nor rational. They are human. They are
fanciful, nonconformist, non-uniform, and diverse.
The top executives must too have a bias for action—action in field, not on paper
sitting in office. What is the 'action' proper of the leader? The leader, as every chief
executive of a unit, must keep wandering about his organisation where action takes
place. This alone can give him the true picture of what is going on in his organisation,