A manager has responsibility to create added value, otherwise there is no money to pay the salaries. However, a manager is not supposed to do the work himself. He has resources (people and otherwise) to his disposal to do the actual work. So his responsibility is to make the resources generate optimum results as effective and efficient as possible and seeing that significant and sufficient added value is generated.

Deming teaches us that the workers have only little influence (say, 15%) on their own shortcomings: most of the problems (the other 85%) of getting optimum results effectively and efficiently are caused by issues outside of the direct control of the workers. These are the responsibility of the manager to solve. The actions can be: education of people, better tools, better environment, better raw materials, ...., whatever is needed to help the workers, doing their best, succeed.

The manager, however, is a poor guy (ok, not so poor) having fallen upwards, so he also cannot control all sources of problems. He has his own 15% of shortcomings plus the 15% of his people. The other 70% are beyond his control and are therfore to be handled by the next level of management.

This continues till we reach the top manager, who has nobody to teach or direct him, so he has 100% responsibility for his own failures, and ultimately he has responsibility for all the other failures as well...!

We assume that the goal of the organization is to add value to generate good salaries for all the people in the organization and some more, to satisfy the shareholders. Therefore, the first responsibility of management, at any level, is to make sure that the layer under him is doing the right things right, while he is not supposed to do any of the actual work under him.

One of the big problems with management is that most managers never have been taught this simple management model. They are busy with many very important things like "strategies", "meetings", meddling in the responsibilities of people below them, being very busy because so many things seem to go wrong. If they only started with their main task: making sure (by teaching, coaching) that the people below them are doing the right things right, refraining from actually doing the work and indicating to higher levels all those things that they cannot control themselves, which therefore are the responsibility of the higher managers.

If they would simply first do these things, they would get a lot of time to do all the other important things, however, now these other things have more relevance, because at least the work that generates the salaries is going well.

Niels Malotaux
14 May 2003