STAGE 1980 – Macho Management

Industrial Relation

STAGE 1980 – MACHO MANAGEMENT

          Macho management described as an authoritarian management style that asserts a manager’s right to manage. This management also became common in the 1980s and used to describe an industrial relations management style. In broad terms, macho management involved an aggressive negotiating position in talks with trade unions, often when the issue was changed working practices. Management frequently demanded union agreement to new conditions within a tight time framework, accompanied by the threat that there would be closure if the demands were not met.

          There are six post-macho principles for the successful manager in the hyper-interactive future. Firstly, relationships require listening. A relationship with the customers or employees that each party should listen to the other party which is something either a women or a man is better for the listening. So instead of crafting algorithms and spreadsheets to plot which of the customer are the most and least valuable to you, you should create some questions for your customer and pay some attention or listen to what they that they really need.

          Next, think long-term. Short-term is a macho management style and probably the single most threatening affliction for business executives and political todays. A relationship does not build quickly but they grow stronger in time. For a business purpose, customers are the mechanism that links short-term actions and long-term value because customers have a memory and that will affect how much value they create for you tomorrow on how you treat them today.

          Furthermore, hierarchies are out and collaboration is in. For the last two hundred years, any organizations were strictly to the hierarchical with authority flowing down from the top while information flowed up flowed up from the bottom. No longer for today, there are technologies that the lowliest employee can jump the hierarchy with a tap into a smartphone. Command and control of macho management is fading fast.

          Other than that, rules and structure do not matter. Culture and informal customs make the difference from now on. Automation is macho mechanism for streamlining predictable processes and accomplishing tasks. With ever more unpredictable innovations and disruptions has rapidly changing the world and dealing with unanticipated situations will be more important. Culture have the unwritten  rules that govern show how an organization’s members behave and it will be the single most important factor in determining how your organizations weather the next unexpected social media is conflagration or disruptive innovation.

          More than that, empathy is king. Macho management principles allow a business to pad its current-period bottom line by exploiting a customer’s mistakes, oversights, or lack of knowledge. But relationships succeed based on mutual empathy, which for a business means seeing things from the customer’s perspective, treating different customers differently, and demonstrating genuinely good intentions toward them. Proactively protecting the customer’s interest is the new standard.

          Lastly, share and be shared with. In the e-social era, with the technology facilities relationships blossoming all around us and need to remember that people have an urge to share so the macho inspired monetary incentives and purely economic inducements are not always useful. In the social domain, in fact they can be counter the productive. Share your ideas, your technology, and your data, in order to inspire more sharing and faster innovation. And begin figuring out what it means to trust others the way you want them to trust you.