Management
Issue No. 2 - September/October 2001
building a top performing organisation
Professor Quin C Mills was the keynote speaker at the recent Umanage conference staged by the Australian Institute of Management in South Australia. Prof Mills' clarity of analysis impressed listeners.
Prof Mills considers that a top-performing organisation is built on trust, leadership, empowerment and results. Here we will some of his salient points.
Prof Mills gave great weight to trust, describing it as a deceptively complex issue involving several levels. Predictability is the lowest level, the middle level is reliability and the highest complete trust.
“Predictability means that the manager is not completely erratic, but it is a low level of trust,” Prof Mills says.
“Reliability means that a person will keep his or her word — it’s enough for a manager to work well with a team.
“Complete trust means that a person can be counted on to treat others as well or better than himself or herself, like the trust between a child and a parent. Where complete trust exists people will go to the greatest lengths for each other.
“Trust can be built in either success or adversity. The highest level of trust, complete trust, comes from either prolonged success or from two managers standing by each other when times are tough. Complete trust makes deep loyalty possible.”
Building predictability as a minimum is important, because workers are afraid of unpredictable managers. They waste a great deal of time trying to ‘figure out’ unpredictable managers and do as little as possible for them, to avoid backlash.
To build predictability, managers should make personal contact “so that people can see what kind of person you are”. They should be consistent so that people can predict their behaviour, and get things done so that people have confidence that they will follow through.
Reliability is important because workers will keep their commitments to managers if...
