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Skillful Diligent Management Oversight is better than Autonomy for the Pharmaceutical Industry

June 7th, 2010 Leave a comment Go to comments

Ever think your manager is a pain because they are always checking on you, quizzing you,  and making you feel like they don’t trust you?  Do they make timely observations and have an uncanny ability to make insightful comments or have you take corrective action before you get tripped up, deviate from corporate expectations, or get into trouble? Are they always trying to find ways for you to do your job better?  Do they know more about you and what you are doing than you would like?  Do they know how you think, so much so that they seem to care as much about your personal development as they do about the job you are doing?  You may not like it but they are doing their job and they are probably better than most managers.  Here is why you should consider yourself lucky.

You have probably heard and may even think you like the management concept of “hire the right people, then get out of their way and let them do their job.”  Well, I believe this can be taken to the extreme and in some cases, to the point of abdication of management responsibility.  I believe many of the missteps pharmaceutical companies have made over the past and perhaps even the current J & J recall situation could be attributed to a lack of diligent management oversight.  There is some truth to the sayings “inspect what you expect” and “trust but verify.”  No, I am not a control freak but where was management when the quality issues at J & J first surfaced or when pharmaceutical companies were involved in some of the questionable and sometimes illegal activities of the past?

So what is diligent management oversight?  From my perspective, it is knowing what is going on throughout your span of responsibility?  If you are a front line manager, it is knowing what is going on within your team and the jobs they are expected to do.  If you are the CEO, it is knowing what is going on in your company.   Diligent management oversight includes evaluating performance against goals and objectives, ensuring regulatory and legal compliance, and maintaining organizational standards for cultural and behavior expectations.  It also requires management to provide timely feedback and to make decisive interventions when deviations from expectations are identified or have the potential for doing harm by exposing the company to unacceptable risks.

Diligent oversight takes skill to avoid annoying micromanagement and to leverage the value-added benefits of diligent management oversight.  Skillful oversight provides employees with coaching and nurturing to enhance  performance, guide career development, and can convey a sense of caring about the person and demonstrate an appreciation for the job employees are doing.  Even the best of athletes have coaches who are watching, evaluating, and providing insightful corrective actions and encouragement to improve performance.  The better the athlete, the better the coach must be to have credibility and to have a positive impact.  The same is true in business.  The stronger your team, the better the management must be.

So the next time your manager seems to be asking too many questions, trying to understand more about what and how you are doing your job, maybe even challenging you to do better, don’t take it personal.  They are doing their job and you might actually be lucky enough to have a manager who wants you to do well, is willing to help you, and can help keep you out of trouble.

mike@pharmareform.com

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  • Sardonicus

    I mostly agree, but beware of the inherent risk that both supervisor and supervised can start to live in the assumption that wisdom and knowledge flow only from top to bottom. The most obvious symptom of this disease is of course that communication between manager and managed becomes a monologue rather than a dialogue, which rapidly leads to a management that is detached from reality and fails to detect problems. Less obvious, but equally dangerous, is the risk that employees develop the habit of referring every issue to their management, offloading the responsibility of making their own decisions, with the result that management channels get clogged with absurd trivia.

    The core of the problem, I think, is that companies often design management structures, and assign roles and responsibilities, with far too little regard for the practical limits of human communication and human brains. It is vital to ensure that decisions can be taken at the lowest practical level, for if every decision has to be routed to the top and back, a traffic jam is inevitable. And the maximum practical scope for a manager is three to four subteams, or ten to twelve individuals without management responsibility. Both these essential rules, however, require managers to delegate, and a surprising number of managers are bad at delegating.

    I’ve seen a lot of violations of these two basic rules, with dire results. Whether that is also the case at McNeil I couldn’t say. I find it remarkable that we actually know next to nothing of what has been going on in that company.

  • http://www.pharmareform.com Mike Wokasch

    Sardonicus,
    Thank you for your thoughtful and insightful comments. I agree with your points of caution as well. I carefully chose the words of “skillful”,” diligent” and “oversight” for some of the reasons you mention.

    As for decisions being made at the lowest level I agree as long as those employees have a good understanding as to what is expected of them and acceptable to the organization (this where culture come into play). Skillful diligent management oversight in those cases should only cause an intervention if decisions have the potential to harm colleagues, customers, or the organization.

    While we’re on the topic, another potential danger of diligent management oversight that is not skillful is that it can stifle creativity. This is especially true for pharmaceutical discovery research which I believe requires a very high level of skill, technical expertise, and masterful interpersonal management skills to provide guidance without compromising the freedom to explore and at the same time making sure progress is being made.

    Again, thank you. mike@pharmareform.com