The management pyramids found in just about every corner of the planet make an assumption. They assume that employees have the authority needed to meet their responsibilities, as the picture above shows with the blue ball for authority and the red ball for responsibility in a precarious balance. That way bosses supposedly don’t interfere and leave employees to do their work.
- A CEO’s authority and responsibility balance at the upper end of that position, but only for half of the authority and half of the responsibility. But for a management pyramid to pull together, a CEO must be able to know and direct all of the authority and responsibility.
- The further down from the CEO you get, the greater the responsibility that can be known with less of the authority being known–which has responsibility and authority terribly out of balance, as the red ball for responsibility shows with authority out of the picture and the structure collapsing.
It takes an intervention by a trained and experienced organizational analyst to establish a superposition of positions at an otherwise missing management level to correct the imbalance and establish a stable management structure. Without the intervention and the Midlevel out of sight, the management hierarchy is all out of tune, like a orchestra warming up. With an intervention and the Midlevel staffed, the management hierarchy is in concert, as if playing Beethoven’s Fifth. Then the CEO can direct the organization, as an accomplished conductor directs an orchestra.
Left without an outside intervention, thugs rule the roost, as Dr. Blue documents in his book Time for Change. From GM to GE in industry, education, and healthcare Elliott Jaques, MD, PhD description of “an unpleasant paranoiagenic zoo” fits. Unfit for man or beast, this zoo proves to be a menagerie of complicity with those in charge overpaid to pressure subordinates into subverting stated goals and objectives. As the British psychoanalyst Isabel Menzies Lyth documented, employees who press for change in such zoos lose their jobs, just as the man in the picture is about to get squashed and lose his job.