By Chally Kacelnik
The article: Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in the Harvard Business Review
What I think:
Here’s a throwback for you – a classic article from 2003 on trust, worker motivation, and ideas management. Kim and Mauborgne state it all in their opening paragraph:
When employees don’t trust managers to make good decisions or to behave with integrity, their motivation is seriously compromised. Their distrust and its attendant lack of engagement is a huge, unrecognized problem in most organizations. This issue has always mattered, but it matters now more than ever, because knowledge-based organizations are totally dependent on the commitment and ideas of their employees.
The most effective solution they found was to create transparent processes for decision making. This encourages workers to contribute ideas and accept decisions, because they accept the fairness of the process even if they don’t like the outcome. Too many managers like to keep things opaque in order to manufacture power, but what you really need to operate an organisation effectively is appropriately designed authority and accountability.
At LKS Quaero, we support organisations to get ideas management right. For more information, visit us at lksquaero.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook.
