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Banish Command and Control Created by

Tim Rutledge

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<div align="left">
"Dad," my daughter asked, "what's Command and Control?"

I just used the phrase in our conversation, and her question caught me off guard. She's in her first management role, and although she's experienced the Command and Control management style before, she wasn't familiar with the label. This caused me to reflect on just what it is we mean by the term, "Command and Control," and why it has a 100 per cent negative connotation in organizational life today.

Command and Control is based on a set of assumptions:
</div>

<ul>
<li>
<div align="left">It divides employees into two groups: those who give direction and those who take it</div>
</li>

<li>The role of managers is to tell employees what to do, and the role of employees is to do what they're told</li>

<li>It values loyalty and obedience</li>

<li>It also values titles, believing that with a title comes rank and privilege</li>

<li>Among the privileges conferred by titles is deference - the belief that employees with "inferior" titles will defer to those with "superior" ones, and the title alone is sufficient to merit the deference</li>
</ul>

In theory, employees defer to the title similar to how soldiers salute the uniform and not the person who happens to be wearing it. In practice, Command and Control means not just "above," but also, "better".

Managers who behave according to these assumptions share the following characteristics:

<ul>
<li>They make all the decisions in the department</li>

<li>They must be obeyed</li>

<li>They project an image of infallibility</li>

<li>They play favourites</li>

<li>They are the sole dispensers of rewards and sanctions, which are allocated in accordance with the manager's pleasure or displeasure respectively</li>
</ul>

One reason for our negative reaction to Command and Control is the dialectical nature of these assumptions. For example, unless two jobs are at the same level, the employee with the "superior" job will assume that he's also "better" than the other.

Trust: the confident expectation of a future event or condition

"Leaders need to learn to trust the people they lead." 
--George W. Bush, 2005 Inaugural Address

Command and Control managers simply don't trust their employees. They're "inferior," after all, and permanently so.

But trust is a combination of emotion and logic, a feeling based on observed past behaviour. Relationships between people, whether friendships, marriages, or in the workplace, become trusting relationships with the accumulation of trust that's rewarded. By "rewarded" I mean that confident expectations of future events or conditions prove often enough to be well-founded for the relationship to be a trusting one.

Logic suggests that when people repeat actions often and consistently enough we can have a confident expectation that they'll keep repeating them. Emotion (the fear that they won't repeat them) needs to yield to logic and allow trust to form. When employees demonstrate over and over that they can perform tasks correctly, managers need to trust that they'll continue to do so.

Command and Control never does that, and this is a second reason for our negative reaction to it. A Command and Control manager doesn't, in President Bush's words, "learn to trust." Repeated successful accomplishments on the part of their employees don't dislodge the need to feel superior or the fear that mistakes might happen.

The Command and Control management style is a stifling one. Today's employees won't put up with it for long.

I'm sure that my daughter will come across Command and Control again in her career, and that she'll know it when she experiences it. Being able to identify this stifling management style is an important first step to adopting other management behaviours that are based on more positive and trusting assumptions about employees.

- Dr. Tim Rutledge, Partner, Retention Services, is a veteran Human Resources Development practitioner with a background in financial services, manufacturing and health care. For more information about Tim Rutledge, and IQ Partners please visit their website at <a target="new" href="http://www.iqpartners.com/index.html">www.iqpartners.com</a>.

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