Communication: Management's ResponsibilityBy: Robert F. Abbott
I've just watched, again, an episode in Back to Floor television series, which aired on BBC (United Kingdom) and PBS (United States). Once more, communication turned out to be a key issue, as it often does in business stories.
If you're not familiar with series, it features real-life CEOs who leave their comfortable offices (well sort of comfortable, these days) and go work on front lines of their organizations for a week. Cameras follow CEOs and record their interactions with staff, and their responses to those interactions.
In this episode, managing director of London's Heathrow Airport took plunge and worked in customer service for five days. That meant facing customers and dealing with their problems, including problems created by airport.
Once more, we saw a CEO suffer slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, so to speak. This CEO was rebuked by employees on front lines, as well as customers. Employees tried to convey to him difficulties they experience because no one at head office listens to them.
And, that's a fairly constant refrain in all episodes, as one CEO after another finds out he or she doesn't know much about what happens when organization comes face-to-face with real customers and their needs.
As most of us know, this is no anomaly. In many organizations, employees feel management doesn't know what's going on in real world, and perhaps what's worse, feel that management doesn't care.
In some senses, this perception reflects a divide in abstract-concrete spectrum. Workers deal in very concrete situations and matters; management deals in abstractions. That's both logical and appropriate, even if it does keep each side from understanding other.