Improved Productivity with Deskilling

The Chinese proverb “Behind every able man there are always other able men" is absolutely relevant in today’s modern management era. We have able managers behind able workers. Managers decide the course for action and guide the workers. Managers can be broadly classified into three levels as shown in the figure below:

 

  As shown in the above figure, the decision making is completely done by the managers. Workers solely  focus on their specific task. The work is divided into jobs and that is further subdivided into small activities and tasks(as shown in figure below) so that a person with minimal skills will also be able to execute it. As the workers will deal with their limited work area ,they will do it efficiently and hence the whole productivity of organisation will increase

 

This is in complete contrast with the old management era when the decision making and executing were done by the same person. As the same person does both tasks, most of the time decision making gets hampered because of pressure and hence the productivity decreases.

           Modern Management Theory                                         Old Management Theory

 

 

Though the above concepts were hard to digest initially but Dr. Mandi explained them with his unique way of teaching. This time he came up with wooden blocks. The task was to make a tower of blocks placing one over the other by a blindfolded person and an open-eyed person. Blind-folded person would be assisted by other person as he can’t see. Everybody predicted that obviously an open-eyed person will make a bigger tower than a blind-folded with an assistant. But, to our surprise, Blindfolded person with an assistant made a bigger tower than an open-eyed person. We   all were flabbergasted when we saw our obvious prediction were proved wrong in front of us.

 

 Prof. Mandi then explained us correlation between this game and real corporate world. Blindfolded person is the worker and his assistant who guides him is the Manager of modern management system. Whereas, an open-eyed person who decides and does the work belongs to old management system. This example clearly showed us that an able manager and worker who  solely focus on his task leaving the deciding part to the manager will always do better than a person who does both deciding and executing.The difference between old and modern management can be summarized as follows:

Parameter	Old Management Theory	New Management Theory
Work	Ambiguous	Crystal Clear
Decision	Ineffective decisions due to pressure	Better decisions by Experienced Managers
Productivity	Low	High
Skill	Greater	Limited(Deskilling)
Satisfaction	Higher	Lower

 

Happy Reading !!!