Why CEOs, Leaders, Managers and Economic Managers Must Move From Traditional Business, Organisational and Economic Management to Results Management

Companies, organisations, businesses and economies are encouraged to shift from traditional management to the results management approach as this will enable them to produce performance and results that are superior to the traditional management approaches.

The majority, if not all, organisations, companies, businesses, corporates and institutions around the world are still using traditional management approaches despite numerous evidence-based results proving that these management approaches are the core reason behind the endemic underperformance.

By underperformance I mean that these companies, businesses and organisations are not performing at their best possible and are not producing their best possible results compared to what they could be producing in terms of their potential and resources.

In spite of the ubiquitous claims that there is a shortage of talent, the reality is that organisations and economies are teaming with undiscovered and underutilised potential because the traditional organisational management approaches do badly when it comes to talent management. In spite of ubiquitously talking about talent, most leaders and managers come short when it comes to defining exactly what they mean by talent and how to identify, optimise and best utilise the talent. Regrettably, the overwhelming majority of these leaders and managers will swear that their knowledge and management of talent is most accurate and they wont respond to the challenge to review their theory and practice in the area of talent management and utilisation. The result is many organisations are perpetually doomed gross underperfomance.

Three Core Reasons Why Traditional Companies and Organisations

Traditional business and organisational management leads to underperfomance because of several reasons. Many of these reasons have been mentioned but few leaders and managers pay heed to them. The Gallup Organisation has asserted that employee engagement has a direct link to at-work performance. There annual employee engagement surveys suggests that as much as 75 percent of employees are either non-engaged or disengaged from their organisations and their work. This means that these employees do not invest their best possible to the organisation. While employee engagement certainly has an impact to performance, there are more fundamental reasons why the traditional organisation is a mediocre in terms of performance and results. The following are some of the core reasons.

Running Companies, Organisations, Businesses and Economies Tactically and Operationally Instead of Running Strategically.

Despite a lot of talk about strategy and despite religiously conducting strategic planning sessions, many companies, organisations and businesses run operationally and tactically rather than strategically. This is not by choice or by design, but because there is still a combination of misunderstanding and poor understanding of what strategy is according to Professor Michael Porter and others of the world's prominent scholars in the theory and utilisation of strategy, strategic thinking and strategic planning.

1. Many companies, organisations and businesses do not take strategy as seriously as they should; so they do not manage their theory and practice of strategy well, it at all leading to permanent underperformance.
2. When you ask leaders and managers in the same organisation and even same team to define strategy, strategic thinking and strategic planning, you get different definitions and conceptions.
3. When you review strategic plans of companies, organisations, businesses and economies, you will discover that the majority are basic operational plans and not strategic plans. If they are "strategic plans", they are incomplete and not implementable.
4. Many leaders and managers and their companies never conduct periodic reviews of their theory and practice of strategy, strategic thinking and strategic planning. They are either not aware that they have to do it, or they do not think it is important. They therefore get stuck in the same old theory and hence the same pattern of performance and results.

Focusing on Managing Performance Instead of Managing Results

This one is big. The overwhelming organisations put their primary focus on managing performance guided by a general, flawed theory that confuses performance and results. Many leaders and managers, including the human resources professionals, interchangeably use the terms performance and results.

There is a general belief that managing performance automatically leads to a corresponding improvement in results. This belief is flawed and not correct and hence the overwhelming majority of companies, organisations, businesses, economies and institutions produce results below their potential. Here is the thing;

You can perform very well and still produce an undesirable result.

Resultsology addresses this issue in greater detail.

Organisations must shift from management performance to managing results. Managing performance is old-fashioned and produces inferior performance and results to managing results. They must step into Paradigm 21.

Using Disjointed Bodies of Theory Instead of a Holistic Integrated Theory and Using Discrete Thinking Instead of Integrated Thinking

The traditional organisation is designed in terms of "departments" most of which are largely discipline-linked. For example, in many organisations you have departments such as

1. Human resources,
2. Management
3. Finance,
4. Marketing,
5. Sales,
6. IT,
7. Customer Service
8. Production

While structure is important, the same structure can create an illusion that the departments operate in isolation; the big picture is easy to lose. Few leaders and managers recognise and acknowledge that their organisations are systems and must operate as systems. This contributes to the underperformance of their organisations.

Linked to this is the ubiquitous discrete thinking, which is the tendency to think in terms of individual elements instead of thinking holistically. This include binary thinking such;

1. Leadership Versus Management
2. Marketing Versus Sales
3. Strategy Versus Management
4. Organisation Versus Business

This kind of thinking put illusionary theoretical boundaries that do not exist in reality.

Many fail to get their best possible results because of thinking errors and thinking deficiencies. Leaders and Managers and organisations and business pay little if any attention to this.

Poor Application of Science and a Scientific Approaches and Methods

Traditional management is driven by a plethora of general management theories- most of which are not science-based. Most of these theories have indeed improved performance and results in organisations when compared to their non-use in the organisations. However, these theories lack the accuracy and precision that is required to produce the best possible performance and results. With general theories, it is difficult to specific exactly how and why the theory works and what exactly about the theory that produces the specific performance and results.

Except for the spiritual, there is no other approach to performance and results management that beats a scientific approach. The reasons why the scientific approach beats general management theory include the following;

1. Science uses very specific language
2. Science produces predictable reasons
3. Science allows you the power to control and change your performance and results deliberately using very specific means such as equations, formulas, models and algorithms.
4. Science is accurate and using science leads to fast changes in situations, performance and results.

From Performance Management to Results Management

Results management is not a new concept. It was mooted after recognising that traditional performance management was not performing as expected in terms of delivering results. However, despite its promotion, the uptake is still very slow but critically important. Resultsology, the study of the science behind the performance and results that humans produce as individuals, teams and organisations was mooted to improve on the results management approach by using science, scientific thinking, strategic thinking, psychology and engineering thinking in the management of performance and results.

Companies, organisations, businesses and economies are encouraged to shift from traditional management to the results management approach as this will enable them to produce performance and results that are superior to the traditional management approaches.

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?Simon Bere, 2023