Are we in the world of Participative Management?

The past decades had generations of management and leaderships where multiple styles prevailed such as autocratic, democratic, authoritative, transformational, delegative, bureaucratic, Laissez-Faire and many others. As the world moves in a faster pace, the growth in collaborative learning, doing and in having the ability to include all the members of the organisation from top of the line of hierarchy to the very bottom is of greater demand. In today’s world of knowledge-spread, high-level skills, great talents and superfast executioners, teamwork is an absolute given trend across organisations from all the industries.

Executives at the top of the pyramid across organisations have realized the importance of collaborative-learning and success-building from the bottom, all the way to the apex of the organisational hierarchy. This has led organisations to reframe themselves from various aspects such as culture, method of operation, reporting styles, work models that needed technology based flexibilities, inclusive model of leadership, voice of employees and customers, and many other components that benefit in organisational growth and development.

The need for participative management

1. Engagement: Employees are more engaged and committed to their work and this allows them to better perform and build their own newer ideas, by being contributory towards organisational growth and excellence. The employees are also given countless feedback and guidance and direction-setting by the higher management on their work roles and actions.

2. Loyalty: The ground aim of participative management is to build loyalty and dedication so to develop initiatives inside of the work groups. In order to accomplish this, every manager need to ensure that his roles are distributed and delegated across all the team members which ensures that the employees are motivated to perform next level tasks that helps them to grow sooner within the organisation. Meanwhile, each team member must ensure that the team works together and takes each other’s support to accomplish the goals with appropriate solutions.

3. Motivation: As motivation is generally high among the employee groups, each individual performs to their best in order to get recognized as an individual and as a group. This further allows a sense of freedom and satisfaction among all the employees.

4. Best practice sharing: Employee engagement on the other hand is generally quite high among organisations. As a result, this promotes the feeling of togetherness among employees which results in greater cooperation. Knowledge sharing and best practices sharing is an add-on to all the generally shared components. By sharing best practices, employees perform better than before and this allows the avenue of new growth potentials across various work teams and groups within the organisation.

5. Autonomy: The sense of belongingness among employees allows them to carry the autonomy across their daily functions so they could individually carry the ownership and perform to their best levels, and for the overall benefit, they could gain the freedom to go much more before they could get suggestions and recommendations from their reporting managers. Employees, peer groups, work teams, task forces will avoid carrying the fear of approaching their higher authorities, therefore new ideas and suggestions could be brought about in a more friendly approach across the whole system.

Preamble to organisations for implementing participative management

1. Communication: It is necessary to build a strong communication pipeline that applies both forward and reverse communication possible. Once this is established, the management must ensure that there is high frequency of communication across the organisation. The management representatives also need to ensure that there is no hesitation or blockade in any of the employees with relation to communicating freely when it comes to the progression rate of their work, better solutions, value additions and inputs on best practices, process chain and the method of operation.

2. Reciprocal Correspondence: The top of the value chain need to ensure that there is a reciprocal correspondence to every communication across the organisation. This step ensures that employees have heard the organisation, and also one another. It is also a vital step that provides clarity concerning the voice of employees as well as the understanding is clear throughout the system. Apparently, this also reinforces assurance and enthusiasm inside the company.

3. Respect: One of the most significant reasons for turn-table events to occur in a community or a organisation or in a nation is due to one major additive - ‘Respect’. Respect is the one vital component to participative management on the whole. Respect is followed by coordination, cooperation, recognition, etc. It is very crucial for the reporting managers and for the top level executives that employees must be respected, motivated, treated fairly and equally and their voices be heard and responded to, positively. The collective decision process and the commitment shown by employees must be recognized by the employer, which then creates a consistent chain of success. Employers’ relationship with each employee is as important as the organisation’s growth and development.

4. Involvement and Collaboration: Companies must provide a commitment that the employees work in collaboration more frequently as possible. It could also be facilitated by the organisation by providing appropriate infrastructures to the employees - both within a division and across divisions. Exchanges must be regular and fruitful so that the sharing of knowledge is beneficial to everyone. For organisations to create the spirit of involvement and collaboration there are many solutions – both monetary and non-monetary. Some of them include rewards, best employee and team recognition, peer learning, reverse communication and reverse learning, transparency in feedback systems, effective HR interaction across the firm and many others.

To conclude, Participative management is a true solution to empower employees and organisations in order to build collective commitment and to bring about effective initiatives. For future managers, some of the top business schools conduct real-time exercises that also include participative management, for the benefit of experience. Although implementing participative management requires clear preparation, the outcomes of this model are enormous and it would positively drive the system for a very long-term creating success stories one after another.

Note: The views expressed in this article are that of ISBR Business School and do not reflect/represent those of Shiksha