Experience with Bureaucratic Management
Uploaded by sls465 on Apr 19, 2007
Experience with Bureaucratic Management
Since the time I entered the workforce in 1987, I have encountered various forms of management and management styles in the career paths I followed. Now that I am venturing into management myself, I have had time to reflect on those various management techniques in order to develop a management style of my own. My experiences have ranged from Fast Food to Information Technology and small private corporations to global public companies. One particular experience with a lumber company has had a major impact on the way I would like to manage. Not because it was the right way to form management, but rather because it exemplified all the wrong ways of managing a business and people in the modern business world.
This particular lumber company is the largest privately held lumber company in the United States. It started like many businesses, as a small “mom and pop” company of the Midwest. Economic growth and the rapid expansion of the 1960’s and 1970’s propelled this company into the realm of big business with multiple locations over a large geographical territory. Stores were opened quickly all across the Midwest and East Coast in order to capitalize on the rapid expansion. In order to keep control of growth, they formed a geographic structure to manage all the new facilities and personnel. Today, over 400 stores strong, the structure still remains a tall, geographic structure as illustrated below.
In the case of this company, the tall management structure along with private ownership has put this company into Bureaucratic Management. The organizational chart indicates that there is a defined order of hierarchy and this hierarchy is expressed to you from the day you start to the day you leave or retire, which ever comes first. This hierarchy also defines your authority and decision making capabilities within the company.
All decisions are made at the top of the organization. All rules and standard operating procedures are developed at the top of the hierarchy. Within this structure, it is each level of management’s responsibilities to convey the decisions and rules to the level beneath, causing a trickle down effect. The corporate management staff, underwritten by the CEO herself, determines all tasks and responsibilities of each level in the structure. This creates, what...