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Article on the Executive division of a businessEXECUTIVE: by Diane M. Hoffmann The doing away with surplus secretaries and clerical people in the last years has created a new management level. We've had Top Management and Middle Management for decades. Now for the first time, in the nineties, has appeared a new brand of management: Bottom Management. Now, everyone is a manager but not everyone is treated like a manager. Not many of the old management people are ready to deal with this -- they haven't been prepared! Neither are all those at "bottom management" level ready to take on that new role either. It is not right to consider them to be "managers" without proper training. There are still some people who are not ready to be managers at the bottom (by lack of experience or ability), yet they are told and expected to be "accountable" -- being accountable for your responsibility at your level is fine but being accountable for your managers' responsibilities is not appropriate. Then "teamwork" came into the picture which did away with "bosses". Then "leadership" was added to the business vernacular, and everybody was expected to be a leader. But what is a leader? Who is a leader? Too many chiefs not enough followers, that's what we now have in many companies. And in others it's too many followers, not enough leaders. However, communication still begins at the top. In "Dear Boss, What Every Manager Needs to Hear and Every Employee Wants to Say, by Dr. William B. Werther, Jr." of the School of Business Administration, University of Miami, it says, "Leaders create a vision around which people rally; managers marshall the resources to achieve this vision. Both are worthy and much-needed roles. And at times managers need to be leaders and vice versa. But bosses are people who lack vision and give orders to cover up their limitations." Effective executives and managers should all be leaders not bosses. To be effective leaders, they first must be effective communicators.
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