COORDINATION is the essence of management.
The word “management” implies there is something and some someones to manage.
A business or company or organization implies others are present and are engaged in a similar activity. It is a team.
Any organization, no matter how complex, is bound together by common purposes.
If the different parts of such an organization are not coordinated, they begin to cross each other’s lines and tangle.
With such a tangle, one gets no forward progress.
The energy of the overall organization is absorbed by cross orders, cross actions and the general purpose of the activity makes little if any forward progress. This can be called “internal noise.” The staff can be numerous, appear busy, even frantic, yet no production is really accomplished.
What is missing is COORDINATION. The efforts of each part of the organization are not being directed and meshed into flows which would achieve the common purpose.
THAT is what a manager is for.
The manager and his immediate assistants have to know where they are going and have to make certain each part of the organization knows and that the efforts of each individual segment of the organization are devoted to forwarding the same general purpose.
Without that coordination action, the different elements of the organization go into a tangle that results, not in the forwarding of the general purpose, but in confusion and frayed temper and nerves.
The elements of coordination are planning, knowledge, information, agreement and production.
Good coordination of team effort results in high ARC. This is called “team spirit, morale, esprit,” etc. But what it is in fact is agreement and understanding within the team so they can each forward the general purpose of the group. Confidence in the group by each individual part of it is built with the above factors. Out of that, one can achieve meaningful and worthwhile production.
Without it one gets various versions of catastrophe. The “hey you” organization, the one-star team with everyone else on the sidelines inactive or confused — there are many aspects of a lack of coordination.
Coordination is why we have Executive Councils, Advisory Councils, staff meetings, mini programs for departments and all the rest of it. It is even why we have an org board.
Any manager, at whatever level, will almost certainly fail if he does not brief his troops, get their viewpoints, establish agreement and program the general on-going activity and see that the program is executed.
A manager at any level has to use the tools of coordination. Otherwise his organization’s product will just be noise.
Oh, it is true that groups do not develop new ideas, that boards cannot plan. This is beside the point. This does not mean they do not serve a vital purpose. A manager uses them to coordinate! If he omits this, he has lost his most valuable tool, the form of the organization and he cannot possibly achieve any lasting results.
An org that doesn’t hold Executive Council, Advisory Council and staff meetings on a regular basis and does not use them to brief and iron out disagreements and get cooperation is lost. It will have down statistics very surely. For no one will know what the blazes is going on, so how can they get their own job done? An answer is to splinter off and go one’s own way as best he can. And that fragments a group and it ceases to be an organization but is just a lot of individual efforts.
The failure in such a case is simply a failure to coordinate!
Oh yes, management is there to plan. Good. If it is planning that will forward the general purpose of the organization, if the various units of the organization are briefed and the plan is adjusted to handle their disagreements and if the plan is real and understood by one and all and if they then cooperate and produce along these lines, you have forward progress.
In our case all we’re doing is selling and delivering a product. If we do that we have a planet. Otherwise we don’t.
Whether we do it in a few years or a few millennia is determined by management. Does it coordinate or not?