henri fayol general and industrial management

It is management’s responsibility to identify and tap into this unrealized value. Every employee is a company-wide asset that can be leveraged well beyond their immediate task. Today, our industry’s common program/project/task/activity work orientation reduces employees to being foot soldiers thereby having minimal opportunity to provide input to management’s decision making and business growth.Īn employee may report to one person for administrative purposes but the employee works for the company. Work is about team-based roles, enterprise-wide functions, cross-functional goals, knowledge sharing, and the company’s objectives. One indicator of this kind of thinking is hearing someone say, “That’s not my job”. Work is no longer about specific work roles, an employee’s goals or what is best for a department. Today, this antiquated view of management’s role, with wisdom flowing down from high, severely constrains a company’s competitiveness. Management was there to lead employees were there to obey orders. In the traditional company structure of yesteryear, this may have made some sense to manage the work of blue-collar workers.

The notion of chain of command has become an explicit or implicit element of most companies’ culture and management system. However, what made sense for managing a large hierarchal, industrial era firm does not apply to today’s knowledge-based businesses. As people have left the military, to work in civilian jobs, they bring this mental framework with them to their places of employment. Over time, the notion of chain of command began to permeate corporate America. GM was a large company, even then, and needed a structure to manage and control employees. General Motors began to embrace Fayol’s principles in its management systems in the 1930s.

The French army soon embraced Fayol’s principles of management to better manage troops.

This last principle, chain of command, and how it has been applied in business haunts our industry today. His work identified and explained 14 principles of management.Īmong these 14 principles, better known examples are (1) division of work – people should specialize in their work so they can produce more with higher quality, (2) unity of direction – one person should only receive orders from one superior, and (3) scalar chain – which became known as the chain of command.Ĭhain of command defined the chain of superiors from the ultimate authority to the lowest ranks. Henri Fayol was a French mining engineer who published General and Industrial Management, one of the first theories of management, in 1916.

Henri fayol general and industrial management