It is common that, in companies that evolve in growth under an autocratic direction, the owners feel the need to generate a change towards a professional management that represents a filter between the top management and the usual problems of company management.
However, getting the CEO to change his autocratic style, which so far has led to company growth, may be the main obstacle.
The owner or owners of the company, over time, begin to saturate themselves with the problems of carrying the solution and attention to all the problems of the company when they detect that the growth that was once very good, is gradually decreasing until really jeopardize growth that ensures reasonable business profitability.
The autocratic style begins to saturate the general manager himself, who sees with despair that he has no trusted and competent personnel to support him, and on the other hand, he observes that the growth whose curve begins to tilt, does not compensate for the efforts and creativity is ending. along with the motivation of the first years.
Before actually accepting that they must change their organizational structure towards the empowerment of a professional management plan between him and the rest of the organization, they usually do experiments that make them lose time and money:
They try to turn their most faithful collaborators into key personnel, however the autocratic culture that for years has successfully imposed on the company, ends up prevailing, making their collaborators unconsciously tend to resort to it again and again in the face of problems until everything he returns to his normal course before the impotence of the general manager himself.
They hire a manager with experience in the field, but not in their company, and generally the organization ends up transforming the great hope into the same vice that it wants to attack, gradually blending into one of a culture that is difficult to change.
They hire seminars and organizational consultancies that generate loss of time at work, try to reconstruct communications and try isolated work formulas that ultimately succumb since a serious action has costs both monetary and in decisions and emotions of the general manager himself, who is the one who has Supporting change itself, however, is very difficult at first.
They depend on an employee who keeps the owner or owners in constant hope that they will change the company with fabulous businesses or threats of big real or imaginary losses if they disregard what is clearly poorly outlined.
The phenomenon of voluntary blindness or of which your feelings of guilt, real or not, do not allow you to make the decision that sooner or later you will have to make the same: transform management into a professional.
What are the reasons for this difficulty?
In many cases, since these are family businesses, who really rules is the family of the general manager, whose exacerbated conservatism, does not approve of the actions necessary for a change given the radical nature of moving from family management to professional management..
In these days of globalization and high competition, professionalization is an imperative sooner or later.
In other cases, it is the manager himself who does not want to abandon his autocratic habits, unconsciously opposing himself, since he mistakenly perceives that he may lose power. Many companies have gone bankrupt because of this fact.
A case that has a high frequency is the tendency of the autocratic manager to surround himself with incapable people who make him feel the most valuable in the company, ignoring that the true value of a general manager is to surround himself with people more capable than he is in some way., which generates leadership and development in the areas of expertise of its managers, instead of hindering it as happens when people are of little potential.
Finally, there are those who give another turn of the screw to generational change, hoping to hand over the general management to one of their children, maintaining the situation at the cost of great personal sacrifices, both in health and economics, given that the company goes through boom cycles and decline that prevent it from growing healthy: statistics say that the change of hand causes bankruptcy in the short term in a large number of companies.
What do you recommend to achieve a change before it is too late or too expensive?
The recommended thing before intervening the structure, strategy and culture of the company, is to work to change the mindset of the general manager, thus causing a change in him that allows him to shake off family pressures, his own fears and obviously fear to work with capable people, that although it may seem expensive, it is not when compared to the benefits of constant growth and development in the future.
It should also be considered how comfortable it is for the general manager to be the one who decides to have a management team that attacks problems and presents viable solutions as a team, instead of spending continuous efforts addressing everything alone and, many times, getting involved in Direct skirmishes with low potential and high conflict personnel, a task that corresponds to the heads of the area and not to the general manager: over the years this wears out and causes great disappointment and impotence in the owner of the company.
One thing is certain: if the patient does not want to heal, there is little that can be done.
It often happens that the general manager, either on his own behalf or because the family imposes it, continues to cling to his vices and fears until the force of the facts convinces him, hopefully in time, to initiate a beneficial change for his business.
A general manager must make a good self-diagnosis, trying to discover if he inherited general management as the head of a hidden family power, or the necessary initial growth transformed him into an autocrat who does not unconsciously want to professionalize the company, or is it a luck of spurious manager who likes to surround himself with people with low potential so that, unconsciously, they do not shade him.
If you, as general manager, are in this dilemma, seek urgent personal advice from an advisor who can build confidence, no matter how hard it is for you, having to understand that changes must be made once and for all to leave the path clear. to a new stage of development of your company.
