Managing at a Distance

Change in the environment has required much more reliance on the quality and calibre of the individual, for example the focus on development of engineers beyond adapting to technology and activity management, and instead using processes and structure to support effective command and control. Managing the activities is important when the focus is on productivity and cost reduction, but leadership is required to ensure that delivery of leading-edge service achieves all its objectives and is effective across a whole raft of measures including customer loyalty, engineer loyalty, process quality and deployment, as well as cost constraints imposed by a changing environment.

Managing at a distance is usually accompanied by the concern that staff left to their own devices will not be productive. This very thinking might be at the core of the concern – creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a problem arises, the immediate response can be to infer blame, and demand that a solution be implemented to fix the problem; in other words, we prefer to fix the problem (short term) by controlling the people, rather than work with them to come up with ideas, tools and techniques which will control the process and fix the problem (long term). Leadership requires working with staff to control the process, not railroading or mandating a solution.