Friday, November 27, 2009

Risk Management in Management

Recently have been involved in the delivery of a frontline management program to 20 supervisors in a regional hospital and during a workshop they were discussing risk management. Naturally being clincially oriented many were considering risk management from that perspective. In turn, I began to formulate some ideas on risk management in management. In other words what are some of the actual management risks? The following are my thoughts:

Failure to communicate effectively. By this I refer to a failure to develop a 'culture of listening' where people are encouraged to speak up, to ask questions, to propose ideas safe in the knowledge they will be listened to, respectfully and due dilgence given to their ideas.

Failure to set clear expectations.How can people acheive their outcomes when they don't understand, and agree with what is expected of them?

Failure to monitor, evaluate, provide feedback and hold people accountable Enough said!

Some, reading this might ask, hey what about failure to set strategy, or implement strategy, or hire the right people or design work roles? Everyone of those, and many more offer some management risk. What I am suggesting here is that the greatest risk of management is the inability to develop a 'people culture'. The greatest management risk is a focus on 'top-down' management rather than collective, collaborative leadership.

Let The Journey Continue
John Coxon
Taking You From Frontline Manager to CEO
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2 comments:

Kristen said...

John,

I really enjoyed your post. I think the 'culture of listening' that you wrote about is extremely important throughout risk management. Whether it's listening to those internal and external to your organization or being able to 'listen' for the risks that can impact your operations, the capability is integral to knowing where you stand and where you could be headed.

Thanks,
Kristen Pike
www.ClearRisk.com

JC said...

Hi Kristen
Good to hear from you, thanks for adding to our blog. I believe you make a good point about listening for the risks - all stakeholder groups talk and 'hidden' in that talk are signals about risks and how they are managed.
John C