OVERPAID MANAGERS?

By a quirk of evolution, managers earn more than the people they manage. There is usually a good reason for that: more responsibility. But as the results of managers are more intangible than of cooks or archtitects or surgeons, people who prefer to avoid clear-cut and concrete activities tend to flee into staff positions and into general management. If the results of managers are measured at all, they are usually measured in numbers. That's what's nice in finance: all numbers - whatever they mean. Numbers can be manipulated and interpreted and there is a broad repertory to hide behind numbers. Positive business results are explained by good management, negative results by external circumstances. Read a few annual reports and you'll know what I mean. Balance sheets and annual statements are riddled by assumptions, estimates and conventions. How are stocks valued? What is overhead? Reserves are increased or decreased at the stroke of a pen. Goodwill is also a favorite fantasy number.
When the product of an organization is produced by professionals, it has become more and more common that "general managers" take over. Schools are led by people who never have taught, department stores are led by people who never have been selling. Marketing is more intangible than selling, market development is even more intangible and strategy even more. And what about people who pride themselves to be responsible for visioning? Whatever we may think of this, one consequence is that professionals resent to be managed by people who don't understand their work and manage by numbers - and earn much more than they ever will do. Departments are downsized, while the top is upsized, in numbers and in remuneration.
In board rooms we might find people that are so removed form the real work and real performance that the only thing they can do is buying and selling companies.
More and more publicity is about managers being overpaid. There is, at least for professional organizations, a solution that is as simple as it is elegant: managers of professional groups may never earn more than the best paid professional under them. The director of an architectural firm may not earn more than the best-paid architect. Hospital directors may not earn more than the best-paid medical doctor. School directors not more than the best-paid teacher. Marketing managers not more than the best-paid salesperson.
Professionals will like that. It also means that they have a real choice to go into management or to make a career within their profession. Most managers will not like this solution. The argument will be that an organization will lose it best managers, because they can earn more elsewhere. That doubles the benefit: what you lose, your competitor has to put up with.
Management, by the way, is an essential function. It deserves to be paid well. But people who do the real work also have an essential function. And they deserve to be paid well also.
As a management consultant I have seen many managers. Rarely the best, because they didn't need me. Rarely the worst, because they kept me out. Unless I was hired by a desperate outside board. By the way, managers should earn more than management consultants.

The rational use of intuition

In the near future I will indulge in an old habit: giving seminars on Management and Intuition. I remember the first time I did that with a colleague. We were curious about the evaluations afterwards. After all, intuition is a slippery subject for managers who usually pride themselves on being rational. We relaxed when we saw the scores, but I was really surprised when I realized that the highest score was on an item I didn't expect at all: practical applicability.
Yes, intuition is immensely practical, though we can misapply it. Enthusiasts think it is a highway to infallible judgement. Well, it isn't.
Intuition is the general label for getting thoughts without knowing how we get them. Rational thinking or, better, intellectual thinking is transparent: we deal with information and with argumentation. We can check that, we can evaluate that. Intuition is immediate. I have often compared our intellect to a plodding, pretty reliable housewife an intuition to a femme fatale: highly attractive, but not too trustworthy. Yet, intellectual analysis also leads often astray and intuition may be spot on - as many men discovered after not listening to their wives.
A blog is no place to expand on how to use intuition, but pointers may be derived from understanding what it is. Intuitive flashes have five sources:

1. Experience: we often react immediately because we have encountered very many similar situations; also without analysis we may appraise fast and pretty sure what we meet.
2. Subconscious perception: this is the kind of intuition in which women on the average score higher than men; besides the focus of our attention we register many other weaker signals. Concentration is a virtue, but not overdoing that also is virtue. This is about picking up the non-verbal signals of speakers, grasping the atmosphere of a meeting, etc.
3. Incubated insight: after fruitlessly pondering and analyzing deeply, we sleep on it, and suddenly the answer pops up. This is the in psychology well-known Aha-Erlebnis.
4. Subconscious association: this is where intuition usually goes wrong. A man gives us the creeps and we don't know why. He resembles uncle Albert, who was a creep, but we don't realize the resemblance, we just get a bad feeling.
5. Psychic impressions: whatever they are, they are related to a part of our brain going into the very slow delta-rhythm. Telepathy seems to be in  this zone.

Intuition has also precursors: emergent feelings, instinctive responses.
Intuition may precede rational analysis (this is something we should look into), it may end rational analysis (we are ready to take a decision). Making intuition more explicit and more hygienic (less associations, less quasi-intellectual arguments) helps us to become more rational, not less.