Procurement Perspectives: Building unity throughout your organization

Organizations function best when they are cohesive, when all parts of the organization work together as a single unit for the same purpose.

The procurement department has the opportunity to talk to all departments in an organization to make sure they are purchasing the best products at the best price.

One of the purchasing manager’s responsibilities is to foster the right attitude within the entire organization. The members of the team need to understand the goals of the organization that have been set and believe all levels within the organization are working towards those goals.

In terms of people management and building unity, there are a variety of different available techniques, each of which is suitable to a specific type of environment.

As a manager, you need to know which technique to employ in each type of situation and for each type of person that is being managed.

It is critical at this juncture to differentiate between style and technique.

Some of the basic styles of management include:

The autocratic manager, who draws on his strength rather than from the strength of others.

The bureaucratic manager, who tends to manage by the book.

The democratic manager, who allows employees to participate in decision-making.

The idiosyncratic manager, who adapts his management style to each employee.

These styles should not be confused with the numerous different schools of management.

For instance, the management by objective school focuses on setting subordinate’s achievable goals, with the overall goal being to attain the best possible result from available resources.

It focuses on the result, rather than the activity.

Managers of this school delegate tasks to their subordinates without dictating a detailed road map for implementation.

Each of the goals so set feeds into the goals that manager is himself required to perform.

Another popular school is known as “management by walking about.”

Many of the basic principles of this school are derived from the writings of W. Edward Deming, the American business scholar who introduced systematic quality management to Japanese industry.

He wrote: “If you wait for people to come to you, you’ll only get small problems. You must go and find them. The big problems are where people don’t realize they have one in the first place.”

Under the management by walking about approach, managers make it part of the general routine to walk through their departments so they are available for impromptu discussions with staff.

Such managers seek out discussion with individual employees, so that they learn about problems and concerns first hand.

They also communicate their own instructions directly to those employees, especially with regard to new methods to deal with particular problems.

This style makes it possible to hold meetings and reviews in the field.

An established (i.e. pre-existing) practice of management by walking about can facilitate passage by the organization through a time of exceptional stress.

A third school is known as the balanced scorecard method of management.

Managers who adopt this school consider a business (or other organization) as a system of interrelated factors of strategy, owners, investment, management, workers, finance, processes, products, suppliers, customers and competitors.

The goal of the business is to maximize overall value for all stakeholders by achieving a dynamic balance of their competing values.

For instance, it is necessary to balance customer satisfaction with the need to provide a reasonable return on investment.

The interests of stakeholders outside the organization must also be balanced against internal cost and growth considerations.

Balancing these differing perspectives ensures both short-term and long-term objectives are factored properly into decision-making.

Yet another school, which evolved in Japanese industry, is known as the Kaizen school. This school advocates a continuous effort for improvement in all aspects of the organization.

Stephen Bauld is a government procurement expert and can be reached at swbauld@purchasingci.com. Some of his columns may contain excerpts from The Municipal Procurement Handbook published by Butterworths.