Everyone is familiar with the business organization concept of Staff & Line. In your Business Management 101 course Line could have been defined as someone who has direct responsibility to make a product. A Staff person is defined as someone who is not in the direct chain of operational command but does managerial work to help an executive manage.
We have been living with this concept for so long that we take it for granted. Perhaps this is a good time to review staff and line and see if your understanding has not been perverted over time.
Every organization, no matter whether it is for-profit or non-profit, can have its human resources divided into staff and line. So What! What does this division tell us? Is one group better, or more important, than the other? If you make this distinction, how does this affect the performance measurement of each group?
From my corporate and consulting experience, I have found that line people usually work (in a manufacturing setting) on the production floor. Line personnel are those people who are directly involved in changing the raw materials into a finished product. These are the people who do the work and touch, in some form, the product.
On the other side, staff people typically work in offices away from the production floor and relatively close to the senior managers. Unfortunately, this close proximity to the senior management tends to make the staff personnel think their jobs are of higher importance than line people who work on the manufacturing floor. This attitude tends to turn things upside down in an organization. This topsy-turvy thinking is especially true in communications. The staff people are usually demanding information from the line people, but furnish little or no information in return. The business world has focused most of its energy on measuring and then improving the performance of line personnel. In fact, a good portion of staff people are tasked with measuring line personnel. But how often do we think to measure the work of the staff personnel?
Staff personnel have a need and a role in an organization. It is important for an executive who has a staff person to clearly define the role and authority of this staff member. If you are going to delegate work to a staff person, you should be certain that the staff person and your direct operational subordinates understand the tasks, the authority and the obligation of the staff person. Defining the role and authority of the staff sends a clear message to everyone of your need for the staff and their role in helping you better manage your department.
If we are going to delegate tasks to staff, we should also accept the need to define clearly what work is to be done and how the staff person is to be measured in his efforts. A very wise manager once told me that if you can’t (or won’t) measure a task or activity, then it should not be done. His reasoning was that if it can’t be measured, then how can you know if it is being done efficiently? If it can’t be measured, it probably wasn’t worth doing in the first place.
So if we agreed that staff personnel are, at the least, a necessary evil then we have to ask ourselves how we go about measuring the results of their work? Line personnel are measured by the number of units per time period. We have all sorts of measurements to make sure a line person is performing in a profitable manner. How do we measure the performance of a staff person?
I would suggest that staff personnel be measured not on the amount of reporting they do, or the data that they collect; rather they can be measured by how much their efforts improve the work of the line personnel. If a staff person is asking for data he should be able to use this data to make the line person more productive. Reports that go up to the executive and are not acted upon are a waste of effort. They waste the time of the staff person in generating the report and the line personnel who have to collect and forward the data. Why generate a report if nothing is acted upon as a result?
If a staff report identifies opportunities to improve production or reduce costs, then the executive should implement the actions and increase the company’s profits. In many cases a staff report can be implemented by subordinate line managers if they just have access to the information. Allowing the subordinate line managers to implement their own improvements justifies the reporting effort and allows the subordinates to take ownership in the data they furnish. Isn’t this a form of continuous improvement?
I would challenge all line managers to review their staff activities and ask themselves a critical question: Are the activities and reports of their staff leading to improvements in productivity or reduced costs? If not, then why not? Share with me what is going on with your staff personnel.
You must log in to post a comment.