The Georgia power company' management style was mainly the use of chain of command for most decisions with the vital ones being made. Business results and communication were communicated on a biased form. Each department operated and made decisions on its own. This management style was the best for business requirements at that time as. The business was relatively predictable and structured with a regulated rate of return, regional market protection, and 100 percent control of access to its own distribution facilities. A watershed development, however, occurred in the early 1990s. This demanded Plant Hammond to transform its leadership system to a team based organization as the plant had reduced the number of employees by about one third, resulting in fewer management levels and fewer managers in those levels. As the world becomes global, many businesses are being driven towards improving of their quality standards in order to increase performance. This has led to a direct new emphasis of the notion of Total Quality Management (TQM). In real meaning, TQM is an integrative idea for management to continuously improve the value of products and processes. The Georgia power company’s plant could have implemented these quality aspects into its leadership team using the following ways.
First the leadership could have acted as the main change agent essential by modeling TQM Philosophy and values within its departmental operation, and serving as a beachhead for the TQM development throughout the company. Second, it could have taken the TQM development throughout the whole company by implementing long-term training and development required for the organizational traditions shift necessary for TQM.
The first aspect would have been to implement involvement as any form of quality management requires participation from all the departments that would be affected. The company’s leadership would have identified what departments would these be and form an implementation team that consist of representatives from each of these groups. A structure identifying various group leaders and their responsibilities should be created together with an accountability system that these implementation team meets its deadlines for getting the new program in place.
It would be required for the management to have a feeling of urgency.. The management could have created this urgency by explaining to the staff why the implementation of quality aspects into the business was necessary. The employees needed to understand how the company could have benefited from the new implementation, and also get the organization to see the disadvantage of not making the change.
TQM being a dynamic procedure that requires to be monitored by management and changed to meet execution of goals; the management would have set a monitoring system , examine the data that is generated during the execution and make any compulsory changes to make the execution more efficient. Implementing quality aspects into leadership teams is often done in phases. The company leadership could have monitored each phase of TQM is complete and transition the company to the next phase. For example, if the company purchases a new software for customer management, then the first phase of the software could be to execute it in the sales department. Management needs to identify when the appropriate modifications to the software have been made that will let it to be implemented in other parts of the company.
In summary the company’s management could have done the following; Initiate agreements on objectives and procedures that flow all over the organization and provide the agreed resources like people, money, training and machines. It could have assigned authority in achievement of goals, monitored progress, improvement and rewarded the achievement of goals and the methods used to achieve them and also involve a consultant to measure their progress.
References
Evans, J. R. (2010). Quality & Performance Excellence, Management, Organization, and Strategy, 6th edition. ISBN-10: 0324827067, ISBN-13: 978-0324827064
