The single greatest obstacle preventing organizations from becoming great–achieving superior results, exceeding customer expectations, attracting and retaining talent, developing leaders, and creating work environments where people at all levels can learn and grow and prosper is painfully simple: Management Malpractice—abuses of power, knowledge and relationships that bog down systems, frustrate people, thwart teamwork, divert focus, and compromise results. What exactly is management malpractice? Any organizational practice or activity that makes it difficult for people to perform their jobs, develop themselves, coordinate with others, find fulfillment, create value and get results for themselves and their organizations. It occurs when management principles or corporate values are preached but not practiced and always involves an abuse of power, knowledge or relationships. Management malpractices at all levels in an organization must be constantly exposed and routinely eliminated if the enterprise expects to achieve and sustain greatness.

Great management principles that are considered by most people to be timelessly and universally true — principles such as sharing ideas at every level, fostering a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo, treating employees as your most valuable asset, valuing the contributions of each individual, creating an environment where people feel free to raise concerns, establishing a foundation of respect and trust, enabling people to tap into their full potential, listening to all viewpoints, constantly challenging assumptions and biases, and accepting responsibility for your actions — provide a vital shield and protection for individuals in organizations. When such universally accepted principles and truths are ignored, forgotten or preached but not practiced, individuals lose their protection and become subject to managers and leaders who can easily manipulate, abuse and injure them. Just as a nation without the rule of law cannot protect its citizens from physical harm, an organization without the rule of great management principles cannot protect its employees from emotional and psychological damage. Management malpractice occurs whenever managers and leaders fail to apply principles that have been tried and tested, proven and accepted as timelessly and universally true.

Oftentimes a vicious cycle is at work in organizations: leaders consciously or unconsciously malpractice management, employees react with disappointment and disgust, leaders attempt to correct their malpractice, employees perceive leaders’ corrective efforts as disingenuous and manipulative, leaders react with disappointment and disgust but they try again, employees cautiously give leaders another chance, leaders improve but not as fully and quickly as employees would like, employees become angry and call leaders hypocrites, leaders become angry and call employees whiners, and so on until both leaders and employees accept management malpractice as the norm. It is an inescapable reality of modern organizational life.

This vicious cycle continues until the organizational culture becomes mired in cynicism and distrust. The solution? Break the cycle by seeing it and exposing it – both the leader’s under-reaction to malpractice and the employee’s over-reaction to imperfection. Only when management malpractice is replaced with a widespread adherence to great management principles (timeless and universal) will the labels of hypocrite and whiner disappear. Only then can the vicious cycle be prevented from returning.

Craig Hickman is the author or coauthor of a dozen books on business and management, among them such bestsellers as Creating Excellence; The Strategy Game; Mind of a Manager, Soul of a Leader; and The Oz Principle. After receiving his M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School, he worked in the areas of strategic planning, organizational design, and mergers and acquisitions for Dart Industries and Ernst & Young. In 1985, he founded Management Perspectives Group, a consulting and training firm that helped companies implement the business strategy, corporate culture, and organizational change principles set forth in Creating Excellence and Mind of a Manager, Soul of a Leader. His clients have included: Proctor & Gamble, American Express, Unilever, AT&T, PepsiCo, Honeywell, Amoco, Nokia, and the U.S. government. He has lectured throughout the world for the U.S. State Department as part of its American Participant Program and is currently CEO of Headwaters Technology Innovation Group, a subsidiary of Headwaters Incorporated (NYSE: HW).

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