Top-down concentrates on producing goals, targets, visions, orders and other directives in order to control the workforce and thereby achieve organizational success. Focusing on giving direction prevents these managers from doing much of anything else. Thus top-down treats employees like robots in the “shut up and listen, I know better than you” mode, and rarely if ever listens to them. By so doing this approach ignores every employee’s basic need to be heard and to be respected.

In addition, not listening to employees makes top management ignorant of what is really going on in the workplace thus making their directives misguided at best and irrelevant at worst.

In top-down, nobody listens to employee ideas, nobody values their opinions, and nobody gives them any recognition. The only way that the workforce can deal with managers who treat them in this way is to disengage and ignore their behavior. In the workplace this is seen as being sullen, uncommunicative, having a poor attitude, low morale and/or apathy.

(During my first 12 years of managing people, I used top-down and was never aware of how bad my leadership was. It was not until I started really listening to employees that I began to understand.)

In this way and others, top-down demeans and disrespects employees sending them very negative value standard messages. The standards reflected in this treatment “lead” employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with the same level of disrespect they received. No one can become committed to company goals while being treated so poorly.

The alternative approach causes employees to unleash their full potential of creativity, innovation, productivity, motivation, and commitment. In this state, they love to come to work and literally blow away competitors. Any manager can learn how to do this, but must get rid of top-down and start listening to employees and respectfully addressing their complaints, suggestions and questions.

To learn more about the right way to manage people, please take a look at these Leadership Articles starting with the article “Leadership, Good or Bad”.

Best regards, Ben