That’s one finding of a research team from Harvard Business School, London School of Economics, McKinsey & Company, and Stanford. The group surveyed over 10,000 firms in 20 countries about management practices across operational management, monitoring, targets, and people management. The result: The first global database of management practices.
The group ranked US managers the best in the world, followed by those in Japan, Germany and Sweden. Brazil, China, and India were at the bottom of the management chart, managers in the UK, France, Italy and Australia somewhere in between.
What American managers and their employers do better than any other group in the world is manage and motivate people, according to the study.
“American firms are ruthless at rapidly rewarding and promoting good employees and retraining or firing bad employees,” according to the World Management Survey. Why?
More competition. Large and open US markets generate the type of rapid management evolution that allows only the best-managed firms to survive.
Human capital is important. America traditionally gets far more of its population into college than other nations.
The US has more flexible labor markets. It is much easier to hire and fire employees.
China is a study in contrast when it comes to people management.
“Many developing-country firms, even while trying to implement new techniques like Lean Management, ignore the fact that labor is different from other ‘inputs.’ the authors write in a Harvard Business Review blog post. “Many of the Chinese firms surveyed did not even employ managers who spoke the same language as the workers, relying on interpreters or basic sign language for communication. As you can imagine, this does not lead to a feeling of mutual support between management and workers.”
Read the full study and come back to tell me why you think American managers are world class — or not.
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