Top-down management: efficiency vs. Face
Top-down management is a double-edged sword.
First, the good side: In Singapore education, the highest power is the Ministry of Education. It determines the curriculum for all schools, grades and levels, trains teachers and administrators, provides budgets and money and administers the exams that determine how well kids are doing and how well individual schools manage to meet MOE goals. The principals of schools are next down the ladder, and under them the Heads Of Department – there are English, Science, Math and other departments, even in elementary schools, and every teacher is affiliated with one of them. The HOD determines what approaches will be taken to teaching. In the primary school where one of my projects is taking place, the HOD of the science department decided to abandon years of rote-memorization in favor of the innovative approach of training children to think like scientists. This is hard work for the teachers in that department, as they have to revise years of training and practice to comply with the new system; but although they grumble a little, they go along with the program. (It helps that the HOD used the program himself on a class that did much better on their exams than other classes.) They don’t complain to their union, or try to get out of it, or slack off (they can’t – their HOD also has a say in performance reviews). They can air their complaints, but if they want to keep their jobs they must incorporate the new system. It helps that they are generally young (under 35) and not set in the old ways, and that they know, like everyone else, that something in the Singapore school system has got to change.
So it’s a lot easier for someone at the top to institute change. If this were California, for instance, this HOD would have had to fight the teachers’ union, the School Board, the School District Superintendent, the County Schools Superintendent, parents’ groups, and the state Secretary of Education.
What’s the downside of top-down management? It depends on the competence of the people at the top.
If you’ve got genuinely thoughtful, experienced smart people at the top, that’s good. They might do some research before demanding things from those below them, and might temper their ideas accordingly. But if you’ve got people of limited experience at the top, or even in the middle, trouble brews. Let’s say the people near the top of the heap have done really well in Singapore’s education system and through merit-based testing have earned a good, free education and a job in the civil service. They’re locked into good secure jobs at an early age, with no real-world experience or necessary exposure to the world beyond Singapore. Their training is to comply with the system and excel at fulfilling the demands of the testing regime. The job-promotion regime now demands that they prove they’re productive; the best way to prove your productivity is by 1) quickly complying with demands from those above you; and 2) showing that you can get the people below you to do new things. What new things? Does it matter? How about a study of how teachers spend their class prep time? Demanding that university researchers fill out their budget reports in triplicate, with accounting accuracy to the last penny? Requiring teachers aspiring to HOD status to take management courses? It doesn’t matter what, as long as you eventually show your boss that you were innovative in some way – whether that way actually improved matters is moot. As long as you can show proof of your productivity, your job is secure.
Of course, that means that the security of those below you in the system depends on fulfilling those perhaps arbitrary demands you’ve made of them; the teachers now get to spend part of their class preparation time accounting for their time in 10-minute increments; university researchers have to spend hours poring over their accounts and chasing down the petty cash they spent on coffee or a new printer cartridge; ambitious teachers now have to follow up their full work days with evening courses in the heart of the city, and get home at midnight in the middle of the week. Unless you can show these people good reasons for your demands, you must expect them to skimp, cut corners, or cheat.
And here’s where we bump into the big problem of FACE. Underlings can’t ask you WHY you’re making a demand, or they’ll cause you to lose face. You can’t correct a boss, or you’ll both lose face. You can’t even point out that something is impossible, or ask to work together to make it more achievable, because by doing so you imply that your superior hasn’t thought things through enough, and thus you cause the superior to lose face. Anything other than unquestioning obedience makes you stand out as the person who “doesn’t value consensus.” There’s no such thing as constructive criticism; the superior is godlike in wisdom, foresight and benevolence.
If only it were so!