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The Vroom Leadership Model When Dr. Victor Vroom is not sitting in at nightclubs around the world playing his saxophone or clarinet, he dissects the leadership styles of managers and gives them feedback to help them become more productive. Vroom, Professor of Organization and Management at Yale, was interviewed recently by Andy Thibault, Editor of APS Quarterly. In the following conversation, Vroom offers a preview of the training sessions he will conduct during the APS Litchfield Coordinator Training Conference July 26-31.
How do leaders make good decisions? For the last 25 years I have been working on a model of decision making. This model addresses the way in which leaders should involve others as partners in the making of decisions. Some people refer to that as leadership style. It starts with the premise that there are some recognizable degrees of involvement in decision making. At one end of the spectrum, there is absolutely no involvement whatsoever; that is, the leader takes the problem or the challenge and makes a decision as to what ought to be done, then announces that decision to the group or team. This happens to be the style that I use aboard my sailboat. I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s a very neat division of labor in which the thinking is done by the leader and the implementation is done by the members of the team. This is applicable to a wide range of decisions and is used in virtually every culture that I know of. From there, one can proceed to varying degrees of involvement or partnership between the leader and members of the team. I distinguish between two forms of consultation, one in which the members of the team are consulted prior to the leader making a decision. The leader can consult with members of the team individually, explaining the problem and giving them an opportunity to influence the decision; or, the leader brings the team together as a group. This has the added ingredient that each of the consultants can hear the advice provided by each of the other members of the team. Then there is an alternative that also involves a group meeting; I refer to it as facilitating. The leader acts as moderator of a discussion aimed at reaching agreement. In this alternative the team makes the decision but the team plays a specialized role. The leader controls the process, but not the final decision. What is the benefit of increased involvement? As you increase the involvement of other people, it improves the implementation of the decision. There is a tremendous amount of evidence that people support what they help to build. It also develops the capabilities of the team members and their abilities to solve problems themselves. It builds teams, it helps to align individual goals with the goals of the organization and it develops individual knowledge; the team member is exposed to problems that often occur at higher levels in the organization.
The final alternative I distinguish is delegation, in which the leader turns over the problem to the team and the team makes the decision. We are finding this much more frequently as spans of control increase; you can’t micro-manage 40 to 50 direct reports. The pyramids of organizations are much flatter with fewer levels between the bottom and the top. How have you found this occurring in the corporate world? I’ve been a consultant with General Electric for well over 30 years. About 10 years ago Jack Welch decreed that there would be no more than four levels between the bottom of the organization and the top. There had been as many as 10 to 12 levels. This has reinforced the need for more use of teams. The alternatives I have described vary in the degree to which the members of the team have opportunities to influence the decision. I refer to this as degree of participation in decision making. Each one of these processes is useful under a certain set of circumstances. It is important to match the degree of involvement with the nature of the problem.
How do you do that? I have developed a model which purports to be an expert system for this. The manager responds to a set of questions about a particular problem or situation or challenge and then the computer puts the responses into a set of equations and makes a recommendation of the most effective process. This system is now on a CD rom and I will be distributing this to all the people in APS. Decision Making for Leaders is the title. I have trained 150,000 managers in various parts of the world in this system. In the last few months I have presented programs in Saudi Arabia, Israel and at the Social Security Administration in Baltimore. What can APS members look forward to? I have also developed a means of analyzing the models that people carry with them in their heads. Each manager reviews 30 cases of particular problems in particular organizations. The manager is asked to specify what they would do. The responses are fed to a computer program which produces five pages of analysis of their style comparing them with 140,000 managers around the world. They learn what they might be overlooking, the likely consequences of their style in terms of wise decisions, implementation and time efficiency. This is a very complex program. The APS people will be able to test themselves, and I will produce their leadership profiles.
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