You were taught that your job is to manage people.. and then to manage teams, which are nothing but people, and then to manage departments, which are nothing but teams. But here is what we will teach you at SystemsWay: your job was never to manage people. Your job has always been, and will always be, to manage the systems of which people are a part.
Many people who attend our courses and workshops call SystemsWay a Management School, and the reason is simple.. they are managers and executives who manage people, teams and organizations, and they have felt for years that something is wrong with the way they were taught to manage. They know things should not be this way, but they have no idea how to manage differently. And to manage differently, to manage in a way that is actually fulfilling, you first have to ask a question that almost no manager ever asks.. why do I manage the way I do? Who taught me this? Where did these practices come from, and what world were they built for?
Because the practices you inherited were built for a very particular world. The old System of Management assumed that systems are perfect.. so when a system fails, it must be because some human failed to do their assigned work. And every practice you know sits on top of that one assumption. The annual review, the performance rating, the whole hunt for whose fault it was.. all of it assumes the system is fine and the person is the problem.
Then our knowledge of systems changed. The newer Systems Theory made the case that much of the behavior of people is dictated by the very systems of which those people are a part.. that it is the system that needs to change, the system that needs to be held responsible, and that people shall be held responsible for one thing and one thing only.. not getting the system into a place that supports individual ability. This is a complete inversion of the assumption that everything you were taught stands on.
And here is the trap. The people who developed the old System of Management were not wrong.. they developed the right knowledge of systems for their context. But the context has drifted, drifted fundamentally, and our knowledge of systems has moved fundamentally.. and because no one ever taught you the context those old practices were built for, you cannot see how far the world has moved, and you cannot see why the practices no longer fit. You are running the right practices for a world that no longer exists.
At SystemsWay, we make you aware of both.. the context in which our System of Management was born, and the knowledge of systems we had back then. And the moment you see those two things, you instantly see what is wrong with the same practices in this newer context, and you see how the newer knowledge of systems lets us build a newer System of Management. So we are not teaching you management practices. We are teaching you a System of Management, and that is what lets you manage the systems of which people are a part.
Because managing systems is critical.. very critical.. and it should be fulfilling. When you start managing the system instead of policing the people, two things happen at the same time.. the manager finally finds management fulfilling, and the systems they manage finally start working the way the manager always wanted them to. And every course, every case study we teach is drawn from real corporations, real management, real systems. So if you want to manage the way management was always meant to feel, come learn the System of Management with us.