DawnBringer3D Tips & Tricks, Personal News, Game Development

Chain Of Command : Good Or Bad?

I have been thinking about chain of command lately as I have few times went ‘over’ my boss to his boss to talk about different ideas and problems. I hate the saying ‘going over somebody’ in this case, it makes people sound like traitors – and I think many managers think about it like that.

The problem I see with the chain of command is limiting the communication inside the organization. And that prevents learning inside organization, e.g. if we can always have a chat with only one person we can’t get different point of views and so on. In short, it prevents creating a real learning organization.

In my opinion managers should encourage everybody to talk to the upper management – talk to anybody inside the organization. I talk a lot about the upper management in this as that is the place where the bottleneck usually is.

Think about it, for example, what kind of new innovative product ideas the organizations have lost because of limiting the communication? There are loads of problems when limiting the communication inside organization : manager can forget, it is not in managers list of interests, etc. And when something like this happens we loose the great idea whet-ever it was about product or just improvement in general.

I think openness inside the organization is the key to build up a great place to work and learn at.