Subordinate review

The basic rules of management are:

1. You can fool your superiors, you cannot fool your subordinates.
2. Never put someone in a position where he must exercise authority unless you are willing to give him that authority.
3. Never put someone in a position where he must exercise authority unless he is capable of exercising that authority intelligently.
4. If you make someone responsible for everything , that person will be accountable for nothing.

   The first rule of management is the most important and can be used to improve all organizations of moderate or larger size.  Supervisors spend little time with each employee and have little idea what they are doing, subordinates constantly deal with supervisors and certainly know when they are screwing up.
   All that needs to be done to improve management is to have at least an annual rating of management by employees.  Each employee would be given a card with two strings of numbers from zero through ten.  The first would be to rate the employee's immediate supervisor, the other is to rate management overall.  The overall rating would be used to trace management upwards to failure points.  The managers would receive an average rating of employees, an overall average of the organization would be developed form the general management rating.
   Ideally, a low, or unusual, rating would result in an audit of employees to determine if something is going wrong and then decisions to demote or remove management would be made.  The reason for that is because there is a none zero chance that a bad group of malicious employees might be clustered, they might deliberately try to disrupt competent management.  The danger of that is that the follow up audits might not be done or the results of those audits might be simply ignored.
   The simpler method is to directly demote and promote managers based upon their ratings.  One basis for doing that is the standard deviation, which is a statistical attribute which will cause about one sixth of all ratings to fall below it at one standard deviation.  That is probably not a bad rate of demotion, if the demotions are at too high a rate, the management will be unstable,if the rate of removal is too low there will not be enough pressure to effect change and a continuing improvement in management.  One sixth is probably a good compromise number.
   The overall rating would first be averaged for the organization, let us say it is 6.5.  Each unit of employees would be clustered and averaged, so, if a group of fifty employees averaged 5.2 that could be bad.  If the next groups over in the branching management chart rated 5.1 and 5.4 that would tend to show that the management failure is above the single group and represents failure at a higher level of management, it is that higher level of management that would be removed.
   The system works well for organizations with more that one hundred employees.  It is the fastest way to improve corporate performance as well as government agencies and the military.  A law requiring it would make corporations more profitable, protect shareholders form incompetence and improve the economy.   Outside boards of directors which are currently populated mostly by psychotics, poorly socialized schizophrenia who promote each other and are unaware of their most basic levels of incompetence, could be improved by rating them by senior managers who are in turn rated by subordinates, the system would progressively and systematically improve.  It would alos be a good idea to psychologically screen candidates for boards of directors for socialization, to prevent people entering the syste who can do enormous damage.  The current system of board members nominating people whom they meet at parties and like guarantees in-bred selecting of the insane and incapable.  If anyone wants to improve corporations and hold them more accountable, this is the way to do it.
    In government service, these changes might require rewriting constitutions and charters but it would be well worth doing.  For government, just using it for information should not require constitutional changes but it might have the salutary effect of embarrassing governments into change by highlighting incompetence and failed political appointees.  In industry, as well, using them only for informational value and requiring the results be made available to shareholders could still have a strong corrective effect, particularly if the information is made legally non-proprietary and the individual share holders would have the right to release it for general distribution.  In both government and business the public release of the information would have the greatest effect on change.
   In the military it could have the strong effect of removing officers who are promotion climbers and would instead  select for officers who actually try to lead their personnel.