Why modern management has considered Fayol's theory of command and control

outmoded?
By: Murtaza Sabir
Commanding and controlling are part of the five processes, which Fayol identified and
stressed that his 14 principles of management steers to accomplish these processes.
As for command, Fayol believed that managers should know their personnel well, lead from
front, are well acquainted with the agreements between employees and business, provide
employees every opportunity to improve where necessary reduce the incompetent in the
organization, carry out regular audits in the organization, involve senior management to
ensure that whole organization focus is same, aim to build confidence, loyalty and unity
among the team.
As for control, Fayol believed that recurring process of monitoring should be in place to
ensure that execution is according to the plan and if needed adjust the plan accordingly to
mitigate errors and deviations.
This style of management works in organization where leader orders group of people to do
specific task without taking any inputs from the team, for example fire fighters when they
need a boss who command the whole plan or in factories with production environments. In
these environments it works well as there is not enough time for discussions and plan should
be executed fairly quickly without introducing delays or indulging in discussions. Below
sections discuss various drawbacks of command and control theory including examples from
different organization teams.
Management principles and practices of controlling and monitoring is vital for the success of
any plan or project in organizations.. The progress and performance of the projects and plans
is closely monitored against set key performance indicators to evaluate the performance and
cope for any shortcomings in the execution. Hales (1986) also considers Fayols five
management functions to be valid and equally applicable in the current modern organizations
as in classic organizations. Fells (2000) argues that the Fayols principles of management are
not refuted by the contemporary management models (i.e. Mintzberg, Hales, Kotter etc.),
rather they are supported by the findings of these models. He mentions that the command
element is represented in the leader, disseminator and disturbance handler roles of
Mintzbergs theory. Further control element is evident in the negotiator and disseminator
roles presented by Mintzberg.
Modern management considers that the excessive use of command and control demoralize
staff in an organization, modern leaders insist on team work where whole organization takes
part from formulating to implementation of the plan. Everyone in the team participates to
execute the plan with success and even addresses the issues, which surface during the
implementation of plan. Advantage of empowering teams results in high morale of the
personnel, which also reduces the need of requiring too many managers in an organization.
Since every member can contribute this results in efficient processes and effective results for
the whole team. Customer service teams in an organization are good example of empowered
team where each individual is responsible for satisfying and providing updated information to
the customers for any upcoming services and campaigns.

Command and control style management also leads to situation where employees end up in a
situation where they are not producing results or the performance is not up to mark. This
affects also their colleagues in the team or organization because the leader treats the staff as
inferior. However if the manager treats them as colleague the results will be totally different.
An individual performs better under the conditions when they are not working under pressure
conditions.
Nowadays organizations encourage their employees to influence in the projects where
managers provide them with such processes and systems so that their employees can
participate in decision-making process as these are the one who know best what consumer
wants from them. With the help of regular retrospectives meetings everyone identifies areas
of weakness and everyone is welcome to suggest ways of improvements for coming projects.
Lets take an example of IT industry where programmers in a team are working on different
task simultaneously and mostly they have the best knowledge to solve the problem and their
manager knows the least.
Command-and-control might be situational and fits the need of specific organization, In
general teams perform better if the manager seek advice, listen to their inputs, demands,
empowers and engage his/her people on regular basis.