President of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) William Mahfood is encouraging business managers to create formal structures that minimise shared biased information in organisations.
“When you have the same set of information being shared by executives or managers within an organisation, you tend to come up with the same decisions, and if you take groups of executives at a level that always get the same information, they end up sometimes making an incorrect decision,” Mahfood, who was speaking at a Make Your Mark Consultants (MYMC) 2016 Middle Manager Conference at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel yesterday, stated.
MYMC Middle Managers’ Conference is an annual two-day event aimed at providing world-class business and youth development services locally, regionally and internationally. The initiative provides value-added interventions and systematic changes in areas identified as important to individuals and organisations to facilitate growth, development and increased productivity and competitiveness.
Guest speakers at this year’s function, being staged under the theme: ‘G.R.O.W…Your people, product and potential’, included William Mahfood, chairman of the Wisynco Group, and Minister of Labour and Social Security Shahine Robinson.
“One of the things that I have done over the years in order to try and take innovation from some of our people is interaction with people at every level within our organisation. What I have come to realise is, we need formalised structure in every organisation, where you include people from lower levels of the organisation – middle management and even lower – and take information from them to develop the standards, innovation, customer service and production processes. That is what I have done informally,” Mahfood continued.“I think a lot of managers over the years, who are in organisations that are truly successful, use that relationship with the employees from the ground right up to be able to remove that shared bias information.”
Mahfood noted that sometimes business owners tend to focus on increasing profit margins, finding investors and growing the business; that they often forget that the single most important resource of the company – employees – lacks nurturing.
“As a reminder, our employees provide inspiration, creativity, vision and motivation that keeps an organisation alive. They provide the skills and competencies necessary to make an organisation work, and the labour that produces the goods and services that an organisation supplies,” he said.
“In a market that is focused on innovation and customer service, our people are the most important competitive edge,” the CEO continued.
Presenters for the Middle Management Conference this year include Courtney Campbell, CEO of Victoria Mutual Group; Halden Morris, professor and deputy dean for Graduate Studies at The University of the West Indies; Mark Chisholm, executive vice-president, Individual Life at Sagicor; and Elon Parkinson, head of public relations at Digicel Jamaica.
