Responsible management-as-practice of time to promote velocity: a new paradigm for managing objectives

Responsible management-as-practice of time to promote velocity: a new paradigm for managing objectives - Research intervention within an audit firm - PhD Workshop with Prof. David Stark (Columbia University)For American pragmatists, management practices are always experimental because action is extended in motion (Lorino, 2020). From Mary Parker Follett, we know that the best levers for human performance are empowerment and inclusion. As sociomateriality tells us that tools and actors are linked (Gherardi & Laasch, 2021), we know that the performance management system as it is put into practice influences people's behaviors. Moving towards a more responsible management is not limited to the deployment of participatory management (Mintzberg & Sager, 2003). Complexity management shows us the need to take into account heterogeneous, interconnected and processual human and non-human elements. In this study, we explore how management control in its practice could be achieved for a better management of temporality. The field of analysis is a Big 4 (auditing and consulting firm) strongly impacted by a high turnover of staff and an important recruiter as long as the workload and the professional pressure are painful. We will see that time management is at the heart of the problem. Insofar as the improvement of the velocity of the teams favors the velocity, the velocity is performative, but how favors the velocity?This intervention research being the opportunity to participate in several projects carried out for clients of the firm, a qualitative ethnographic analysis is carried out on the basis of a participant observation of the people embarked on the projects. Based on a multidisciplinary literature, both in management control but also in social sciences, we understand that the innate intuition and the experience accumulated by the seniority of people are under-exploited, and that the development of investigation (instantiation and conceptual articulation) would improve people's velocity. The researcher also observes that the quality of the project framework improves the working environment of the teams. We conclude that productivity and the social climate could be improved by modifying the management by objectives system currently in place, moving from a control system based on quantitative data to a control system based on the qualitative assessment of cognitive abilities. We propose a new paradigm, improving life balance while ensuring better customer satisfaction and better project profitability. A paradigm shift refers to a major shift in concepts and their practice. In this case study, it is a break in goal management practices.