The quality of the managers in your company will make or break your company.

In a recent interview with Dr. Corey Billington, we learned about his theory of management. Dr. Billington worked for Hewlett-Packard (HP) in a variety of roles for almost 20 years. The biggest role he had while at HP was as the Global Vice President of Supply Chain Services. In that position, he managed over 1,500 people in 32 countries who were responsible for engineering, procurement, and corporate social responsibility. After his time at HP, Dr. Billington started and managed several companies, and he has taught entrepreneurship and supply chain classes at several universities around the globe. He has extensive experience managing others, and we were excited to hear his thoughts on management. Here is an excerpt from the interview.

So, management is a service job first and foremost. I think that if you look at what business is, it is about people doing work, and management is like I.T. … It’s a function that should help the people who are doing the work, do their work. So you organize a situation where they are either well trained, they have the resources they need, they are motivated by what they do, they are energized by what they do, [and] their team productivity is good. It’s about allowing people to be successful and helping them to be successful.

Now a part of that is understanding what they need, what they want to achieve, why they are working, [and] what they get out of work, because the more you can capture the passion of people through the managerial motion, the more work you get done and the more success you have.

So I have a philosophy that you have a choice between creating a culture of fear or culture of achievement. So, you either trust your people, and you let them do their job, and you give them the resources, and you get out of the way, and you let them delight you, or you don’t trust people, in which case it’s all about control, and asking permission, and micromanaging, and all these things that people hate. In my mind and my experience in all of those things, if you don’t trust people, they are not as productive. They don’t get as much done. They don’t have as much passion. They might clock their time, and they might be diligent, but I want more than diligence. I want passion for us to succeed in something worthwhile. Also, management is about creating energy in organizations and channeling it in healthy ways, so that the energy allows us to achieve things that we could never do if we weren’t well managed.

… Management is a service job, but if people create the success of their organization, they deserve the rewards from that. You can’t take it all. You have got to feed some of it back, and that is just aligned incentives. So, that’s why [I’m] very strict with succession planning. So, if you have a team that wins games and hits home runs, and is performing extremely well, someone on that team wants to be the next boss, and you [have] got to make it so that happens. If you bring someone in from the outside, you are insulting the team. Remember, the probability of the traditional interviewing process predicting success in the job is less than 3%. So, it is deeply insulting to me, and I think anyone with a brain, that if you higher anyone from the outside for a managerial job, you don’t have any faith in your people. And if they have succeeded, and they are a star team, then why would you not have any faith in them?

Do you agree or disagree with Dr. Billington? What is your theory of management? Let us know your thoughts on LinkedIn or Facebook.