SALARY AND SCALABILITY

There is always a talk in financial services that every one has to justify his or her salary, more so at the frontline sales (being easier to track). But how do people at higher levels look at justifying their salaries or how they envision their critical roles within the firm.

Surely taking the business from ‘X’ levels to ‘X+5’ levels would not justify. Taking from ‘X’ to ‘7X’ with the same resources would really test the Management skills. Now my observation for financial firms is that whenever they want to scale business, the pressure increases on middle Management who get into supervisory roles rather than managerial trying to extract the maximum mileage from sales personnel by heavy supervision and control This might make the team efficient to a degree but the model is still not scalable from the top Management perspective.

The next important question is what is a managerial role and are people in managerial positions especially Top management ( those getting really high salaries) thinking in those lines

Well again I wish to invoke the thought of Stafford beer who described the role of Management as mentioned below

Policy-making, decision-making, and control: These are the three functions of management that have intellectual content. A man may be very good at any two of them, and still make a hash of his job for want of capability with the third. And whatever can be said for the qualities of drive and leadership, which is a lot, these attributes cannot in the long run be expected to compensate for deficiencies in the three-pronged intellectual attack

Guess the above para is self explanatory. Please note that by control Beer means more in terms of feedback and action rather than supervision.

I seriously Hope that intellectual content is given its due importance in organisations over drive and leadership

(The role of middle management has not been sufficiently described my be in the above and would share my views on some another occasion.)