At the Vanguard of Evidence-Based Management: It's Time For Management to Grow Up Denise M. Rousseau H.J. Heinz II Professor of Organizational Behavior and Public Policy Heinz School of Public Policy and Management Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University

Today's expert managers are those on the vanguard of Evidence-Based Management (EBM). They recognize what Peter Drucker pointed out forty years ago--that most business issues--from morale problems to strategic implementation--are generic, reoccurring patterns of individual and group behaviors, organizational actions and market responses that are susceptible to interventions informed by evidence. EBM's experts use principles based upon the best available scientific evidence, coupled with carefully gathered local information, to make organizational decisions, much as their counterparts do in medicine, nursing, criminal justice, and education. By using management research and locally gathered data to their best advantage, EBM makes it possible for well-informed managers to develop substantive expertise throughout their careers as opposed to faddish and unsystematic beliefs. (Reengineering, anyone?) The result is better outcomes for organizations and their stakeholders--and managers who grow increasingly expert and effective throughout their careers.

EBMers at this moment are somewhat of a rare breed. Not for long. The first signs of a pervasive shift toward EBM are evident in one industry whose core professional workforce is already committed to evidence-based practices--healthcare. In August 2006, the first cohort of healthcare executives (managers, not clinicians!) graduated from the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation's (CHSRF) Executive Training for Research Application (EXTRA) program. The program's goal is for its graduates to serve as change agents to shift the culture of Canadian healthcare towards evidence-informed decision making within their own organizations. Funded by the Canadian government, committed to training many more cohorts, the industry will have a critical mass of evidence-based managers "…with the skills to find, assess, interpret, and apply research to their day-to-day work, we will begin see significant changes in the approaches taken by the healthcare system's organizations and leaders," according to Jonathan Lomas, CHSRFs CEO. (For more information, check out http://www.chsrf.ca)

EBM's trajectory is on the rise. While it makes sense that the first industry to buy into it is predisposed to evidence-informed decisions, EBM's wide applicability is well illustrated in Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton's recent book Hard facts, dangerous half-truths, and total nonsense. Yet, because it is a regimen, a way of thinking and doing the tasks of managing and organizing, EBM doesn't stand a chance as a fad. It is too tough just to go through the motions. Making evidence-informed decisions takes on-going personal development, an informed network, and an organizational culture promoting critical thinking, conditions that take a collaborative community to achieve.

Take a look at John Zanardelli, the CEO of Asbury Heights, a residential care facility for the elderly, the quintessential evidence-based manager. An epidemiologist by training, his professional practice is informed by executive courses at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard and the community of practice he has catalyzed in Pittsburgh to develop both an understanding of the current evidence from management research and how best to access and utilize it when novel situations arise. John and his management team regularly gather and analyze data linking customer experiences and employee attitudes and behavior with the firm's financial outcomes. For example, he and his staff query both these local data and the research evidence from finance, strategy, and social and organizational psychology to identify effective ways of setting pay and service rates to keep their organization financially sound while maintaining client trust and employee commitment. The evidence they use comes from on-going reading of research, their personal network of contacts with academics, and the research they sponsor at Asbury Heights. The organizational results are as impressive as the team's commitment to EBM.

It is Labor Day today in the United States, and thus perhaps the ideal moment to assert the following: It is time for management to grow up! Pressures for results and the decline of safety nets have demanded that labor mature. Today's workers in developed countries are now more self-managing both on the job and in their careers than anytime in the last century as they use their best available resources to develop and deploy their competencies. Contemporary managers are another story. Managers themselves are less likely as an occupation to shoulder responsibility for expanding their own expertise in a systematic fashion, one reason why so-called experienced managers are not necessarily more valued than their junior counterparts. Fewer demands have been made on managers and management practice itself to keep up with the opportunities expanding knowledge and IT afford. In the face of business information enabled by technology and widely available management research on effective practice, it is ever-harder to justify the ad hoc basis of managerial action--or accept the wide variability in performance it yields. EBM embodies the maturing of management practice, enabled to use the best available evidence--from research, local data bases, and knowledge networks available for cultivation. I note that it took years for organizational productivity to catch up with the promise the IT revolution wrought. Management research has long offered its own promise. Managers and the educational communities that serve them now need to catch up too.

Posted on September 4, 2006
 

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