The Difference Between Flexibility and Firmness as it Relates to Management: Why is a Healthy Balance of Flexibility and Firmness Important?

Flexibility and firmness are crucial to good management principles and practices in any business. Knowing when to be flexible and when to hold firm, calls for discernment and entails judgment on the part of a manager, or management team.

What are flexibility and firmness, as they relate to management?

Businessdirectory.com suggests managerial flexibility is “the management team’s ability to adapt investment decisions, including timing and scale, to existing market conditions as opposed to preset assumptions and goals”.

All businesses need to have a degree of managerial flexibility and firmness. Being flexible allows fluidity and elasticity, bending and stretching, while firmness holds to designated limits without give and take.

Being too flexible can be problematic, as can being too firm or rigid. A healthy balance between the two is essential in terms of the financial survival of any business.

Excessive rigidity in management indicates economic fear, typical of the attitude in any era when the economy can swing any direction. Excessive flexibility may be indicative of an irresponsible attitude on the part of management or an inappropriate, business plan.

Managerial responsibility involves acknowledging and maintaining a healthy business perspective based upon an appropriate business plan. Most business plans have a predetermined degree of flexibility, as well as firmness, because markets are seldom predictable and are subject to change.

Management teams function as a whole, keeping profit and loss at an acceptable level in the light of fluctuating markets. Decision-making is invariably an ongoing process, as well as a vital aspect of managerial responsibility when it comes to investments and expenditures. Timing is a crucial aspect in the decision-making process. Realistic expectations are also important.

This is where flexibility and firmness play an important role. Being too flexible can place a business in a precarious position financially, as can being too firm.  

For example, the scale of financial transactions as determined by management, can accelerate the profit or loss of a business. When that scale is preset or predetermined and does not have built-in flexibility, a valuable investment opportunity may be lost. That same preset scale can prevent an over-extension of investment that could prove problematic in terms of allowing too much flexibility.    

Managerial flexibility and firmness in a financially healthy business, does not lead to a dictatorship. Principles and practice based upon a balanced degree of flexibility and firmness ensure that does not happen and allows a business to function on a relatively secure financial basis. While no one can guarantee economic success, flexibility and firmness are vital to the survival of a business in any fluctuating economy.  

Preset assumptions and goals can be idealistic and are only as realistic as the unpredictable nature of the global economy and thus, managerial flexibility and firmness have to take priority, at times.