Peter James: Leadership and Management

Summary:  As organisations grow, the level of complexity grows accordingly, and the division of tasks increases.  As this happens, don’t lose sight of the fact that some activities still need to sit across management as a whole -they should not be delegated or departmentalised wholesale as the organisation grows. Leadership traits, especially, can be lost or underdeveloped if managers look to other departments to deliver organisational initiative such as performance management, value and culture or change management.  Their involvement is crucial, not only for their own development but for the success of the organisation.

 

I use the generic term ‘Managers’ in this article to refer to all levels of management from leading hand to CEO.

 

Reflecting on my own journey in management over the past 35 years, I’m getting a sense that some leadership accountabilities might have been sidetracked.  Many people that I have coached and spoken to feel that their organisations management lack leadership skills, teamwork and interpersonal skills development across the board – that they are running around trying to plug gaps – but when I look back at my own organisational history over the last 30 years, it comes as  no surprise, and there is no quick fix.

My role prior to making the jump into consulting was in Senior Management for a very successful manufacturing company in Perth.  We had an annual turnover of around $50 Million, employed around 300 people and delivered equipment around Australia and overseas.

 

Many changes occurred in that company over a 10-year period, including:

 

  • Growing 10 times in revenue
  • Growing 5 times in size (factory area)
  • A huge increase in the product range and offerings
  • Moving from “build to order” to “production line JIT manufacturing” (a huge investment in capital equipment)
  • Adopting recognised international Quality Control standards
  • Changing the company name
  • Being purchased by a multinational (we were originally owned by a single shareholder)
  • Introducing unions into the workforce
  • Being one of the first companies to provide signage and instructions in multiple languages and running language classes for supervisors for the large number of overseas workers
  • Moving to a computer-based operation (including CAD) from a totally non computerised base.

As well as all of the other growth challenges and changes that the above presented.

When I think about all of that change and transformation, we did it without specialist people allocated to Human Resources, Change Management, Safety, Training and Development or Organisational Development etc.  No doubt we made errors and stumbled through certain aspects but ultimately these roles were all expected to be addressed by the core business management team.  We had to work together, allocate resources, address the issues and solve the problems – it may not have been pretty, but the result was a unified delivery of the end goal, to the benefit of everyone.  Times were simpler then, but it did force us to take responsibility and work together to achieve our goals.

 

I had never heard of ‘change fatigue’, nor had I heard of ‘the zero-sum game’.

 

Over the last 30 years, we have gone about adding a great deal of complexity and, to accommodate this, removed a great deal of the activities that core business line managers had previously undertaken.  Complexity has driven us to engage a wider range of professionals, especially around building the company’s people engagement, development and change capability.  But this has happened at a cost, sometimes splitting the alignment and accountability for the greater goal.

The role of the manager has changed substantially, we can now rely on a range of expert advice and assistance, but do we sometimes go too far and expect those support areas to not only be responsible for their contribution, but also accountable to make it happen?  At its worst, some organisations have set up support structures that have become competition for the core business. IT systems have often been introduced at the whim of the IT Manager on the pretence of saving costs, Human Resources became the people police, safety became a process of policing procedures and the Change Department became the people responsible to ensure the workforce did things differently, sometimes totally without the support of their own supervisor.  Not only did we create splits in views of how to achieve company goals, but we have removed accountability from those who should have it and splintered responsibility for outcomes.  Departments often compete for their share of the organisation’s scarce resources and become entities restricting development, not supporting it.

Justifiably, support areas have developed their own structures, procedures, processes and policies to support their organisation in meeting its obligations, legally and to stakeholders, but over time this has allowed for the diluting of responsibility from the line managers whilst they dealt with their own increase in complexity.  One could argue that the totality of complexity is feeding off itself and we are victims of the need to control and command our own destinies, but that is the subject of another blog.

What we do not want to see is a situation where managers are so totally focused on their core role that they completely abdicate their people interactions and responsibilities to other areas of the business.  If I speak harshly to an employee, that’s an HR issue; if we are changing the way we work, that’s for Change Management to resolve; if the culture isn’t as we want, call in OD; if someone is injured, Safety will address it.

 

When core business line managers abdicate accountability, this creates a major disconnect.

 

Going back to my experience in senior management, everyone is responsible for the success of the organisation and its goals and we all should be looking for ways of supporting each other rather than competing.

Change activities were originally the responsibility of all line managers, but I have witnessed this divergence of accountability resulting in a manager not agreeing to a decision, and actively rebelling against their own organisation’s initiatives.  I have personally, as an external change consultant, spent time trying to engage managers in a change initiative supported by their CEO, that they are not interested in adopting.

It is desirable that we freed up our core business line managers to focus on their task, but there is still a key responsibility for all managers to engage in the company’s people and change initiatives.  We don’t want to remove these responsibilities in the process and end up with a new wave of managers that we wish would show better leadership. That’s not how we set them up to learn.

Of course, any person in a management role will likely have a leaning toward people or tasks depending on their own personalities, so we look at the best of them and wish we had more like them.  Add into that mix into the research Eliot Jacques did, in terms of an individual’s ability to manage complexity and this starts to present a real development challenge.  For those that are not naturally endowed with people skills and leadership potential, wishing they were better is not enough, we need to re-engage them in the people component of the business and free them up to focus on developing their people skills.  Without this level of attention and focus on developing our managers over the longer term, why would we be surprised that our leadership pool is shrinking.

It also weighs heavily on the size of the organisation, at what point do you move from doing it internally, inviting outside consultants, or actually creating business divisions.  Dunbar spoke about the rule of 150 suggesting when a social or work group exceeds 150, not only do the members believe they can no longer know everyone in the group, they stop trying and actually reduce their interactions.  Organisations who take this theory seriously such as Gore-Tex, have maintained a maximum number of 150 people in their factories.

 

Solution:  Our suggested steps for better alignment

 

  1. Management should not abdicate all accountability for outcomes to HR, the Change Team etc. The work can be done by others, but the accountability still sits with them.
  2. If management do not agree, they need to address this with senior management, not take it out on support areas.
  3. Support areas should make it part of their remit to upskill and develop managers in the skills required to support any initiative.
  4. The EQ, cognitive complexity and people skills of managers need to be assessed and addressed to align with the expectation of the business
  5. Various departments must work together to ensure alignment in goals, objectives and values.
  6. If an initiative is required by the organisation, then leadership need to support it and help stakeholder areas achieve their sub goals and objectives.

Taking Managers and turning them into leaders is much more than a learning activity, it requires a high level of competency and self-awareness and these can only be learned through doing.  Don’t impede your leaders’ development by letting them off the hook when it comes to people issues.  Hold your managers accountable for their people interactions across the board – support them and watch their leadership skills grow and develop.

 

 

About the Author

Peter James

Peter James is a professional career coach, with expertise in the areas of strategic and ‘hands-on’ change management, coaching, group facilitation, leadership development and organisational design and change. Peter James is director at Career Life Transitions.