Are You An Accidental Manager?
Are You An Accidental Manager?
By: Dr Stephen Whitehead (view are author’s own)
Manager is one of the hardest jobs in the world.
Why?
Because you are trapped in the worst of all possible situations: loads of responsibility, loads of accountability, lots of scrutiny, lots of visibility, but very little power.
Leader, on the other hand, can be a lot of fun.
Why?
Because as leader you can employ managers to take the flack, take the weight of responsibility, shield you from the messy day-to-day running of the business, and you don’t even have to share the profits with them.
As leader, the real power rests with you.
Sure, the leader/owner of an organisation has to take risks with her/his own money but in return they receive near total autonomy — they are accountable to no one (well, other than any shareholders in the company).
If there is profit to be had, it’s the leader/boss who gets most of it.
Positional Power
To put it another way, in all my working life I have never known anyone resign from a leadership position to take on a management position. The vast majority of the managers I have known really wanted to be leaders — but lacked either the money, experience, courage, or confidence to be their own boss.
During the 15 years I was MBA Director for a leading UK university, one of the key discussion points was always:
“What is the difference between a leader and a manager?”
And the answer, as I state above, comes down to one word: ‘power’.
Managers have very little power other than that bestowed on them by organisational leadership, typically the company boss. Such power is amorphous. That is, easily taken away and just as easily lost. The organisational leadership can subject the managers to many types of performative practices, supposedly designed to improve performance and efficiency but in reality, designed to control, coerce and pressure managers — force them to get the most out of the workforce.
In other words, the leaders can be all smiling and benign with workers precisely because they are not working with them — they are many steps removed from the shop-floor.
Managers, by contrast, have appraisal systems to implement, targets to meet, performance indicators to set, and all the difficult motivational and disciplinary people-management stuff to deal with. When the leader/boss decides to implement a new strategy, for example, the first person he calls in to handle the process is the department manager(s).
The manager is the person expected to translate that strategy into performance outcomes, to ensure the workforce get the actual job done. When things go badly the first person to get a roasting from the boss will be the manager. When things go well, the boss takes the profit and the accolades.
Not that fair.
Soft Power
Yes, being a boss can be stressful, but then who is going to argue with you?
No one.
And certainly not if you are boss in an Asian organisation — where Confucianist values and Asian culture mean the boss is given exaggerated respect by the workers.
Most Asian managers wouldn’t dare challenge their boss nor raise any critical questions about strategy, even if they fear it’s going to fail. So as manager you are caught between a rock and hard place. The rock being the staff under you and the hard place being your boss, the person paying your wages.
You are squeezed from all sides.
As manager you have to keep everyone happy. Because you have so little real power (e.g. to hire, fire, promote, invest in new resources, increase salaries) then what are you left with?
If you are wise then you will realise you are left with soft power: likeability, respect, good communication, emotional intelligence. Any manager who tries to act like a hard-headed leader is quickly going to get into trouble. The boss of the company may well declare ‘my way or the highway’, but no manager can say that.
Well, they can but it’s not a good career move.
The manager has to take people with her/him on the journey of organisational improvement. The manager lives or dies by the results of his/her department. Therefore, the people who keep the manager in a job are not those above but those below. What this means, in reality, is that as manager, if you lack emotional intelligence then you are lacking the most important of all the intelligences — you are heading for failure.
The boss of the company may not be loaded with emotional intelligence, but for sure he/she better recruit managers who have loads of it. If not, then the company is going to suffer badly.
In the UK, almost one-third of workers say they’ve quit a job because of a negative workplace culture. This recent survey underlines the risks to managers who succumb to toxic behaviour or fail to create a work culture which is inclusive, effective, empathetic, supportive. Once you get this unhealthy type of work culture embedded in the system then you’ll see employee wellbeing decline, employee absenteeism rise, productivity decline, and costs rise. There is nothing more costly to an organisation than having to constantly replace and retrain staff.
Employee retention rates must be seen as a key indicator of the organisation culture: is it toxic or is it healthy?
Since Covid, employees around the world are much more likely to quit a job if they are not happy, feel undervalued, or if the organisational culture is oppressive, bullying and lacking inclusivity. This is especially true of university educated Generation Z employees — probably the most sought-after type of employee.
If Gen Z are not happy they will quit at a moment’s notice; they have little organisation loyalty; desire a healthy work-life balance; are not only motivated by salary level; and expect to be given regular professional development.
For a growing number of Gen Z employees, their wellbeing account matters more than their bank account.
The Accidental Manager
Unfortunately, too many managers are accidental. Which means they have not been professional trained to be managers; they have been appointed because;
1. They were in the right place at the right time.
2. There was no one else suitable for the job.
3. They had been timeservers and it was ‘their turn for promotion’
4. They were related to the boss (e.g. family member)
5. They were sycophantic, ‘docile’, willing to do anything the boss required of them
6. They had excellent technical expertise.
7. They know the company very well and are trusted by the bosses.
8. They regularly met targets.
9. They are friends of the boss.
As you might imagine, Asian organisations are dominated by accidental managers.
Which is one reason Asian organisations can find it a challenge to compete with the best Western organisations where professional development, advanced management training, employee wellbeing systems, and the most effective HR practices are likely to be in place.
How many Asian organisations have the following:
1. Open communication between employees, managers, leaders?
2. Training and education for managers and leaders, current and aspiring?
3. Appropriate and developmental succession planning for managers?
4. Mental health resources — e.g. access to confidential counselling services?
5. Flexible work arrangements — for those employees seeking a better work-life balance?
Unfortunately, very few.
But when such practices are absent the likelihood of unsuitable or untrained employees getting promoted to management roles is greatly increased.
Why?
Because the organisation has not set a premium on emotional intelligence, employee wellbeing, professional development. Instead, it has set a premium on results and profit, but without realising that nowadays profit follows employee wellbeing and quality management. In other words, people before profit.
Around the world, not just in Asia, most managers are accidental. Indeed, the UK Chartered Management Institute believes some 2.4m of 3.4m UK managers fall into this category. If this is the case in the UK, then assume it to be even higher in Asia.
Educators as (Accidental) Managers
Ironically, one of the worst professions for having accidental managers is a profession I know very well indeed — educator.
Every school, college or university manager was firstly a teacher. They taught students before they started leading other professionals. Having been successful at teaching students, they then got promoted to managing other teachers. Unfortunately, these good teachers do not necessarily make good managers. They were not given any professional development in how to manage people. At which point these accidental teacher/managers discover that managing students is a whole lot easier than managing their work colleagues.
Hardly any teachers or lecturers receive ongoing and advanced training in management. My MBA Education programme at Keele University (UK) was one of the few in the world to offer such training. It ran in both the UK and Asia (Bangkok) and was extremely successful. Graduates of that programme now lead many of the top schools and universities around the world.
What this programme proved was 1) There are too many accidental managers around; and 2) These accidental managers need help.
If all the above resonates with you, and you recognise you are an accidental manager, here are my 10 TIPS:
1. Accept that your emotional intelligence level now counts for more than any technical expertise you may have.
2. Foster open communication, creative thinking, questioning and collaboration within your teams and department, underpinned by a ‘no-blame’ work culture.
3. Introduce professional development for yourself and all your staff, especially focusing on Total Inclusivity and its practices/values*
4. Retrain your mind to stop thinking in terms of command-and-control style of management, reinforced by performativity, and instead focus on empathy, support, and listening — the core people skills.
5. Learn to devolve upwards. Which means not accepting responsibility for every little matter but where necessary ensuring your boss is kept informed of problems/issues and requested to deal with them or give guidance to you on how to deal with them.
6. Don’t say yes to everything your boss asks of you. Instead, learn to question, learn to get more information, and encourage your boss to share information so that you can do your job more effectively. Don’t be afraid to give your boss bad news.
7. Do not rely on inflexible performative measures (e.g. targets, indicators) reinforced by appraisal to control and motive your staff. These can be in place but should not be allowed to take precedence over soft-power methods, especially incentivisation, enabling, listening, sharing, communality, brainstorming, collaboration.
8. Get a mentor: find a suitable older/experienced person prepared to occasionally guide you. This person does not need to be part of the organisation.
9. Be a mentor: offer yourself to those (likely younger) people needing guidance and career coaching.
10. Never assume you are the only brains in the room. The best managers operate as flexible and supportive team leaders, which means with a communal approach not with a silo mentality.
By: Dr Stephen Whitehead (view are author’s own)
