It’s time to ditch the Leadership rhetoric and get back to Management.
Leaders don’t know what people want.
By Dr. Reg Butterfield
5 minutes read.
OK, let’s get straight to the point of this short newsletter, “The leadership hype of the last few decades is causing organisations to flounder because of a lack of management”.
In our newsletter 15 January 2023 we began discussing the problems associated with focusing too much on developing leaders and at the same time flattening organisations by reducing or removing managers. We quoted the unofficial “father of leadership” Warren Bennis (March 8, 1925 — July 31, 2014) who noted, “leadership is the most studied and least understood topic of any in the social sciences” and “never have so many laboured so long to say so little” (Bennis, 2009).
The leadership saga continues to this day (just Google it if you doubt what we say) and now we have headlines such as a recent UK discussion on not only needing managers, but also better managers, “For Britain to grow faster, it needs better managers“. (Burton, 2023). The role and status of managers seems to have got lost in the leadership rhetoric.
The popular TV series “The Office” is a good example of how managers are often seen by society (The US had its own version which ran for 9 series). For example, Brent, the main character, is shown as the increasingly tragic figure of the series; a lonely man without any friends, goals or achievements who would rather please everybody around him even if it is met at his own expense. Ricky Gervais, who co-wrote the original and plays Brent, discussed the character and in doing so, probably summed up the dilemma organisations are facing today, “David Brent doesn’t represent evil or nastiness or even ignorance. He’s just a little out of place. Out of time. His worst crime is that he confused respect with popularity. He wanted both but concentrated on the wrong one. He didn’t really know what people wanted of him.”
This confusion around what organisations want of their management is an indictment of the leadership. It is no secret that good management is essential for an organisation to thrive. A plethora of surveys and studies have shown this. For example, over the last 20 years, the World Management Survey (WMS) has conducted more than 20,000 interviews with medium-sized companies, hospitals, and schools in 35 countries, a mixture of rich economies, and other emerging countries. They have found that well-managed companies will likely be more productive, more profitable, export more, and see their production grow faster. They also enable their employees to achieve a better work-life balance.
The correlation between high management scores and productivity is so strong that management seems to be more responsible for the difference between the most productive and least productive companies within a country than factors such as research and development spending or IT usage.
Management is a slippery subject, and in a world of shareholder value and increasingly over paid executives, commentators suggest that is not well studied by economists. As one scientist puts it, economists tend to avoid talking to companies much like biologists avoid talking to chimpanzees. Maybe that is why CEOs with high interpersonal skills are now being sought instead of finance and law being the main prior experiences of previous recruitment trends; lose touch with the people and struggle to survive.
Let’s go back to basics — organisations need just one leader who sets the direction, strategic goals, and pace for the managers to deliver. Pausing for the howls of dissent to die down….
Everything else is the role of managers. Let us explain briefly using the two figures that follow. Figure 1 details the high-level roles of management and leadership, whilst figure 2 illustrates the expectations that people have of management and leadership.
Figure 1: High-level roles of Management and Leadership
The overarching role of leadership, typically the CEO and Board, is that of defining the Purpose of the organisation, its Strategic Direction and the High-level Goals and associated metrics for the managers to achieve with the workforce. The leadership is also responsible for at least two other key areas together with the management: ‘Creating a community that encourages and retains a quality workforce’ and ‘Providing a suitable environment to achieve the business objectives.’.
Management has at least ten roles to ensure that the Strategic Goals are translated into relevant work goals and activities so that the purpose of the organisation is achieved. These are: Motivating, Coordinating, Resourcing, Optimising, Planning, Budgeting, Organising, Directing, Controlling, and Communicating, in ways that create a community that encourages and retains a quality workforce by providing a suitable environment to achieve the organisation’s objectives.
Today’s workforce has a clear understanding of what it expects from an organisation, and we discussed this in our previous newsletters:
‘The big quit’ 8 May 2022;
‘To build for the future, first understand the alphabet’ 15 May 2002;
‘Management Taboos — dealing with symptoms vs managing the problem’ 22 May 2022;
‘Are you innovating or stuck in the mud?’ 29 May 2022;
‘Knowledge workers’ 12 June 2022;
‘The complexity of work’ 19 June 2022;
‘Understanding leadership and management’ 7 August 2022; and
‘The quiet quitters’ 14 August 2022.
Figure 2 encapsulates the key activities that management and leadership need to understand and undertake if they are to recruit and retain their workforce, particularly the Knowledge Workers necessary for success in an increasingly technical world of AI, robotics, automation, and social responsibility.
It is important to point out that the leadership elements in figure 2 are also relevant to and part of the management roles.
Figure 2: The expectations that people have of management and leadership.
Summary
In this brief newsletter my colleagues Dr Ross Wirth, Silvia Calleja and I argue that in order to thrive in today’s frenetic and rapidly changing world of work there needs to be more clarity about the roles of leadership and management. This has come about because an industry has developed around the subject of leadership research, training, and development, which implies that leadership traits are the key to success.
All research has demonstrated that focusing on leadership traits is not a good predictor or determinator of success and current experience of organisations struggling to cope is yet more evidence of this in action.
In conclusion, we suggest that by having one leader with a clear role and providing the management with a clear mandate is the way forward.
The type and style of that management and how it operates will depend on the organisation, its size, function, and so on. A Futocracy approach supports this view of leadership and management in a flat network setting.
In this newsletter we have given a very clear view of the split between leadership and management. At the same time, posit that there should only be one leader, that of the CEO and Board.
Question:
Do you agree with our perspective, or do you view things differently?
Let us know in the comments below and/or comment at our magazine site.
For a more detailed discussion around leadership please read our latest magazine article, “Challenging the Hype of Leadership”
https://issuu.com/futocracy/docs/leadership_edition_v1
More information about Futocracy and how to develop your organisation can be found at: www.futocracy.network
