Excerpted with revisions from my upcoming book, Unmanaged: Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations.
How well are your managers doing? In our upcoming research brief on workers and team productivity, based on a sampling of the over 200 professional services organizations we have worked with, confirms that managers (and the way they manage) are likely your biggest impediment to productivity. This is a conundrum of sorts, as managers are often responsible for self-policing their own behaviors, yet research confirms that managers are not really good at assessing themselves, other managers, nor (especially) workers.
The complexity of this question (are we managing well, and if not, in what ways?) is why we offer to our clients a multi-point diagnostic survey (called the productivity diagnostic workshop) to help the organization clarify the impact of managerial actions upon productivity. How does it work? It works quote well, and we can now benchmark an agency’s productivity against a database created from using this survey with over 80 agencies. Our own Lauren Dobkin coded up that data and created categories that we can then measure comparatively.
But really how it works, how we best judge managers in-context, well that’s a very simple answer. And as I describe in Chapter 5 of my new book, UNMANAGED: Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations , I had my eyes opened by an amazing agency CEO alomost a decade ago.
Chapter 5: The Measure of the Manager
I didn’t believe it when Ben, the CEO, described his organization. I assumed he was lying. Many of the [project-driven] organizations we work with have 30–40 managers for 120 people: a 1:3 or 1:4 ratio. Ben had just told me he had 8 managers overseeing 120 people. That is a 1:15 managerial span of control, which is pretty rare and pretty cool.
You’re probably expecting me to talk about the transformation that we did for them. But this was my first meeting with Ben. He had unmanaged his organization on his own. It was one of those wonderful moments when I got to be the student rather than the teacher. I dug in.
“So, how did you end up with so few managers?” I asked.
Ben looked around the beautifully renovated SOHO office space — it was nicely modernized while retaining the original midcentury charm — and with a dramatic gesture he said, “I never wanted ours to be like other companies, and so I vowed I would make my decisions differently. Every time I had to make a business decision, I would say to myself, ‘What would they do?’ and then I would do the opposite or something different.”
I smiled and nodded. Amazing. He was a contrarian, and that’s useful if you want to manage well.
“I noticed how often they would have chosen to hire a manager, and I just didn’t do that. Sometimes I had to, of course, but most of the time we could just find another way to do it or let people self-manage — do it themselves.”
Ben had called me there because, while he did know how he got to this point, he was not sure how to sustain it. His biggest fear was that as the organization grew, he would need to bring in more managers — ones who might not share his belief in their limited usefulness.
After some more discussion, I asked him how he judged the quality of the managing going on. His answer was simple.
“We do a performance survey for each manager. The workers get to vote on any manager that they have interacted with. It is a simple score and just one question: Thumbs-up or thumbs-down, how well did this manager do in helping to make you successful?”
Wow, brilliant. “How do you use the results?” That’s where the magic must lie, I thought.
“If a manager gets one thumbs-down, then we just have a conversation,” Ben said confidently, pausing afterward, as if to let the idea sink in. But the silence dragged on — he was actually baiting me, I think.
I took it. “And what happens if they get a second one?” There had to be a challenge to solve here — like what if a worker was just being mean or whatever.
“Nobody gets a second one.” Ben grinned wide.
Ben had turned the notion of managerial exceptionalism on its head. In effect, he said, if you, as a manager, fail at making our workers and teams better, then you have no managerial value to our organization.
The Futility of Managerial Responsibilities
Ben succeeded where many of us have failed: succinctly defining what managers provide an organization. He was focused on outcomes. When most managers are asked about their role, instinctively they rattle off a long list of activities that they do or responsibilities that they have:
· I make sure the project schedules are updated.
· I keep track of project status by holding the weekly status meeting.
· I conduct one-on-ones and write the annual performance reviews.
· I make sure we have enough resources for the work.
· I make sure that everyone remembers the due dates for the work.
· I approve everything before it gets launched, sent, or whatever.
This list certainly looks managerial from a traditional perspective, right? But does this mean that I should measure the manager by whether they do these things? Granted, these activities may sometimes be useful, but it depends upon how they are done and what the outcomes are. Consider that the team could still fail in their work while the manager “succeeded” at these tasks. What if a weekly status meeting turned into an hourly “What are you doing now?” interruption of the worker? Obviously, that would be highly detrimental to their productivity and morale. But the manager was merely executing their “responsibilities.”
Responsibility lists really don’t get to the core of what a manager is needed for. Instead, let’s ask, What is the measure of the manager? Lacking that answer, how could we judge any choice of action by a manager?
My conversation with Ben taught me a lesson about the importance of clarity in how we measure managers in a project-driven organization. If we prioritize our teams’ success because of their profound impact upon productivity, we can only judge managers by a few measures:
· Are your people growing, building new skills, and overcoming their gaps and limitations?
· Do they feel acknowledged, supported, informed, and central to the organization’s success?
· Are they happy, and do they feel engaged and appropriately challenged?
· Are they achieving their highest productivity while maintaining work quality and personal satisfaction?
Behind these questions is the most fundamental truth about workers and managers, what I have dubbed the First (and only) Law of Unmanagement.
The First Law of Unmanagement
Workers are the most precious source of productivity and capability in a project-driven organization. In their actions and design, managers and the organizational context can enable their workers productivity — or they can define the workers’ limits. The strongest organizations, from their structure to their preferred styles of managing, enable workers to the maximum productivity.
The productive speed of an organization is the speed of its workers and teams, not the speed of management. In fact, as you already understand to some level, an increase to the speed of management — that is, the frequency and intensity of managerial activity — is more likely to detract from the productivity of the organization. Enter the First Law of Unmanagement:
The singular role of the manager is to be in full support of the workers and teams, enabling and unleashing their natural capability and energy upon the work and opportunities faced by the organization. In performing those duties, the manager shall not detract from productivity through any other actions or inaction.
This law shifts the burden of scrutiny — as Ben did with his thumbs-up survey model — onto managers. Are their actions making things better for workers and teams? This question provides a North Star for measuring managers, but it certainly is subjective. Any manager can claim their intent is to support the team, hence the genius of Ben’s survey: workers get to report on how supported they feel.
Post-script to this book snippet:
At some point you need to stop writing and re-writing the book, which I have now, but of course new pieces of research pop up that scream to be included. Here’s a new one for me, a paper published in 2000, “Leadership role effectiveness as a mediator of team performance in new product development virtual teams.” (by Han, Soo Jeoung, Mirim Kim, Michael Beyerlein, and Darleen DeRosa, in Journal of Leadership Studies 13, no. 4 (2020): 20–36.)
The paper is on factors that influence performance in virtual (distributed) teams. I’ll write another article about their primary findings, but the cool tidbit in all of this is when they highlight that “factor models” (is the manager more of one thing or another, like mentoring versus directive?) that aim to assess managers’ behavior don’t really work because they give different answers in different contexts. For example, Company X’s distributed team will need different managerial factors to become optmially productive than Company Y’s team, because they are different companies with different business contexts (type of work, shape of team, industry, project design, etc.)
This is significant because most things written about managing are written in a generic way that assumes that any given managerial action is intrisically good or bad, regardless of the context. And the meta-analysis in the paper confirms that is not true, and as I wrote in Unmanaged, correct managing is contextual.
To my delight, the paper also concludes (with a lot of supporting citations) that the best measure is what Ben had chosen: team members are the best judgers of how optimal the manager’s behavior is for the given business context.
