Management as a Balancing Act: A Personal Account
As I explain in the “Home” and “About” pages of this site, how we know has been a lifelong interest of mine and is a theme throughout this site. It is, therefore, with some discomfort that I write this personal account. Any personal account is anecdotal evidence and of a particular kind: it rings true to ourselves because we lived it, but it is also subject to our own unrecognized biases. So the value of a personal account in a learning blog is hard for me to gauge. In any case, as I write this post, I have been for eight years leading a team providing services to USAID. I feel it is almost an obligation to myself to want to try to draw lessons from this experience. So here goes.
In my role of leading and managing a team, I see my performance as having greatly benefited from luck. This luck is of two kinds: a) I benefited from a few personal traits that I developed over time through no merit of my own; b) I benefited from the environment I was placed into when starting to lead this team. The personal traits that I think helped me have been some degree of humility and empathy born out of not so memorable events that resulted in conflicting feelings of superiority (ugly, yes, I know) and failure, confidence and insecurity, and I think may have translated into a relatable and approachable style of leadership (I will not delve any further here). The environment that I was placed in and that also helped me, was a receptive group of young, kind and competent staff, that was delivering day after day on its own and had built a culture of collaboration and collegiality. For whatever reason, I was embraced. Independent of my own feelings of luck, personal psychological history or additional details of my team, the important part is that, early on, my role on this team was steered by supportive personal relationships, rather than any particular management capabilities I brought to the team.
Over time, however, my team grew both in size as it did in scope and complexity of the work we were asked to take on. It gradually became clear to me – and I believe to others on the team – that supportive and collegial relationships would not be enough to sustain a successful team performance. We needed to improve in ways that none of us were very familiar or comfortable with.
The first direction we sought was towards better defined and established processes, management tools and standards of operation and behavior across the team. The Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), 6th edition (2017, the only one I have) has a table distinguishing between leadership and management (p. 64) that I reproduce below:
To me the central point is the fourth row: leadership focuses on people, management focuses on systems and structure (I would say processes and tools). We needed to continue nurturing a leadership structure and culture that we thought had been successful until then, while improving on processes and workflows, and providing the team with tools (software, templates, established standards and procedures) that would enable us to gain in effectiveness and efficiency. This all may sound like jargon, but it is really what we thought we needed to do.
I believe we have advanced considerably in this direction, although there is still much to be done and it is an ongoing effort, so I will not provide details in this post (perhaps in another, future one). But I would like to highlight that, moving towards better established processes, standards and tools, does not replace the role of leadership. I have found that professional managers often dive into the PMI management jargon and guidance, while forgetting that the PMBOK itself distinguishes between management and leadership, and attention to both are necessary for the good functioning of a team. Our own efforts and time must be geared towards both management and leadership, This is the first balancing act.
A second and more recent direction we’ve been pursuing is in assessing what kinds of top-down authority we need to allow ourselves to exercise and enforce, unapologetically. As mentioned, our team relied largely on a supportive and collegial culture to function. That is a good thing. But, as such, establishing authorities of a more hierarchical nature is not always easy: it comes with a risk of creating unhealthy power relations. A common illustration that I have found in several places on the internet, mostly blogs, is the one below.
In several blogs, I have seen this picture accompanied by text that goes something like: “when the top guy looks down, they only see s***, when the bottom guy looks up, they only see a**h*****.” The top guy is portrayed as a manger or a CEO and the layers typically reflect layers of management. This is a common view of a top-down management structure. We wanted to avoid the negative relations that are often associated with such structures. However, we did find that some degree of top-down enforcement is needed to enforce minimum standards across a team, and minimum levels of accountability and fairness.
As with the effort to establish better management processes and tools, this effort to better establish authorities and accountability is also ongoing, and here too I will not get into detail in this post. But this is a second balancing act: establishing clear expectations, responsibility, accountability and a structure to enforce such accountability, without losing the supportive and collegial culture built collectively over time.
So, for whatever it’s worth, there is my personal account. I’m sure I will come back to this in the future, with the critical eyes of our ever transforming selves, as it should be, neither kind, nor mean, but hopefully as honest as self-assessments can possibly be. I also hope to, in the future, further develop how we’ve been rolling out our efforts to better balance leadership and management, bottom-up and top-down structures and processes, the extent to which our efforts succeeded and any insights from the experience.
References
Project Management Institute (PMI). 2017. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. PMBOK Guide. Sixth Edition