Managers at the carrefour

As a manager, friend-from-college and production-lead from the steel industry quoted it, few things can destroy iron other than its own rust. Is techno-functional expertise and optimism driving managerial effectiveness now, to avoid rusting to jeopardy?

Managers leading from the front  demonstrate optimism, without losing sight of the current risk.

Engagement with team members are less about any utopic presentation of hope rather more about the ‘real talk’ on practical challenges to solve. A substantial number of managers are re-focusing at these crossroads of uncertainties, reconstructing the good practices from the ‘past’, developing insights from the perceived ‘present’ to be able to create the platform for the anticipated ‘future’.

 Managers with teams under them believe that the present environment is at an inflection point, which requires them to exercise contextual judgement and work on situational insights. They understand that deep-learning from contingent situations in the past, and that those who have encouraged certain fundamentals like knowledge transition as a ‘habit and practice’ in the teams, are able to strive as a team, work with empathy and deliver on work-obligations at the same time.

 A few weekends conversing with managers from 4 different countries, 13 different professions and 4 different industries reveal how they are demonstrating situational ability to lead, plan, organize, control and inspire their teams to action, learning and execution towards a greater cause.

 Here is a snapshot of what appears to be happening on the ground with managers through these times:

1. More focus and 'System-2' thinking, questioning assumptions; away from System-1 characteristics of least-hardships, though there are instances where quick decisions are taken on snap-judgement and heuristics, thankfully coming from deep experience involving relatively low errors.
2. Communication on a higher plane (e.g the relevance of team members on engaging community work that can be done maintaining social-distancing, local regulations and personal safety)
3. Removing learning-impediments through opening up closed chambers kept ‘politically under’ all this while.
4. Leveraging on collective intelligence, breaking silos and pockets of power. Leaning more on and utilizing ‘informational’, ‘referent’ and ‘expert’ sources of power rather than ‘legitimate’, ‘reward’ and ‘coercive’ ones.
5. Articulating a direction, communicating straight on risks, while maintain optimism (e.g the direction to up-skill and cross-skill in order to avoid situations of redundancy in skills and job losses in an ever evolving market landscape)
6. Supporting credible activism towards investing in the pursuit of a purpose (e.g negotiating at the budget meeting for keeping training budgets intact, or not to lay-off on a short-sight)

 A true SKIP level concept (a great manager is one who takes the effort to have his/her manager know his/her team members deep enough) institutionalized in teams has never been more useful, as more layers in the team succumb to absenteeism at workplace devastated with infections under the pandemic. Contingent disaster-recovery plans from managers are identifying new faces to lead from the front.

 Being at work over the last two decades, we have seen the nature of work change and how great managers have been instrumental in guiding team members under them through each wave, or gateway.

We stumbled upon how technological and human components got inextricably knotted and how jobs got less defined, how customers started playing a key part in establishing work and evaluation standards, talent pyramids inverting with tenure challenged by the young and the meritorious, and organization charts hardly capturing the networks of influence, flow of tacit communication/knowledge that characterizes the workplace. We had seen recessive environments happening more frequently, innovation at breakneck speeds. We were however, yet to see this - despite having assumed that we already saw a face of the pandemic in 2020.

 The differentiator (if there is any) appears to be in the managers’ ability to leverage on the strength derived from a large convergent pool of subject areas, having walked those extra subject-miles in the first place. This is enabling expression and demonstration of expertise in solving problems, helping convert valuable data and information coming from the external system, to actionable insights. Managers known to be technical subject-matter-experts to a client are leveraging this position to negotiate timelines on delivery – as they also prepare for contingency plans even on negotiated timelines.

 Managers who are surviving and are helping their teams survive are ‘consuming’ less of established competencies and ‘creating’ a few combinations instead. A manager and friend present in the chat was from the armed forces engineering corps, managing a team of 15 core personnel, with expertise in rapid-construction of temporary bridges across high-flow river-streams in the North-West of India. He mentioned that regardless of an internal strategy and tactic to build a bridge, the external environment was the biggest fulcrum for strategic team decisions and as that environment becomes more complex and intertwined, so does the need for outstanding managerial decisions on contingency planning -  drawing from structure, technology implementation, capability and capacity planning, uncharted inorganic road-maps and investments.

Across different industries where managers are still able to lead high performance work practices while succumbing to the stress of it, are re-balancing a set of horizontal and vertical competencies. The ‘horizontals’ are the age-old analytical and communication skills, ability to drive change and work with conflicting stakeholders, empathy as an ability, knowledge of rewards and incentives, ability to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. There are however  ‘business essentials’ that are core to a business or industry that have always influenced managerial competencies as well, and are being balanced on now, to be able to drive people-decisions vis-à-vis business metrics ranging from topline to profits, through in-between line items like overheads and people costs.

Managers are moving from being the techno-functional experts to utilizing their contextual and experiential knowledge in managing contingencies. Stand-up meetings conducted virtually have invitations extended to family members occasionally, re-adapting existing cybernetic influence diagrams with new dimensions.

The evolution of the virtual organization has been hastened by the pandemic, and much of the existing managerial pool that has evolved so far from traditional to network organizations, will have a challenging time moving over to this new paradeigma, in order to accommodate new modes of work, new expectations, new regulations and entitlements. Managers who have taken up this challenge demonstrate agile navigation through certain decisive moments once again, under what Senge referred to as Creative Tension.

Great managers are showing increasing ability to navigate their teams through this inflection point, by addressing dysfunctionalities upfront.

They are influencing organizational/institutional policies to mitigate debilitating fear (one recalled how a town-hall question was not on hospital insurance, but post-death benefit through Group Term Life policy). They are alert to erase internal competition at this point by compelling collaboration, challenging poorly designed and complex measurement systems and mindless reliance on precedents

As stress engulf managers and teams under them to the extent of affecting wellbeing and mental wellness, managers see a high probability in breakdown of positive organizational scholarship and citizen-behaviours.

Managers creating a differentiation leading on the front are playing a crucial part in managing this – starting from a deeper journey of self-awareness, and creating success factors through temperaments and personality traits derived from their upbringing and professional journeys, and applying them at work. We realized that this has a strong element on how to manage self-esteem, self-efficacy and locus-of-control configurations to be able to channelize neuroticism and anxiety into eu-stress.

We see more managers understanding the importance of reaching out to hitherto low-utilized platforms on Mental Assistance Programs of their organizations not just for themselves, but for their teams.

A manager’s own ability to rise above his/her own narrow insecurities (compensation, progression, competition with peers, etc) has been instrumental in championing the cause for team members and priorities on the ground. The shedding of egocentric behaviors and entitlement-orientations are creating a larger space in the mind for altruistic decisions and to be able to derive insights to help the larger organization with. The manager is therefore in a better position to coach and counsel team members with conviction and without creating a dissonance.

 Collective intelligence of the managerial function, they believe, is likely to see this through in the end, and that entails developing strong collaboration with counterparts in the industry and outside, and the ability to gather continuous insights from the team, customer/clients and other stakeholders. A market report may be available to any company, and the line managers’ ability to rise in situations like these, appears to be about validating those data and insights through subject matter expertise that the function brings to the organization.

My own limited experiences on preparing for uncharted territories, show that a practiced marathon-runner is as much likely to twist an ankle as a novice during a cross-country trail run.

The difference between the two however, is the ability of the practiced runner to recover from that injury and be back on track faster, with minimum long term repercussions.

We witnessed strong resilience in business activities, agile turnaround in teams, quick transitions to the normal from desperation, fatigue and listlessness in individuals before – for those who were on ‘practice’, and could draw lessons deep from the Lymbics.   

Great managers understand that contingent situations bring in rapid rusting leading to major dysfunctionalities, but this is where great managers operate - in their ability to leverage their own strength, that of the team and the strength of the community, to be able to lead. 

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