Rethinking Management for the Emerging New Normal
Geoffrey Moore
Author, speaker, advisor, best known for Crossing the Chasm, Zone to Win and The Infinite Staircase. Board Member of nLight, WorkFusion, and Phaidra. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute.
As we emerge from the hibernation of the pandemic, we are going to build a new work rhythm around a hybrid of work from home and commute to an office.?It is an idea whose time has clearly come, but it raises issues about our approach to management.?Historically, a manager has been a supervisor, meaning they overlooked the work of the employees assigned to them.?That might still make sense in a factory, but it doesn’t work for knowledge work, especially when time and attendance are no longer enforced.
Worse, this management paradigm is an artifact of the parent/child relationship, one which got extended in school through the teacher/student relationship.?It is inherently hierarchical and sets the wrong tone for business relationships, which need to be more adult/adult.?This is one reason performance reviews can be awkward both to give and receive.?The move to a hybrid work model gives us a chance to reengineer this relationship for a more productive outcome.
For me personally, a key inflection point in my career came when I redefined my manager as my client.?In that context, my job was to make my client successful.?Feedback from my client would make me more successful in making them more successful.?It was inherently an adult/adult relationship, and it did not need my manager to do anything new at her end.?Instead, it empowered me to proactively invest in the relationship.?Where before I was trying to please the boss, now I was being more analytical about what she needed and where could I make a difference.?Doing my job well was still table stakes, but the whole relationship was framed differently.?And, not surprisingly, this led to me becoming a trusted advisor.
On a parallel track, managers can also reimagine members of their team as their customers.?After all, team members are in the market for engaging work, personal development, and career advancement, and they are more than happy to pay for those outcomes by working hard.?But managers can’t just promise these things, they have to deliver them, and that implies creating employee success programs modeled after the customer success practices that are proving so valuable to SaaS companies.?
In that context, while many managers have good intuitions about how to help team members in their personal development, they are not usually as clear about how to support career development.?This often shows up in their own reviews as an inability to build bench strength.?The best way to build strength, of course, is to exercise muscles.?In career development terms, that means assigning people tasks that go beyond leveraging their existing skillset to stretch their capabilities.?The key principle for managers to embrace is that every employee is an asset that has been entrusted to them for two purposes: 1) to get the work of their organization done on time, on spec, and on budget, and 2) in parallel, to develop the person into a more valuable asset.?
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To fast-track a team member’s career development, managers can identify a problematic use case that needs creative resolution outboard of the normal course of work and charge the team member to lead a cross-functional team to develop a proposed conclusion within a specified amount of time.?Such assignments are an excellent vehicle for career development because they build peer relationships and create exposure to upper management, all the while helping the enterprise to eliminate a bottleneck to its productivity.
One more thing to note: all of the above points to the trend of work to move away from hierarchical structures of command and control to reorganizing around a more collaborative team-centric set of relationships.?There is still a hierarchy of empowerment and authority, but it is more that of a team captain working with peers than of someone sitting in a corner office.
That’s what I think.?What do you think?
Co-Founder & CEO @ AlphaAI | Operations Research, Engineering
3 年Great post! As we emerge from the hibernation of the pandemic, organizations are on the rise in creating a new work rhythm around a hybrid of work from home and commuting to an office. Every manager needs to continually remember this key principle when it comes to managing his employees and colleagues. Every employee is an asset in an organization and he/she has been entrusted to execute his duties in a scaled budget in the right quality and time. Furthermore, managers are to develop the person into a more valuable asset. Thanks for sharing!
Senior Product Manager @ Eviden | AI Powered Advanced Software
3 年Agreed Geoffrey ?? !
Managing Partner @ FifthRow (U+) | Serial Entrepreneur | VC | AI Powered Venture Builder | Global Innovation Leader — over $2B in Value Delivered
3 年Thank you for sharing this great post with us Geoffrey Moore! Every manager needs to continually remember this key principle, when it comes to managing people. First, every employee is an asset that has been entrusted to them to get their organization done on time, on spec, and on budget, and to develop the person into a more valuable asset. Insightful! I enjoyed reading through this post!
MBA | Bsc | Quality & Metrology Specialist.
3 年We find a competitive advantage in employees.