Separating value management from personnel management

I like the concept that separates people management roles from work management roles. I got a lot of kickback for saying that. Sure, matrix management has been tried for decades, and many suffered. Just as they suffer now when old-school management tells everybody to be Agile within a conventional organisation and changes nothing about how it is managed. That doesn't mean the concept is flawed, only the execution. I had a great experience of working in a matrixed organisation in 1986-7. And sure McKinsey are calling it Helix now. Jurgen Apello blew that to bits, but at least it is surfacing the concept again.

It can work in the right culture. As well as the kickback coming from people's negative experiences of matrix management, I think when readers see "manager" it triggers their trauma of experiencing 20th Century management. I'm imagining a very different Open Management here: invitational, inverted, inclusive, transparent. Seen through a teal lens, it's a different matter. So we continue to use the word "management", not do away with it. My organisation works to change the management not to tear it down (even if that has happened a couple of times with clients). Evolution not revolution. Change from within, don't assault the walls. We help management move from command-and-control to gardeners and pilots: better ways of managing.

Our model of managerial roles looks like this:

(This is not an operating model nor an organisational chart. It says nothing about those things, only about what kinds of managers to have within whatever system you have.)

Let's unpack it, starting with that separation of duties:

• Personnel managers manage why we work: motivation, incentive, growth.
• Value managers manage what we are working on: the production of value.

Two sets of servant managers looking after the organisational responsibilities of caring for employees and getting the work done, in collaboration with self-organising workers. As much as possible, the workers themselves manage who-and-how they do the job, except where it needs to be defined by the value manager or by a function manager (see below). ?An organisation has a responsibility for the welfare of its employees, collectively and as individuals; and a responsibility in what it produces to serve the needs of all stakeholders, including customers, owners, employees, governors, and society. The two kinds of managers separate those responsibilities. Personnel managers talk to value managers about what their people need personally (growth opportunities, accommodation for personal life needs, ...) and value managers talk to personnel managers about what kind of people and capabilities the organisation needs (recruiting, development, ..).

Somebody needs to look after employees on the organisation's behalf: to be responsible for whether staff flourish, get what they need, and grow as they wish. A pastoral role. They also need to curate staff: keep records, organise resources, coordinate. And sadly, somebody needs to deal with staff who have failed to meet standards of behaviour.

Equally, even in the most agile holacratic organisation, value management still has a place. There is still a role for product managers, service managers, project managers, and similar functions. Centralisation is not inherently wrong, only centralisation of authority is. Centralising attention, orchestration, curation and other activities is often a good idea.

The origin of the word "manager" is in the handling of horses, from where it became the handler/trainer of workers, to then be a boss in a power bureaucracy. In current usage it has long since lost the link to personnel management; we have "managers" of every aspect of an organisation, from security to service to sanitation. When I talk of a work or value manager, there is no implication of being a boss of people (even if that is one of the main dysfunctions of contemporary project management). In a modern organisation, managers don't get to tell and yell. Command-and-control is gone. Management is a collaborative function: inviting collaboration, engineering consent, and inspiring action. Management should observe, navigate, and facilitate. Even a personnel manager should exercise minimum authority, only in situations where the employee's behaviour is unacceptable to the community of the organisation (note: standards of behaviour should be set by the group, not imposed by some remote governor). My favourite term is "flip the hierarchy". This what I meant by "inverted" above:

People should have a long term relationship with their personnel manager and a dotted line to the value manager they are currently doing work for. Asking a manager to do both is unfair on the manager and the employee because:

? They require different skillsets, even different personalities and behaviours. Play to an individual's strengths, don't force them to build their weaknesses. "T-shaped" people are great but don't make the shallow parts of the "T" part of their core role, especially if the lives of others will suffer as a result.

? Their relationship timeframes are different. A person's value manager can change as often as the fluidity of work dictates. Personnel management should be a long term relationship, getting to know the person, their aspirations and needs, the back stories and the history.

? Value management is usually more urgent so personnel management suffers.

? There is more glory in delivering value than looking after employees.

? They should report to different areas and have different (sometimes conflicting) goals. Resources and products are different parts of the organisation. The resources of an organisation are capability (not humans or even "talent"), money, and information. Their owners are intent on growing and caring for them, the gardeners. The owners of the products and services are intent on maximising their value to stakeholders, by doing value-creation work with the resources.

? As a result their expectations of the employee can conflict. Unfortunately the world has polarity tensions e.g. the need to meet the deadlines vs the team are burning out. It's not safe or transparent to make one manager resolve that inside themselves. Unreasonable systems make unreasonable people. Until we attain a Teal organisation, managers will always have unreasonable pressures to deliver that drive the best people to sociopath behaviours. We have all seen it. By having separate roles accountable for each, the conflict is resolved publicly. How amicably that happens depends entirely on the health of the culture.

In addition, the model recognises other forms of management. Because we define managers as servants, we are comfortable including coaching roles here.

• Function managers manage a specific area of the organisation, e.g. a process or a facility.
• Organisational managers run the big picture, mostly executives.
• Scrum masters (or whatever you call them) coach the teams in ways of working.
• Ri masters of the craft (we use the Shu-Ha-Ri model) coach guilds in ways of doing the work.

I think it is a good model. It is in the spirit of distributing authority, liberating workers, avoiding monolithic hierarchy, and simplifying roles. It succeeds when the organisation has reached a certain level of cultural maturity, able to separate management functions without the dysfunctions of siloed communication breakdown, territorial disputes, and ego power struggles. The model above summarises the necessary conditions of work, management, culture, and organisation. That is beyond the scope of this article. Helping an organisation find such a culture is what we do successfully at Teal Unicorn. The key to our success is changing how management manage, and this model is a useful part of that growth. Don't let 20th Century experiences sour your consideration of it in a healthier context.