Managing Leadership^®

If you’ve worked in an organization of any size, you know that it’s not just the boss you have to worry about – there are control issues spread all throughout the place, like mines. Sometimes you can only learn where they are by setting them off.

But, as Jared Sanberg‘s most recent WSJ Cubicle Culture piece points out, some of them, once they’ve targeted you, just keep on going off. The item is about people occupying chokepoints in an organization – supplies, approvals, access to key personnel – and using these tactical positions to subdue all those, of whatever rank, who seek passage without paying the toll of submission. This is the nature of the great organizational beast: it simply spawns opportunities for opportunists. But listen to this quote from an expert quoted in the piece:

One of the competencies in every study of outstanding leaders is their degree of organizational awareness — reading the informal networks, like influence, in the organization.”

Must even the most mundane thing come back to these so-called “outstanding leaders” at the top? Understanding what is going on in an organization is the duty of a manager. The problem is that many of these bottleneck jockeys will not be visible to managers in the ordinary course of events – so ways must be found to discover them, and then to reorganize their incentives so that they are better aligned with execution of corporate goals.

On the other hand, we all know of the boss who just can’t let go. He or she never goes on vacation, comes back early, or takes advantage of modern communications to pester you from the beach. See Carol Hymowitz‘s WSJ In the Lead column of last week for more on this.

This instinct to personally retain control, even when physically absent, often comes from fear of a palace coup. The concern is that things will go well, or, even, better than when the boss was there, reflecting poorly on him or her. The problems with this should be pretty obvious: time for a coup.

Alternatively, the boss may simply be so close to what’s going on that he or she can’t let go, or genuinely feel that no else can possibly comprehend and deal with the issues as well. But anyone who is actually that indispensable is manifestly a terrible manager, because a competent manager trains juniors to move up, especially when vacancies are temporary and on the schedule.

Control expressed personally is by definition limited. If you are using it to exploit a bottleneck for personal gratification or aggrandizement, then the restricted reach of your authority is probably going to be of limited duration, as well.

But if you are this sort of a “hands-on” boss, you are failing to exercise control in a truly meaningful and effective way: through others. Failure to learn this should (although it, unfortunately, often does not) limit your rise through the managerial – and certainly the executive – ranks.

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On a slightly different topic, I want to invite everyone to view Wally Bock’s essay on Evidence Based Management, at Three Star Leadership. He has identified some key issues that bedevil the efforts of managers to establish a practical and effective intellectual infrastructure for their work, as well as some superior advice about how to deal with the problem. Please do stop on over – it will be well worth your time.

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