When we question ourselves as we often do nowadays about what managerial posture to adopt, about giving meaning and a framework, instead of command & control management, it’s important to grasp that the temporality of this management also changes. What I mean by this is that command & control management is cause-and-effect management: I ask you for this, you do this, well or poorly, but the relationship is direct and the time is short, or at least we understand how long it will take. When we establish a framework and give meaning, to make things emerge, or to let teams self-organize, we enter into a system, a complex adaptive system. There’s no longer really any direct causality. These are two very different temporalities.
When we do modern management, the effort must be constant, and the results will be inconstant. This is complicated to live with for people accustomed to a cause-and-effect system, who are used to asking for things and obtaining them (or not), or for heroes who are used to doing things and obtaining results (or not).
To make a constant management effort, it’s important to know its framework and meaning (the loop is complete, since the goal of this management is to convey this framework and meaning).
Making a constant management effort means that the rhythm is constant. There’s no point in having “crunches.” You can have “crunches” on local, temporary actions: end of cycles, events, but you won’t be able to have crunches on your culture, the image you give to your candidates, on refactoring your code, etc.
This effort will need to be regular and continuous.
The effects will often be irregular and often unpredictable (but they will go in the desired direction and respect the given framework).
All of this must be kept in mind.
It’s difficult to make constant efforts whose results turn out to be inconstant.
But it’s also exhilarating to see your efforts pay off at an often unexpected moment.
Other articles on management from 2018: