So, in all of this, what should we pay attention to? People, naturally. Teams? Definitely not! I couldn’t care less about teams. Teams don’t interest me regarding this subject. Nothing. Count me out if it’s about supporting teams. It’s not the teams and team members who are going to block this fictional organization. So I don’t care about teams. There are plenty of different teams, some work well, others less so, but we can generally act quite easily if we have the organizational levers, and above all they very often want to do well. To accomplish all this, I don’t care about teams, because teams will move forward if we let them move forward, and we’ll know how to act intelligently on those that are blocking.
I’ve told you why I think they have plenty of reasons to flee, to oppose, to simulate “transformations,” even movement. Plenty of good reasons. And these people who oppose, who slow things down, we find them partly in teams, but in teams they have very limited power to cause harm. Managers have the power to cause harm. Everyone will help succeed in moving in this direction, but only managers can truly block, flee, elude, avoid precisely.
The organization’s movement depends on the actions and will of managers. Of all managers, from middle management, the small bosses, to top management, the big bosses (be careful with words—there are small bosses who are great, and big bosses who are small). The higher they are in the food chain, the more levers or power to cause harm they have, and the stronger their impact and importance. If what you call “digital transformation” fails, I can assure you that the responsibility lies with top management, with the bosses. They haven’t given enough meaning, haven’t supported enough, haven’t communicated enough, haven’t been present enough in the field, maybe didn’t have the courage to fire all the middle management, the small bosses who were obstructing—I don’t know the reason, but they’re the ones holding the keys. Maybe they’re the ones who didn’t support this middle management. But as I told you, it’s difficult, because plenty of understandable brakes are present. The only thing I hope in telling you this: is that you remind everyone, or that you remind yourself if you’re a manager: if the organization’s movement fails, it’s never related to teams, but always to management, because practically only management has the power to truly cause harm once structures reach a certain size.
Once again, everywhere within the company we can find people who flee, simulate, avoid, for the reasons mentioned above. And also everywhere we find people who will help succeed, who will move forward. But only managers can truly block, flee, elude, avoid. Only managers have this power. And the higher they are in the food chain, the more they have it.
If it works, it’s probably linked to a set of actors, if it fails, it’s the bosses. This isn’t a formula, it’s my experience. The manager, the boss, at all levels has too much power to cause harm (or leverage) to ignore this fact.
So what should this boss do? They must mainly do two things. They must discover a new role as a supervisor. First let go: of the how, of decisions, of action, but make them possible by taking care to nurture a framework that will make them possible. Let’s return to plain language: to frame, give a framework, and to direct: give a direction, go in a direction, a meaning.
Then, communicate and embody. Be the first example, expose yourself, be vulnerable.
Being a supervisor means knowing, as a manager, how to establish and maintain the framework that will allow your people to engage (in this movement).
Why? Because in the complex world we live in, it’s people’s engagement that will make the difference.
People’s engagement will multiply the organization’s productivity, and its capacity for innovation, intelligence, reactivity. The same engaged person has nothing to do with one who drags their feet arriving at the office in the morning and whose entire daily strategy will be to cleverly pretend to do things without really knowing what to do (and we often understand them).
So are there ways to engage? Not so directly. But there are ways to establish a framework that will allow people who desire it to engage. And there’s one area where people are particularly engaged because the framework allows them to be. They try, they try again, they communicate with each other, they do everything you can imagine that’s good to try to succeed, they constantly question themselves to progress. This area is video games, video game players. So since a lot of money is at stake, we’ve studied these players to understand their engagement. It’s simple, it rests on four points.
First, there’s no engagement and therefore no performance if there isn’t a clear objective, and even more so if this objective carries a meaning that transcends this person. Save planet Earth from Zorg’s invasion. We know what we want and why, and the meaning transcends us (but be careful, grandeur isn’t mandatory, no tyranny of vision). In any case, it’s not a personal objective. Succeed in a digital, agile, lean transformation. We understand nothing. Why? For what purpose? Who are we? Who wants to get started? Nobody. “Succeed in opening new markets in Africa while communicating our values,” “Facilitate family life for thousands of households by enabling more transactions…”. There we can start working together, thinking, trying, bouncing back.
Second, there’s no engagement if there aren’t clear rules that allow a sense of control over one’s work tool. In some video games I can only kill werewolves with silver bullets, and demons with a magical weapon, if I want and when I want, with success or not but I control my action, I control my work tool. On the other hand, if as in this fictional organization, I don’t know exactly if I have the right to touch this part of the product, I don’t know exactly who can decide on options in a certain area, and if with each of my actions I must ask other groups to intervene, well, might as well tell me what to do and here I am disengaged. Hence these multidisciplinary teams that are so sought after currently, but that challenge the old siloed structures so much, where the expertise of a skill is more important than delivering something, where the hierarchical structure has taken over from value creation. It’s up to managers to let go to let their teams, multidisciplinary, with a clear objective, and the means to act on it with minimum dependencies, move forward. With autonomy. We therefore need clear rules that give enough autonomy and space to multidisciplinary groups.
Third, to maintain this engagement we need to feel we’re moving forward, have a sense of progress, therefore have information about what we’re producing regularly. Whether the feedback is positive or negative, it doesn’t matter, we need feedback above all. If it’s negative, I suspect an autonomous multidisciplinary team will know how to react. But if there’s never any feedback on what we’re doing, on what we’ve produced, what’s the point of doing anything? And if the feedback is drowned in a flood of information, or incomprehensible, it’s the same. Normally we seek for this feedback to be linked to what we’re concretely making, and therefore to the meaning, to the objective initially given. Did the test of this new way of doing things work on this new user population yes? no? Why? It’s also for this reason that making immense things that only make sense at the very end, in addition to often insurmountable complexity problems, demobilizes everyone. Nobody knows if what they’re making works, is worth it, etc. So we think about products differently. By small sets prioritized by value that we deliver over time and whose impact we measure to validate or invalidate our hypotheses and continue moving forward. The pieces we deliver must therefore themselves carry meaning, be autonomous, and we thus return again to multidisciplinary teams that are able to deliver finished things, learn over time, measure their impact, compared to siloed organizations that aren’t capable of delivering anything without the other silo, and don’t really know where they are. Oh yes, they’re at 46%.
Fourth, and this one is difficult to grasp, it’s the invitation. None of the video game players were forced to play. Ideally none of the members of this fictional organization should be forced to come get involved, work. Not easy. We run into another reality, that of Maslow’s pyramid, you first need to have a roof, eat, in short… have an organization and a salary before thinking about engagement. It’s a vast debate. But difficult today to invite people to work, in any case not simple depending on contexts. I invite you for example to ask people to form their own teams as long as they try to deliver your product as best they can and I also invite you to observe the results. Or choose their subjects. People who don’t feel like it should be able to leave the ship. Not easy, I told you. But, on the opposite side, if you do projects with people who don’t want to do them, don’t be surprised by certain results. As much as possible try not to impose anything, you disengage the actors who suffer this imposition. It’s easy to say, I know. There are thankless tasks that nobody wants to do. Yes, but we don’t want to do these thankless tasks if it’s our only job, if it’s imposed, if we’re not even left the freedom to choose how to do it, if we’re not told why it needs to be done, and if we’re not left the freedom to change the functioning of our activity, to improve it, even just to apprehend it differently. But if we form a team that works on an area, whose meaning we know, whose results we measure regularly, for which we’re allowed to think, improve, change the functioning, well these thankless tasks become part of daily life that’s much simpler to accept. And even more so if we’ve been invited to be part of this team.
People who refuse all invitations quickly understand that their place is no longer here. After that it becomes a societal or legal problem: these people should be able to find their happiness elsewhere, which isn’t necessarily reality. You can set them aside in other roles and allow them to accept an invitation later (there’s a life alongside the organization that also naturally has an impact).
Your role as a manager is to establish this framework!
Once this human and personal shift has been made, from “boss manager” to “coach manager,” it’s impossible to go back, so much does the world appear with an unsuspected human richness at the start, rightly adds Sophie Lenoir - Reynaud.
To these four points are added rules linked to our species. We don’t really know how to communicate beyond fifteen meters (I’m speaking in a local group dynamic), a team has trouble functioning, building itself beyond seven, eight people, same for a constructive meeting. That a department shouldn’t exceed our social cognitive capacities which seem to have a barrier around one hundred fifty/two hundred twenty relationships. But all this could evolve.
Your role as a manager is to establish this framework! Yes, it’s easier to give 0.25-day tasks to twenty-eight people, with Cartesian breakdown. Fortunately for the happiness of our species, that doesn’t work.
So generally this fictional organization I’m talking about doesn’t have a time and money problem. It has a problem with the impact of its collaborators who aren’t responsible enough, who don’t have enough autonomy, and it has a problem maximizing value: it’s not capable of reacting, learning vis-à-vis the market. It doesn’t know how to deliver small pieces that it measures regularly.
The entire role of bosses, managers, is to shift from the role of giving orders on the how, and the what, to that of supervisor: the one who gardens a space in which their collaborators can be well engaged and move forward, and the one who shows a direction, a meaning, and who embodies it: we are this, we want this, therefore we conduct ourselves thus. For many managers, bosses, it’s a revolution. This also implies a lot of discipline, knowing how to say no a lot too, so some can be reassured.
Interlude
I love people, and therefore I love managers. I don’t judge people. They’re fine. I judge the quagmire in which the manager role is. And the harm this role causes. Don’t forget that it’s the system that opposes people.
End of interlude.
The story is simple, but it repeats too often.
Pierre is a good organizer, a good leader, a good expert, he leads the group he works with. He becomes in a way their “manager,” their “leader.” Then the implicit becomes explicit: he officially becomes “manager.” His analytical abilities, organization, know-how, involvement, work capacity make him a good manager, especially since he’s very friendly and human. In the middle of his team, he excels. Success is there and Pierre climbs the ranks. Until he arrives at the head of the department, the organization. And there it’s failure, incomprehensible. Yet Pierre hasn’t changed.
Pierre has just hit the main Peter principle syndrome of management.
Pierre is still this friendly and human man, full of qualities. But he’s become his own worst enemy.
At the head of the department, there are too many decisions for his analytical abilities to suffice. Yet Pierre has always succeeded with his organizational qualities in organizing this. He won’t budge, he’ll always want to decide everything, in any case too much. Too many decisions, his failure is accentuated by the isolation linked to the position. His know-how becomes a burden, because he feels capable of better understanding, better knowing, he thinks himself duty-bound to absorb the subject, to meddle in it, and nobody dares tell him to buzz off. He knows how to organize. But again, he wants to organize everything, isn’t that what he’s been asked to do from the beginning?
It’s a difficult moment. Either Pierre shouldn’t accept this job. Or he’ll have to understand that it requires a posture that balances very differently. No longer doing, no longer controlling, delegating, no longer deciding (day to day), but giving direction, inspiring, recalling the framework, and communicating, communicating, communicating, sharing, sharing, communicating, sharing, inspiring, embodying, communicating, sharing, inspiring, framing, delegating. Nothing to do with what he’s been asked to do since the beginning of his journey.
Managers aren’t sensitized enough to this rupture.
I see plenty of admirable people not making it through.
And then Pierre earns more money since he’s been a manager, boss. And he’s invested time. And since he’s embarked on this career path, he sees the next steps, even if nothing pleases him the path seems laid out. Might as well continue, it’s a mental trap hard to fight.
Once again.
This fictional organization wants to go faster and for less money. It always talks about the means. It always targets the wrong thing. If it’s about “a digital or agile transformation” we understand it would like to go faster for less money. We don’t go faster and cheaper. We go better and we engage people. For that we must know who we are, what we want, what we believe in, and conform our acts and our environment to that. First make all management, all bosses, understand that this is a major change on their part. And then, implement these heterogeneous teams, with autonomy and regular feedback on what has meaning, able to regularly deliver value elements, and to improve. All this only becomes possible if management, bosses, understand they’ve shifted into another role: shape, clarify a beautiful framework, which allows teams to evolve. And embody, communicate this meaning, this identity.
And again I repeat, the higher you go in management the more important it is, the more you’re responsible. You’re going to laugh at me and tell me that the big boss of a gigantic organization can’t communicate or embody in the eyes of all their collaborators. On one hand, the means of communication seem to allow it today. On the other hand, if they can’t, does it show they give enough autonomy to the “local boss” so that they can make the right decisions, create the right framework for these teams, have enough autonomy themselves? “No we can’t because the big boss doesn’t want to” is acceptable if the big boss came to explain it one way or another, explained the meaning of this refusal, that this explanation is in conformity with the organization’s identity. Otherwise hello disengagement.
It’s tiring to embody, to communicate. Especially if like Pierre we’ve lost meaning over the course of career evolution. And then if we’ve climbed the ranks, it’s probably because we’ve already given, we’d like to take back a little.
The manager is no longer at the center, they’re at the boundary: they’re the guardian of the framework.
I don’t care if your equations are correct, management is a soft science. Being a manager means embodying the identity and meaning of your organization. We can decide that the organization’s identity changes, but there too we’ll need to communicate, explain. Being a manager is tiring, that’s why you’re paid more.
Earlier I was talking about firing people, which is an important act, not simple, and which does the organization good if it’s done with reason, and done well. What I’ve been able to observe in one or two places is that a quarter of middle management adapted very well to this new way of doing things, that another quarter of management became coaches: adapted even better? Another quarter left, because they either didn’t find themselves in the new way of doing things, or in the direction, identity, which were clarified, finally I observed the last quarter of management getting expelled, because judged toxic.