Becoming A Better Boss E-Book

Julian Birkinshaw

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 270

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

An employee's-eye view of what makes a great boss—and how you can become one

Whereas most books on managing people approach the subject from the perspective of a manager of an idealised organisation, Becoming a Better Boss takes a real-world approach, looking at the topic from the perspective of an employee in a real-world organisation—dysfunctions, warts, and all. Focusing on the choices individual employees make every day in getting work done, this book reinvents the practice of management one employee at a time.

Author Julian Birkinshaw stresses the importance of taking management seriously, reveals where management practice often goes wrong, and dives deeply into the worldview of employees. He then explores the common personal biases and frailties of managers and discusses the vital importance of experimentation to overcome the limitations and idiosyncrasies of a particular organisation. Throughout, he supports his assertions with case studies from a wide and varying range of management experiments and situations at real companies.

• Written by a leading authority on strategy, management, and innovation who is also the author of eleven books, including Reinventing Management
• Introduces a new approach to management focused on real employees and actual situations
• Includes case studies from real organisations

Between the stress of deadlines and the demands of today's business environment, it's easy for managers to lose sight of the importance of people management. Becoming a Better Boss not only shows managers how to lead effectively, but why doing so is vitally important to every organisation's success.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise for Becoming a Better Boss

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Online Self-Assessment

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Building A Better Business

The Way Forward

Who Is the Book for?

1: Why Management Matters

Drivers of Corporate Performance

Quality of Life Considerations

The Rhetoric–Reality Gap

Explaining The Puzzle

Why Companies Struggle to Change

Why Individual Managers Struggle to Change

2: So What Is Good Management Really?

Management and Leadership

Bosses We Love to Hate

What Makes a Good Manager? Insights from the Survey

Another Perspective: Insights from Seminar Discussions

The Rhetoric and The Reality

3: Getting inside the Minds of Your Employees: What Makes them Tick?

Getting inside the Mind of The Employee

Identity

Motivations

Fears

Strengths

So What does an Employee's Eye-View Tell us?

4: Seeing The World Through The Eyes of Your Employees

Putting Yourself in Their Shoes

Lessons from Marketing

Cut Through the Hierarchy to Build Employee Insight

Individualizing the Employee Proposition

Managing the Employee Experience

Turning Employees Into Advocates

Thinking Like a Marketer

5: Doing What We Know We Should: Managing As an Unnatural Act

Doing What We Know We Should

Why Do We Behave the Way We Do?

Letting Go: Why is it Difficult?

Letting Go: Some Advice On Doing it Better

Giving Credit to Others: Why Is It So Difficult?

Giving Credit to Others: Some Advice On Doing It Better

Self-Control: Why Is It So Difficult?

Self-Control: Some Advice On Doing It Better

Overcoming Our Natural Instincts

6: Experimentation: Functioning in a Broken System

Understanding Bureaucracy – and Rising Above It

Take Personal Initiative – To Overcome Political Game-Playing

Challenge The Rules – To Overcome Inert Procedures

Making Your Experiments Stick

Making The Best of an Imperfect World

7: The Future of Management?

Forces that Shape Our Choice of Management Model

Technological Change: Web 2.0

Social Changes: Generation Y and Transparency

Economic and Political Changes: The Shift from West to East

Conclusion: Making the Right Choices

Index

Praise for Becoming a Better Boss

“In a world of relentless change, one of the few sources of competitive advantage for companies is the quality of their management practices. Top executives are increasingly looking for ways to rethink their management processes and systems. In this book, Julian Birkinshaw suggests a complementary approach – to push responsibility for rethinking management down to individual managers, and to help them find better ways of doing their job on an individual basis, one person at a time. Becoming a Better Boss is a revolutionary approach to management because it starts from the view of the person being managed, not the one doing the managing.”

Gary Hamel, best-selling author and management thinker

“We know the secret of long term success is more engaged employees. In this book Julian Birkinshaw shows how managers can do a much better job of fully engaging the people around them, so they can do their best work.”

David MacLeod, author of The MacLeod Report to the UK Government, “Engaging for Success”

“Great companies are defined by the quality of their managers. At Roche, we expect our managers to take a genuine interest in their people, to empower and trust them, and to exhibit integrity, courage and passion. This may sound straightforward, but it’s not – it takes real effort and commitment to do these things on a sustained basis. In Becoming a Better Boss, Julian Birkinshaw provides a clear roadmap for how we can all become great managers.”

Jayson Dallas, General Manager, Roche UK

“Good leadership and management begins with good people management and it’s never been more important given the increasing diversity of the workforce and the ways in which we work. Julian’s book speaks to these challenges and is full of great case studies, models, and ideas about how to effectively manage and engage the workforce of today, and of the future, for leaders at all levels. As he has done so often on the topics of management, he is able to bring new perspectives and insights and deliver these in a highly readable and engaging way.”

Peter Cheese, CEO, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

“Julian’s new book is perhaps the world’s first discourse that looks at management from the eyes of the employees. With this simple yet path-breaking thought Birkinshaw ends up providing a practical roadmap for individuals to function effectively within an organization no matter how archaic/dysfunctional its structures or management machinery is.”

Vineet Nayar, Vice Chairman, HCL Technologies

“One of the hallmarks of a truly successful company is its ability to harness the talents and skills of its employees across the world. In this book, Julian Birkinshaw shows why so many companies struggle with this, and he offers practical advice to help managers at all levels be more effective at getting the most out of their people.”

Ayman Asfari, CEO, Petrofac

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ISBN 978-1-118-64546-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-118-65940-3 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-118-65941-0 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-118-65942-7 (ebk)

Cover image: Linus Lohoff, www.linuslohoff.com Cover design: rawshock design

This book is dedicated to all the bad bosses I have worked for. I couldn't have written this book without your help.

Online Self-Assessment

Take this free online self-assessment to find out if you are a “good boss” or a “bad boss”. http://www.josseybassbusiness.com/assessments

Preface

I never expected to write this book. As a researcher and consultant, I had always focused my attention on the “big” challenges of strategy and structure that large organizations grapple with, leaving others to work on individual-level issues, such as how to motivate, influence, or develop others. However, over the last five years I have found myself drawn increasingly towards the nitty-gritty, practical challenges of how individuals actually get things done in large, complex organizations. It has been an enjoyable and surprising transition in my outlook on the world.

This journey of discovery began in 2006 when I founded the Management Innovation Lab (MLab) at London Business School with my colleague, Gary Hamel. The MLab mission was to accelerate the evolution of management, and our intention was to work closely with companies to design and run a series of management experiments that would help create new management practices and processes.

The MLab had some successes – we facilitated some important initiatives in companies, we wrote up our insights and ideas in some influential publications, and we spoke about the importance of management innovation in events around the world. However, we weren't as successful as we would have liked to be, especially when it came to making change stick. On many occasions, we helped groups of mid-level managers design and implement management experiments: a new approach to innovation, a way of bringing customer experience into the workplace, an initiative for eliminating bureaucracy. Even though the experiments typically worked well, they rarely made it to the next step. Instead, the ideas were killed off by invisible forces of inertia.

It was an eye-opener for me to observe first-hand how little support these mid-level managers were getting for their management experiments. Many observers have said that companies should become better at trying out small-scale experiments, as a way of de-risking their change programs, but it turns out that these small-scale experiments don't actually make much of a difference: they overcome the corporate immune system's first line of defence, but there is typically a second and then a third line of defence as well.

This led me to realize that reinventing management isn't just about rethinking the “system” of management, that is, the structures and processes through which work transpires. It is also about rethinking the “role” of management – the way individuals behave in the workplace in order to get things done. We have all observed individuals working in large organizations who are able to rise above the rules and procedures and to get things done through the force of their conviction. We can see such individuals as outliers and we can endeavor to build a better system to help ordinary people achieve the same results or we can see these individuals as role models who are showing others how to deal with the inevitable limitations of large bureaucratic organizations.

So over the last three years, I switched my focus – at least in part – to exploring the role of the individual manager in large complex organizations. This led me to develop my thoughts further on what makes for a successful “intrapreneur” – thoughts that I had first pursued in my doctoral dissertation 17 years earlier. It also led me deeper into the relationship between the manager and the employee. Management, it is often said, is about getting the most out of your employees, so a good manager is someone who really understands what makes his or her people tick. Of course, the notion that managers need to see the world through the eyes of their employees is an old one, but I was still surprised how few of the current writers on management actually gave much attention to it. Most preferred to write about management from a rather elitist perspective – from the point of view of the person doing the managing, rather than the person being managed.

This new focus resulted in a report on “Employee Centred Management” that I published in 2011, with funding from HCL Technologies and help from my co-authors Lisa Duke, Vyla Rollins, and Stefano Turconi. This study included a lot of data from employees in large companies about their fears and motivations at work, and their manager's style of working. It also included materials from my research interviews and from my own “ethnographic” experiences of life working on the front line. I have now expanded on those findings and developed my ideas further, and this book is the result.

I see this as a complement to my previous book, Reinventing Management. If Reinventing Management was a roadmap to help you make better choices in the “architecture” of management in your organization, then Becoming a Better Boss is about helping you, as an individual, to function effectively. I wrote it particularly to help those managers who are frustrated by the lack of change in their organizations and who are seeking to make a real difference. However, the ideas are actually relevant to pretty much any manager, regardless of their level of ambition. Becoming a Better Boss is about understanding your employees, your organization, and yourself more acutely, and developing a way of working that treats these components as they are, rather than as you would like them to be.

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of many conversations and interviews I have had over the last five years. I have talked to CEOs about these issues and I have talked to front-line employees with no management experience at all. I have also spent a great deal of time kicking my ideas round with colleagues and friends. Unlike some of my previous books on rather arcane subjects, this is one that everyone can relate to, so the people I have talked to are numerous. While I will do my best to acknowledge everyone who has helped me, I apologize in advance for those I have temporarily forgotten.

First I would like to thank London Business School, which provides the perfect blend of practical relevance and theoretical rigor for me to pursue a project of this type. Individuals at the School who have helped me include Andrew Likierman, Karen Napier, Lynda Gratton, Costas Markides, Jules Goddard, Holly Parker, Vyla Rollins, Rob James, Alan Matcham, Lisa Duke, and Stefano Turconi.

Gary Hamel continues to be a source of inspiration for all my work on management. Many of the ideas I developed in this book started from casual conversations with him. Gary's colleagues at the Management Innovation Exchange, Michele Zanini and Polly LaBarre, were also helpful for several of the stories in this book.

Simon Caulkin and Ngaire McKeown helped me to write some of the company case studies that I used in this book.

Many others have also provided useful insights and examples. In no particular order, these include Peter Cheese and John McGurk at CIPD; Tim Brooks at the British Medical Journal; David Smith formerly of Asda; Andrew Dyckhoff of Merrick; Vineet Nayar, Anand Pillai, Bindi Bhullar, and Ani Mukherjee at HCL Technologies; Stephen Martin at Clugston; Ross Smith at Microsoft; Andy Mulholland and Rick Mans at Capgemini; Chris Bayliss at National Australia Bank; Jordan Cohen and Siri Uotila at PA Consulting; Stefan Arn and Christian Crowden at AdNovum; Paul Lambert, Jesper Ek, and Steffi Mitchell at Roche; Torgeir Jacobsen, Hakan Johansson, Niclas Ward, Jorgen Hiden, and Katarina Mohlin at If Insurance; Julie Powell at Rio Tinto; Paul Flaum, Lorena Dominguez, and Peter Gardiner at Premier Travel Inn.

I thank Wiley/Jossey-Bass for pulling the book together and helping me to sharpen up the key ideas, especially Rosemary Nixon, Nick Mannion, Kathe Sweeney, and Patricia Bateson.

Finally, thanks as always to my family, to Laura, Ross, Duncan, and Lisa, for putting up with my long hours of writing. I couldn't have done it without your support!

Introduction

One of the defining features of Google's management model – alongside it's fun working environment – is its analytical, data-driven approach to decision-making. New products are launched through carefully controlled experiments. Highly paid persons' opinions – HIPPOs for short – are disdained. The company's chief economist has even predicted that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians.

So it is no surprise that when Google started to review its management practices, in early 2009, it took a data-driven approach. Led by the VP for people operations, Laszlo Bock, and codenamed Project Oxygen, the initiative involved gathering more than 10 000 observations from performance reviews, feedback surveys, and interviews1. After a lot of number-crunching, as well as some subjective interpretation, the project team came up with a list of eight ranked factors that defined the really good managers at Google:

1. Be a good coach.

2. Empower your team and don't micromanage.

3. Express interest in team members' success and personal well-being.

4. Don't be a sissy: be productive and results-oriented.

5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team.

6. Help your employees with career development.

7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.

8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team.

This is a good list. We can all agree, I think, that these are desirable attributes for managers. It even includes a few surprises – technical skills had always been considered very important in Google's geeky, technocratic environment, yet they were ranked far lower than “softer” skills around coaching and empowering people. The analysis helped Google to think much more stringently about the types of people they wanted as department heads and team leaders.

But it is also a useless list. Why? Because we already knew all this. With the possible exception of “don't be a sissy,” I have seen versions of this list in every book ever written on management. When I run seminars with executives or with MBA students, it takes about 20 minutes to construct this list simply by drawing out the experiences of those in the room. Adam Bryant, writing in TheNew York Times, called the list “forehead-slappingly obvious … reading like a whiteboard gag from an episode of The Office.”

So here is the problem. Let's say you work at Google and you want to improve your managerial skills. Are you going to study this list and evaluate your progress against each of the eight points? Are you going to pin it up next to your desk, so you can refer to it next time you are meeting with one of your team? My guess is you are not. This list is about as useful to you in becoming a better manager as “ten steps to a healthier diet” to an overweight businessman or “how to perfect your golf swing” to an aspiring Rory McIlroy. In all these cases, we can read the words and we know what we are supposed to do. But we don't know where to start, we don't know how to prioritize among the list of points, and we don't know how to get out of our old habits. So our behavior remains unchanged.

This gap between what we “know” and what we “do” provides the primary motivation for this book. If we are to improve the practice of management, we need to move beyond how-to lists and engage in a more thoughtful inquiry about what we are trying to achieve and what the obstacles are that prevent us from achieving it. I wrote this book, in other words, to help you become a better boss, but don't expect any simple bullet-point lists of things to do. If being a good manager was as simple as following a list of instructions, anyone could do it!

Building A Better Business

There is also a secondary motivation for this book, namely a concern for the overall success and welfare of large business organizations. As I write this in 2012, we face a very uncertain economic future. While the macroeconomic story is the one that gathers most of the headlines, I believe a lot of the problems of the last few years can be attributed to failures of management and leadership in our large companies.

The financial services sector has, not unreasonably, attracted most of the negative attention. Whether the offence is manipulating Libor, laundering money in Mexico, mis-selling pensions, or rogue trading, the cause is always some sort of underlying deficiency in governance or culture that makes the company in question prone to poor decision-making. But plenty of other sectors have also been fingered in the last couple of years – BP's oil spill was condemned as an “overarching failure of management,” Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation was found to have “failed to exercise proper oversight” following the phone-hacking scandal, and pharmaceutical company GSK was fined $3 billion for unethical drug-selling practices2.

In these and many other cases, bad management is indeed to blame. But it is not worth just pointing the finger at the CEO. Typically he takes the hit, as he should, but the problems of a deficient culture or governance system usually stem from decisions made many years earlier. In fact, I would argue that many of the management failures we are seeing today can be traced back to an “industrial era” model of management that is no longer fit for purpose. This model – with its emphasis on coordination through formal rules, hierarchical decision-making, and extrinsic rewards – worked well for many years, but is ill-suited to today's fast-paced, knowledge-based business world.

My previous book, Reinventing Management, focused on these big picture issues. It described how executives can challenge these deep-seated assumptions about how large organizations work and how they can devise new and better ways of working.

This book tackles the same problems from the other direction, that is, by focusing on the choices each of us makes, every day, about how we get our work done. The goal, essentially, is to reinvent the practice of management one person at a time. If each one of us becomes more effective in our managerial work, we don't just improve the working lives of those around us, we also become agents of change for this broader endeavour as well – to build better businesses.

The Way Forward

The central idea in this book is that we can all become better bosses by starting with a more realistic set of assumptions about the challenges we face in the workplace. There are three problems with the standard advice that is offered.

First, it is usually offered from the perspective of the person doing the managing. Most management books and articles are written by successful executives looking back on their careers, or by academics or consultants who have interviewed or advised these same executives. We get a view of how these individuals think and how they achieved what they did. But it is an incomplete story, because it doesn't give a voice to the people being managed – the employees through whom the manager achieved his or her objectives.

Second, it starts from a very rational view of human nature. Google is a company of engineers where data is king. So not surprisingly, their approach to improving management in the company is to see what the data says and to codify the results of their analysis in a way that everyone can understand. Google is hardly alone in this – most large companies have carefully developed lists of management “competencies” and most books on management have recipe books for aspiring managers to follow. But this rational perspective is a gross simplification of reality. There is now a great deal of evidence that we often behave in an unpredictable and nonrational manner, and often in ways we don't even realize.

Third, it assumes that the work of management is happening within a reasonably sensible organizational environment, where objectives are clear, decisions are implemented, and rules are followed. Again, though, we know that many organizations are not remotely reason­able or sensible. People pursue their own pet objectives, they subvert decisions, and they bend the rules. Managers often end up succeeding despite the system, not because of it.

Given all these realities, is it a surprise that the standard advice goes unheeded? Or fails to make a lasting impression on the way we work?

In this book I put forward a perspective on management that starts from a very different set of assumptions.

First, and most importantly, I take an employee's eye-view of management. I focus on the needs, motivations, and fears of those working on the front lines of their companies, and ask them what they are looking for in their managers. I examine cases where man­agers have completely misunderstood the needs of their employees, and have paid the price, as well as cases where they have done an exemplary job of seeing the world through the eyes of those doing the work. This perspective suggests some important new techniques for becoming more attentive and helping our employees to do their best work.

Second, I encourage you to look in the mirror and to confront the biases and frailties that are preventing you from being a really good manager. I show that, for most of us, being a good manager is an “unnatural act” – something that we can learn to do, but only with a lot of deliberate effort. By understanding the three primary areas of tension between our subconscious instinct and our rational mind, we can become more effective at making the right choices when it really matters.

Third, I rethink the role of the individual manager when the organ­ization he or she works for is dysfunctional. I describe the typical pathologies and limitations of large companies and some of the coping strategies that managers use to get things done despite the structure. I also introduce the notion of active experimentation – the idea that you can make conscious but low-risk changes to the way work gets done within your own part of the company.

These three perspectives are summarized below and they provide the overall structure for the book.

Who Is the Book for?

As you should have gathered by now, there are no “silver bullets” for becoming a better boss; no hard-and-fast rules for improving the practice of management. So I am not going to fall into the trap of providing you with a how-to list that summarizes all these ideas. Good management has an analytical component – the folks in Google aren't crazy – but it is mostly about building deep expertise in relating to other people. Like improving our golf swing, we become better managers through practice, feedback, and reflection. And like trying to lose weight, we become more effective when we have got to grips with our own biases and frailties as human beings. So while there are no silver bullets, there are plenty of little tricks we can play on ourselves, and plenty of exercises we can try that will help us develop the expertise we need to succeed.

I have three types of reader in mind for this book:

You as a manager of others. The book is all about the things you can do differently – to give you a new outlook on your work, to help you reflect on your own biases, and to force yourself out of your comfort zone.You as an employee. This book will help you understand why your manager isn't as helpful, articulate, or forgiving as you think he or she should be. And it will also help you to manage him or her more effectively. It is sometimes said that you get the manager you deserve: I don't entirely buy that, but I do believe you have some degree of freedom to help your manager do the job better.You as a manager of other managers. Many of the obstacles to good management discussed in this book are not set in stone. If you want your own people to become more effective in their work, there are plenty of things you can do to facilitate their improvement.

The book is in two main parts. The first part provides the motivation and background for the core ideas in the book. I show how important it is to take management seriously (Chapter 1), I sketch out the key dimensions of management and where it usually goes wrong (Chapter 2), and I take a deep dive into the worldview of the employee (Chapter 3).

The second part provides a detailed discussion of the three alternative perspectives: a re-interpretation of management through the eyes of the employee (Chapter 4), an exploration of our own biases and frailties and how we can overcome them (Chapter 5), and a discussion of the use of active experimentation to overcome the limitations and pathologies of the organizations we work for (Chapter 6).

The final chapter (Chapter 7) looks to the future, to make sense of how technology and other forces are changing the practice of management. Taken as a whole, the flow of the book represents an arc, from the “big picture” concerns addressed in Chapter 1, down to the worldview of the employee and manager, and then back up to the big picture again.

Notes

1Google's Quest to Build a Better Boss, Adam Bryant, The New York Times, March 12, 2012.

2 The words in quotations are taken from news articles: see the Financial Services Authority report on the collapse of RBS, www.fsa.gov.uk; the National Com­mission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, Chief Counsel's Report, Chapter 5; the quote about Rupert Murdoch from www.newscorpwatch.org.

1

Why Management Matters

One of the motivations in writing this book was to tackle the following puzzle:

Do we know how to generate sustainably high performance in companies? Yes we do.Do companies consistently follow this established formula? No they don't.

On the face of it, this seems strange. Surely human nature compels us to seek out better ways of doing things? Surely competition between companies creates a survival-of-the-fittest push for constant improvement? Well, yes it does, but there are also many other forces at work that can frustrate our ability to do what we know to be right. Sometimes these forces prevail, leaving everyone stuck with an inferior model.

The established “formula” for delivering high performance is what I call a people-centric approach to management. It involves hiring talented and motivated people, providing them with the competencies they need to succeed, and – most important of all – putting in place a system of management that enables them to do their best work.

Do you buy the argument that a people-centric approach to management is key to long-term success? When I ask this question in seminars, the majority of people say yes: they intuitively buy the argument. However, when I probe further, it becomes clear that a significant number are more sceptical – they aren't convinced its true, but they figure that investing in people doesn't do much harm and perhaps it is just one of the costs of being in business, so they go along with it. Then there are the cynics, usually a fairly small number of people, who strongly disagree – they think this emphasis on people is misguided or insincere, or perhaps even a Machiavellian way for managers to further their own objectives.

I will get back to the views of the cynics later, in Chapter 3, but for now, I want to concentrate on those in the first two groups. I was in the first category when I started researching this book. I saw the link between investing in people and corporate performance as axiomatic – self-evidently true, but so fundamental that it probably couldn't be proved.

Drivers of Corporate Performance

It turns out I was half-right. When you collect the evidence together, it shows that the axiom is not only correct but is also objectively verifiable. Several recent academic studies have shown that companies with engaged and happy employees outperform those that do not1. There has also been a lot of applied research in recent years, such as the “Engage for Success” movement in the UK, which has drawn similar conclusions2.

One particular study is worth recounting here in detail. A London Business School Professor, Alex Edmans, studied the “Best Com­panies to Work For” in the United States and focused on their stock market performance over a 25 year period. He showed that “A value-weighted portfolio of the 100 Best Companies earned an annual alpha of 3.5% from 1984 to 2009.” In plain English, this means that if you invested your own pension in these companies, and left it there, you would get a significantly better return – 3.5% per year – than the average fund manager3. Edmans showed, in other words, that not only do these “Best Companies to Work For” have better performance over the long-term than those in the market as a whole but also the stock market fails to pick up on their superior prospects.