I started to notice a subtle shift during my early years as a manager, though I was still too young and inexperienced to pay much attention. It wasn’t until my first graduate school class on management, (Leadership and Organizational Behavior), that I began to truly assess my own practices as a manager. I was able to use the crucibles of my own daily management failures and apply theory to practice in real time. I found this autobiographical reflection from a term paper I wrote nearly 15 years ago:
Reflecting back on my past year of management, I recognize that much needs to change in order for me to be a transformational leader. Things such as allowing for flexibility in determining how I define and perform my work and moving away from transactional leadership towards a more relationship based approach with my direct reports.
Even then I was realizing that it’s who is doing the work, how the work gets done, and why we choose the work in the first place that all matter. Our collective answers to these questions have shifted over the years. As HBR’s Rita McGrath notes, management practices in the US have really experienced a few key eras: execution, expertise, and now empathy. The execution era was marked by large scale dominance of the workforce, whether through the institution of slavery or the birth of the industrial age. It was all about the product (which, initially during slavery the people were the products). It’s unsurprising that our most established forms of management practices have their roots in a product over people approach with vestiges in chattel slavery in America. The second phase of expertise capitalized on the organization’s ability to efficiently allocate resources, still rooted in a product over people approach. But things were beginning to change.
Later, once management shifted from expertise towards deploying management in service of organizing “knowledge work”, a new trend emerged. McGrath writes:
Today, we are in the midst of another fundamental rethinking of what organizations are and for what purpose they exist. If organizations existed in the execution era to create scale and in the expertise era to provide advanced services, today many are looking to organizations to create complete and meaningful experiences. I would argue that management has entered a new era of empathy.
This quest for empathy extends to customers, certainly, but also changes the nature of the employment contract, and the value proposition for new employees. We are also grappling with widespread dissatisfaction with the institutions that have been built to date, many of which were designed for the business-as-machine era. They are seen as promoting inequality, pursuing profit at the expense of employees and customers, and being run for the benefit of owners of capital, rather than for a broader set of stakeholders. At this level, too, the challenge to management is to act with greater empathy.
Judging from recent events, as the great resignation became the great reshuffling of the workforce, workers are realizing that they too have options. Will managers respond to the changing terms of the arrangement between workers and managers? Can they? It depends on whether managers can develop the necessary emotional intelligence to lead with empathy. One more note from my past self. I found this one at the beginning of a leadership profile that I had to write for the same organizational leadership class in grad school. Looking back, I’m struck by the optimism and even the contours of a working theory of new management practices.
I firmly believe that leadership development is a process of self realization, spurred by reflection, and supported by professional development, coaching, and mentorship that should continually repeat itself like a cycle. Good managers play a critical role in stewarding this process.
Good managers indeed.
