When I was a young manager, a half a life-time ago, very simplistic theories about management were pervasive. When I was first appointed to manage  a power station, my boss believed I should have some management  training. He duly enrolled me into a weeklong live-in course conducted in a Gold Coast resort (although not a very posh one as I remember!).

Here we were set upon by a small panel of trainers and academics, none of whom had significant management credentials. The curriculum was hardly scintillating and comprised such topics as decision making, time management and report writing.

I suppose that decision making is an important element of management, and like many things the process is important. But my decision making training assumed that I was going to make all the decisions and that was not my style at all. I delegated what I could and put trust in my subordinates, who often had more relevant skills than I did to make good decisions. This not only removed some of my burden but enabled my subordinates to grow and develop their own skills. But the most important decisions, particularly those involving a broad range of stakeholders, we made collaboratively. My more authoritarian peers insisted that the quality of such decisions was compromised. I doubt that was the case, but countered with the riposte that I would rather have a decision that was 80% correct and had support from those who were going to implement it, than a decision that was 100% correct but would fizzle through lack of support. And that of course is the case – participation and collaboration garner support. Of course there are some decisions a leader must make alone. They are the ones that keep you awake at night mulling over the alternatives. But in my experience they are few in number.

Time management is an enigmatic area in my experience. Generally those who worry about time management are invariably already good at it!

As for report writing, any reasonably competent professional can usually put together something passable. Those that can’t, can often be helped or sometimes can delegate to those that are more competent.

Anyhow, in the scheme of things these are not the make or break skills of management and leadership.

In my own case, it soon became apparent to me that managing people was the key issue. Working in an engineering based industry, where most of my peers were engineers, there was a pervading ethos that managers were there to give technical guidance to those under them. When there was disputation it should be resolved by rational processes to prove who is right and who is wrong. Things were black and white, cut and dried, and logic should prevail. I can vividly recall an industry management conference where I had been invited to give a paper on my management philosophy. I related how I believed it was my role to establish an appropriate culture. I then outlined the various collaborative processes I had put in place, the focus we had of engaging personally with the workforce, the commitment to “managing by walking around” (as per Tom Peters) and so on. I invited questions at the end of my presentation only to have one of my peers enquire, “That is well and good but how do you find time to do your ‘real ‘job?” I was of course flabbergasted.

It was helpful to me that shortly after that I was able to do an MBTI course and subsequently be accredited as an MBTI practitioner. It was thus reinforced to me that not only do people matter but that they are inherently often different from one another and that wise leaders will take that into account. To gain the most from our people we must acknowledge they each have different strengths.

The majority of my management issues were about getting people committed to do things. I wanted people to get gratification from their work. I wanted their work to be meaningful. I didn’t want people to come to work to do things because I told them so – I wanted them to come to work because they could see what they were doing made a worthwhile contribution.

I became to believe that management (and more particularly leadership) is not a mechanical application of learned skills (often manipulative) but an exercise in applied psychology. Surely what we wanted to achieve is to win over the hearts and the minds of our employees so that they might commit to the objectives of the enterprise because what we were trying to achieve was a worthwhile cause and what we asked them to do was worthwhile work. And what we were looking for was an arrangement that was not only good for the organisation but good for the person as well.

I was surprised when the good Dr Phil and I published our joint oeuvre “Humanity at Work” that we had a review from a very left-wing commentator from the “Age” who accused us of trying to inveigle workers into believing that work could actually be meaningful. This was obviously a capitalist ploy to exploit the workforce!

Then there came along a string of various management approaches, most of which I learnt something from..

I became interested in Human motivation and quickly became familiar with Herzberg, MacGregor and Maslow – all of which added to my understanding of human behaviour and were useful at the time.

Then followed the Quality movement. There were some useful elements of the Quality approach. One that I seized upon early were the use of Quality Circles. Quality Circles provided a framework for teams to work on workplace improvement. The tools were simple but useful and began a long term interest for me in the promotion of times and teamwork.

However there were I believe shortcomings in the Quality approach. Quality management is largely a collection of refinement techniques where we examine what we do and seek to improve the efficiency of our business processes. I often said that an organisation took up TQM (Total Quality Management) for example in the 1980’s after twenty years would be the best 1980’s organisation in the world and as a result probably out of business.

At the same time we were assailed with a lot of popular management literature emanating from the USA. One of the first of these books, and probably the most controversial in Australia, was Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence. This drew criticism from Australian managers because of its brash, extraverted, approach to motivation. It also drew derision because a number of the companies that had they singled out as exemplars folded within a decade of the book’s publication. The first person I knew to read the book was a colleague who managed a large facility in South East Queensland. When I asked him about the book, he responded, “It was an enjoyable read, but really has no application in our workplace!” This was quite typical of managers I mingled with. They were quite parochial and afraid of trying new things. In Search of Excellence gave me a few ideas that I could adapt to my workplace.

 

The Americans continued to churn out management books of varying degrees of usefulness. I remember taking some useful lessons away from such books as Ken Blanchard’s The One Minute Manager, Peter Senge’s seminal work The Fifth Discipline and Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

But as well as the American literature, I started to develop a network of Australian academics and practitioners whose work informed my own management practice. Among these were people like David Limerick from Griffith University, Richard Baldwin from the University of Western Sydney, Peter Saul from the University of Sydney and John Edwards, then at James Cook University, and Paul Chippendale from the Minessence Group who helped us clarify our thinking on values. And of course by then, Doctor Phil Harker had become a friend and collaborator in much that I was doing.

At the same time in Australia, because of some creative thinking by the Hawke and Keating Governments, we embarked on an era of microeconomic reform. For those who had the courage this presented a huge opportunity to review how work was done in Australia. We embarked on an ambitious program that redesigned work, facilitated broader skilling and recalibrated industrial relations by reinforcing the paramount importance of the management-workforce relationship.

As the years passed we were coming to emphasise a “softer” side of management. There was increasing emphasis on culture, teams, values, communications and so on.

We finally came to the understanding, thanks to Daniel Goleman’s work in Emotional Intelligence and useful studies and analyses such as Collins and Porras performed in Built to Last, (among many) that real leadership depended on some underlying personal characteristics of people. So in my career in management I had seen a great transformation from a focus on rather mechanistic skills (decision making, report writing etc) to the realisation that the influence and long-term effectiveness of managers/leaders was more a matter of their being than their doing! (To learn more on this topic see the little book I co-authored with the good Dr Phil, The Myth of Nine to Five).

I won’t go over the topic of leadership again – I have written extensively about it elsewhere.

However I wanted to finish by sharing a thought with you. In the more than a decade now that I have been working as an executive coach, I have worked in many organisations that I could only describe as dysfunctional. In fact, I have been disappointed that I have found few organisations that I could point to as role models in leadership and management.

But nevertheless it finally occurred to me some time ago, that organisations are dysfunctional, because some of the people working in them are dysfunctional.  These people largely suffer from a lack of psychological robustness and emotional awareness. (I could give you a myriad of examples), It seems to me that the most effective way I can help organisations now,is to help the people in them become more competent human beings. The wonderful spin-off from this is not just that they then become better employees, managers and leaders, but just as importantly better citizens, spouses and parents. This is my underlying goal as an executive coach.

Again I won’t elaborate on this because I have covered much of this material elsewhere. But when I reminisce about my management career my focus has changed:

• From mechanistic skills to the softer skills of understanding human behaviour, the impact of culture and values and what I have come to call ‘the mastery of self”, and
• From a focus on organisations, business systems, policies, strategy and structure to a focus on the individual and facilitating personal growth, psychological robustness and emotional competence.