William Morris was a hugely influential designer during the Victorian period, and there’s a good chance that you have encountered his designs many times, maybe even in your own home if your decorating tastes lean towards his distinctive style. He is on my mind because I encountered a quote attributed to him and it reflected for me something which I think applies today to managers across our companies across the world.
What William Morris once wrote was: “The work must be worth doing: think what a change that would make in the world! I tell you I feel dazed at the thought of the immensity of the work which is undergone for the making of useless things”. This was, it seems, a reflection of his dismay at what today we call consumerism, and a concern that working people were toiling to produce things that had no real value.
That isn’t my concern, in truth. But I do worry about how we describe the role of managers and the things we expect of them, and the quote made me reflect on how consistently their work is worth doing. Many of the managers I work with feel weighed down by the scale of the tasks asked of them. They aren’t simply aligning the work of their team towards important outcomes and ensuring performance and quality; they are also completing multiple processes, following complex procedures, filling out forms and adding data to spreadsheets, carrying out multiple tasks in addition to their mainstream work, fulfilling additional requests and queries. Much of it is complicated, even bureaucratic. Frequently it is time-consuming, difficult to complete, and hard to fathom. You will find a lot of managers completing these tasks late in the day, or at weekends, when the work of producing outcomes and leading teams is less immediate and they can find a little bandwidth to get this stuff done. And to continue with the theme from William Morris, I feel dazed at the immensity of the work which is undergone for the following of (potentially) unnecessary processes.
In fairness, most of these additional asks and tasks are created with a sensible outcome in mind. The extra things we put on managers start life in pursuit of the right things being done, in the interests of consistency and even fairness, for efficiency, or reliable reporting, or to monitor progress, see gaps, direct resources to where there is most need. Risks get mitigated this way, ways of working get changed this way, new practices get embedded this way. But then they take on a life of their own…extra fields get added, more steps get inserted; the processes get extended, the reporting cycles get shortened and the data needed gets more detailed. With every “improvement” and extension we make our managers’ lives harder; as we pursue more detail or certainty or information so we make it tougher for managers to do their day jobs.
So let’s remember that day job, and celebrate the fact that managers are in their roles to make their teams successful, both in production and in growth. They are there to harness the capabilities of the people on the team to create fantastic results, which delight customers, which deliver great results for clients and which contribute to overall enterprise success. They are there to provoke and enable amazing work to get done. They are there to get the best from every member of the team, to support their achievement and enable their growth. They are there to create an environment of outperformance and success, where great things get done and people achieve more than they realised they could. This is the work of managers, really good managers. It’s not really about the processes and the reporting and the systems and the spreadsheets; it’s about creating a climate for their team of achievement and progress.
What a change it would make in the world if we could have our managers fully engage in the parts of their work that truly matter.
We need to streamline, simplify, or even cancel the worst of the processes in our organisations that weigh on managers. There’s a high chance these are now more complex and cumbersome than their good initial purpose required; there’s an equally high chance that managers will do the right thing every time without those processes and procedures, if we ensure that they are trained right and supported well. If we could even remove just one burden from them and give them a little bit more time to spend on the really important stuff, imagine what a difference it would make…
My first book, The Self Determined Manager, is a handbook for every manager, regardless of level and experience. I wrote it to help everyone to be the best manager they can be, as a practical guide for every manager and as a manifesto for how management should be done across the world. People who read it seem to love it. Available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. More details at the Self Determined Manager website
