This is the third and final post in a short series exploring how the default set-up of a manager role helps or hinders the creation of joyous and productive work.
Check out the first post about managers serving as guides, and the second about the mastery model as an alternative to zero-sum advancement.
Though each post is standalone, I think the first two are good context or perhaps a cushion for this one. As a trio, I believe these posts pose a meaningful question about whether the default set-up for a manager role is ideal for anyone: the manager, their team, or their boss. I see few winners outside of pure convenience: ‘it has always been this way1 so it’s easier not to change'.
As always, it comes back to craft.
The joy of craft
I believe that it is fundamentally human to want to do things that matter, and do them well. Put in even simpler terms, joyous work is about executing craft.
In response, I’ve been asked various versions of this question: Is there a management craft, or is management something else, something that exists to ensure others can execute their crafts?
There is a philosophical answer about craft that probably needs multiple bottles of wine and will help none of us before the next wave of emails hit. Instead, let’s go with the practical, and look at where managers spend their time, with the help of some 2023 research from McKinsey.
A mixed bag of things
Straight away we see that half of the week has nothing that looks like management craft. Individual contribution takes-up 30%, which is craft, but it’s not a management craft. And another 20% is spent on administration, of which the root causes and how to address is a topic for another time.
But the other half is a different story. We see that 30% of time is growing people. This is the coaching, development, recruiting, and other people stuff. This is about humans and growth, it absolutely is a management craft, and a critical one at that.
Then we see that 20% of time is spent overseeing the work of the team. Worst case this is about creating assurance up the chain, to ensure the boss and their boss are comfortable that everything is being done right and is on track. But the best case, and the optimistic view we will take here, is that time is spent providing guidance, lending wisdom as advice to support a great outcome. This guidance is absolutely a management craft, and another critical one.
So we have two management crafts, growing people and guidance. The big question is, do you need to bind these to a manager job for them to be effective? I would argue, no, to the point where I believe the opposite is true: management crafts benefit from being distributed between many people.
Better loses to easier
When the management craft is distributed across people, you don’t need to make the choice of a single coach to fit all people in one team, instead you can consider best matches between skills, knowledge, experience, personalities, and interest in coaching. This is true for guidance too: the idea of constraining guidance to a manager or even the broader management group is silly. All people in an organisation have unique wisdom to contribute, and when an organisation can distribute the management craft of guidance, it can benefit from more of it.
Of course to do this you need a means of identifying and distributing the management work, and this is where the organisation blinks and stumbles: it is so much easier to just give one person the title of manager, and the difference in performance on growing people and guidance is so hard to see in the short term that it cannot possibly outweigh this convenience. Better loses to easier.
But those who are deliberate about distributing some or all of their management craft reap the rewards. These sorts of practices are not theory, but proven in organisations around the world, such as UK search advisory, Reddico (award winning place to work UK), and Finish digital sales agency, Columbia Road (award winning place to work Finland).
So, no managers?
It is understandable - in particular for those in management roles - to extrapolate from this idea of ‘distribute management craft’ to ‘no managers at all’. But in practice, that endpoint is very, very uncommon. Structure, including some form of hierarchy, has proven to be important in effective and efficient systems of work since antiquity. Distributing management craft and the specific manager job role are not mutually exclusive2. For those in manager jobs, the excitement should come from a better shared understanding of the management craft, recognition of how it differs from other individual crafts, and an opportunity to consciously allocate time between the two. No more being pulled in multiple directions without the required bandwidth or being lumped with the elements of the management craft you don’t like and don’t excel in. You can break the boundaries here.
Start small, but start
The first step, the first experiment, is super easy. At your next team meeting, have an open discussion about which elements of the management craft might benefit most from distribution across people. Recruitment, leading meetings, coaching, and offering advice on work are all good starting points. Listen for where the energy is, where do people want to contribute and grow. Pick one, agree on the means of distributing the work, and give it a go. Learn, iterate, and see what the right mix of management distribution looks like for your team.
The prize is managers with space to be more choiceful about where to invest their time, more people growing and mastering the management craft, and more people benefiting from collective wisdom, to name but a few.
Remember, 1% better each month is an absolute revelation in time. Joyous work is within your reach. You can start now.
What we do
At Joyous Work, we help organisations of all sizes to identify and eliminate the work-about-work that suffocates people from executing their crafts. Consistently joyous and super-productive work is closer than you might think. Visit joyouswork.com or reach out to john@joyouswork.com.
It hasn’t always been this way, by the way. The middle manager emerges during the industrial revolution as a means of facilitating communication and assuring specific output, because for the first time ever, people could be working on the same thing but be some distance apart. Digital communication technologies have eliminated this problem entirely.
The what-about at this point is often about advancement. When management is distributed, how do we offer people a clear path for advancement? The answer - of many proven options - is something like the mastery model that I have shared previously, which removes the zero-sum game of promotions and allows people to advance in mastery of diverse skills, the management craft included.
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