leadingIn(tech)#11: The role of a manager has changed

March 2022

Mar 02, 2022

Hi there! 👋🏽

Welcome to a new issue of leadingIn.tech newsletter. I'm Roberto, and this is a place where I share ideas, practices, learnings towards the journey of becoming a better leader in technology.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

Today’s article is about how management styles need to change in a world where the work that is repeatable, that can be automated and where technology is continuously substituting work previously done by humans. As this happens a new kind of challenges arise to be solved and the classical styles of management around “planning, organising, staffing, directing, and controlling.” are no longer suit.

The management styles needs to change to enable people to experiment and solve these challenges in a safe environment as Simon Sinek refers to in his book Leaders Eat Last, to create a Circle of Safety.

💡 learnings and ideas to become 1% percent better every day

📄 Articles

The Role of a Manager Has to Change in 5 Key Ways

What is it about?

This article reflects on the trend that is ongoing from a few years already on how leadership behaviours from management positions are changing or need to change from a command-control style towards a team empowering environment. It describes how managers can change in 5 ways, actually they mention 6 ways; from directive to instructive, from restrictive to expansive, from exclusive to inclusive, from repetitive to innovative, from problem solving to challenging, and from employer to entrepreneur.

💡 “Be people who love to learn and love to teach, who liberate and innovate, who include others in the process of thinking imaginatively, and who challenge everyone around them”

What are the key take aways?

Move from Directive to Instructive, tasks that are repetitive and being able to be reproduced in a procedural form can eventually be replaced by technology and AI. We need to change in a way we encourage people to extend their knowledge and learn through experimentation.
Move from Restrictive to expansive, forget about micromanagement and making all decisions. We need to encourage our teams to take part in the decision process and develop their own judgement.
Move from Exclusive to inclusive, when a single person drives the decisions it limits the actions to the mental model of that person. We need to be able to bring multiple perspectives that enrich the context of the challenges faced and brings alternative solutions to the table.
Move from Repetitive to innovative, if we focus only in predictability and existing systems performance innovation halts. We should create space for innovation to happen, give room for experimentation and learning from failures.
Go beyond Problem solver to challenger, we need to be careful of not staying in the “putting out fires” mode of problems that arise from day to day operation. Some problems are not evident and we need to challenge our people to discover them and find ways to overcome them.
Change the mindset from Employer to entrepreneur, as time passes and organisations mature some leave behind this mindset in favor of less risk taking behaviours, resulting in teams that just follow stablished proceses to meet managements goals. But as the article states “being entrepreneurial is a mode of thinking” where survival of the organisation is about risk taking and putting emphasis on your customer and innovating for them.