SHR 10.1108/SHR Strategic HR Review 1475-4398 Emerald Group Publishing Limited 10.1108/SHR-10-2013-0098 Articles Strategic commentary HR & organizational behaviour Employee behaviour Why good management is so difficult Birkinshaw Julian 4 2 2014 4 2 2014 13 2 peer-reviewed no academic-content no EContentType JOURNAL rightslink excluded <bold>Why good management is so difficult</bold>

Article Type: Strategic commentary From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 13, Issue 2

Thought leaders share their views on the HR profession and its direction for the future

A few years back, a team at Google sought to find out what good management looked like in their company (Bryant, 2011). Under the codename Project Oxygen, they studied 10,000 performance reviews and came up with the following answers:

be a good coach;

empower your team and don’t micromanage;

express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being;

do not be a sissy: be productive and results-oriented;

be a good communicator and listen to your team;

help your employees with career development;

have a clear vision and strategy for the team; and

have key technical skills so you can help advise the team.

This is a good list, because it rings true. But it is also useless – because we already knew all this. Let’s say you work at Google and you want to improve your managerial skills. Are you going to study this list, and evaluate your progress against each of the eight points? Are you going to pin it up next to your desk, so you can refer to it next time you are meeting with one of your team?

My guess is you are not. This list is about as useful to you in becoming a better manager as "ten steps to a healthier diet" to an overweight businessman, or "how to perfect your golf swing" to an aspiring Rory McIlroy. The challenge with management, in other words, is not about figuring out what to do – it is about doing what we know we should do, but do not.

The knowing doing gap

So why does this "knowing doing gap" arise? There are some obvious reasons. First, managing well is harder than it seems because you need to understand what motivates your employees, and every employee has slightly different needs. So, giving employees space to act is a good thing; it is also possible to give them too much space. Challenging tasks are good, but impossible tasks are not.

Second, managers have competing priorities and limited time. If you only had a single direct report, it would be fairly straightforward to structure his/her work to make it suitably challenging. But many managers have five or six people reporting to them. They have their own work to do, they have bosses of their own to answer to, they frequently travel a lot, and they have calls on their time from dozens of other people. Throw all these things into the mix, and then add whatever economic or corporate crisis has just hit, and it is no surprise that even the most well-intentioned and skilled executives fail to do the managerial part of their jobs well on a consistent basis.

But underlying both these is a third point, namely that for most of us managing is actually an unnatural act, by which I mean it involves us behaving in a way that goes against our basic instincts. There is a lot of academic research out there looking at the natural predispositions we have as humans. This research shows that most of us are fairly selfish, control-oriented, and risk-averse. There is nothing wrong with these traits – they are inherited things that our forebears passed on to us, and you can see how they might have been useful traits for surviving in earlier times. But of course these are not the traits of a good manager; far from it. As Google discovered, a good manager is more focused on his/her people than himself/herself; they are prepared to delegate rather than stay on top of everything; and they are open to taking a few risks and allow mistakes to occur as a way of helping others to learn and develop.

Becoming a better manager

So the starting point for becoming a better manager is self-awareness – a recognition that you have certain behavioral flaws that you need to overcome if you are to do your job well. Armed with this awareness, you can then start to develop specific tactics. For example, if you find yourself dominating meetings, put someone else in the role of chairman and ask them to give equal airtime to all participants. If you are a micro-manager by habit, you need to become more explicit up-front about what the deliverables are around a project, so that you and your subordinate can agree which decisions belong to each of you.

The other piece of simple advice is to seek feedback. If you want to become a better golfer, you do not read a book you hire a Pro. The skill of managing is no different – you need a trusted colleague, mentor or coach to help you figure out your limitations, and to help you correct them. Becoming a better boss takes time, and requires a willingness to adapt and learn.

Julian Birkinshaw London Business School, London, UK

References

Bryant, A. (2011), "Google’s quest to build a better boss", New York Times, 12 March

About the author

Julian Birkinshaw is Professor and Chair of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School. He is a fellow of the British Academy, a fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (UK), and a fellow of the Academy of International Business. He is co-founder with Gary Hamel of the Management Lab (MLab). Professor Birkinshaw received his PhD and MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business, at the University of Western Ontario; and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Durham. In 2009, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Stockholm School of Economics. His main area of expertise is the strategy and organization of large multinational corporations. Julian Birkinshaw can be contacted at: mailto:jbirkinshaw@london.edu