Selecting flawed managers

[Blog 14 January 2016; adapted from the last chapter of my book Simply Managing(Berrett-Koehler and Pearson, 2013]

Distributed management enables non-managers with grounded experience to participate in the making of consequential decisions. None can be more consequential than the selection of managers themselves. Taking this excerpt seriously could improve the quality of our management monumentally—and I don’t use this word lightly.

What makes a manager/leader effective? The answer awaits you on all kinds of little lists. For example, a University of Toronto EMBA brochure listed: “The courage to challenge the status quo. To flourish in a demanding environment. To collaborate for the greater good. To set clear direction in a rapidly changing world. To be fearlessly decisive.”

The trouble with these little lists is that they are always incomplete. For example, where on this one is basic intelligence, or being a good listener? Fear not—these appear on other lists. So if we are to trust any of these lists, we shall have to combine all of them.

This I have done in a table, as below. It lists 52 qualities from various lists that I have found, including a few missing favorites of my own. Be all 52 and you are bound to be a terribly effective manager. Even if not a human one.

The inevitably flawed manager.   Successful managers are flawed, like everyone else. It’s just that their particular flaws are not fatal under the circumstances. Reasonable human beings, in other words, find ways to live with each other’s reasonable flaws.  

Fatally flawed, however are those lists of managerial qualities, because they are utopian—and often wrong. For example, who can argue with managers being “fearlessly decisive”? Anyone who has watched a CEO make a disastrous acquisition, for example. And how about “setting clear direction in a rapidly changing world.” Ingvar Kamprad, who built IKEA into a furniture powerhouse, needed fifteen years to do that. Actually, he succeeded because the furniture world was not changing rapidly: IKEA changed it.

Choosing the devil you had better get to know.   If everyone’s flaws come out sooner or later, then for the sake of better management, sooner is better than later Hence, managers should be selected for their flaws as much as for their qualities, instead of ignoring the flaws to focus on the qualities, often just one: “Sally’s a great networker” or “Joe’s a visionary,” especially if the failed predecessor was a lousy networker or devoid of any vision.

There are really only two ways to know a person’s flaws: live with them or work for them. But who among the people who select managers—board members for chief executives, senior managers for junior ones—have ever worked for the candidates? As a consequence, too many of these selections end up with “kiss up and kick down” managers: smooth-talking overconfident, individuals great at impressing “superiors” while mistreating “subordinates.”.

What, then, is the selection committee to do? That’s easy: get past its superiority, to get the input of the people who know the candidates best. They can’t ask the candidates’ partners, because they will be biased, and the ex-partners more so. But they can certainly get the opinions of people who have worked for these candidates.

I’m not one for simple prescriptions in management, but if one change could improve the practice of managing monumentally, it is giving voice in selection processes to those people who know the candidates best, namely the ones who have been managed by them. I am not suggesting that such people elect their managers, although some prominent consulting firms do just that, threw a vote of their senior partners. But I am suggesting that this small degree of distributed management can lead to massively  more fabulously flawed managers.

Composite List of Basic Qualities for Assured Managerial Utopia

Source: Compiled from various sources; my own favorites in italics.

[*] This item appeared on no list that I saw. But it might rank ahead of many of the other items because, way back when, studies indicated that managers are on average taller than other people. To quote from a 1920 study, [REFThe Executive and His Control of Men], Bishops averaged greater height than the preachers of small towns; superintendents of school systems were taller than principals of schools. Other data on railroad executives, governors, etc., supported these findings. The “Super-intendents of Street Cleaning” were actually the second tallest of all, after the “Reformers.” (The “Socialist Organizers” were just behind the “police chiefs” but well up there.) Musicians were at the bottom of the list (p. 25).