Are you the boss you need to be? When they are receptive to change managers usually take on new positions and assignments. The ambitious ones stretch themselves to understand the challenges and deliver good results. But as they settle in, they often become complacent — perhaps because they lose the fear of imminent failure. Linda A Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School (HBS), says many of them stop making progress because they simply don’t know how to. Hill, who is also the faculty chair of the leadership initiative at HBS, co-authored Being the Boss early this year in which she offers an approach for managers to understand the transformational challenges of their roles and what it takes to become an effective leader. She discusses the approach, which she calls “the three imperatives”, in a free-wheeling conversation with Amit Ranjan Rai.
You have said in your book that becoming an effective manager is difficult because of the gulf that separates the work of the management from the work the individual performer. What do you mean?
When you are an individual performer, fundamentally, you have a task to yourself that you are responsible for. You are the doer and your success in that task depends mostly on your own efforts and talent. But when you take on the role of a manager, it is likely that you are stepping into a new universe unlike you’ve encountered before. Many get into it assuming that the new role will be an extension of the old — that is, they’ll keep doing what they do, except they will also be exercising more control over the work of others. They think the managerial role will be a broader extension of managing themselves. But that is never the case. It’s only with time that you realise the managerial role is very different.
|