Success vs. Effectiveness: The Manager's Dilemma
Why getting promoted doesn’t always mean you’re good at your job—and what truly effective managers do differently.
Welcome to Coaching Contemplations, a newsletter full of ideas and insights that will help you equip yourself with game-changing strategies in leadership and coaching to succeed at work and achieve your goals.
Before we dive in, here are two ideas to share with your curious, ambitious friends and colleagues:
+ Before You Step Into The Office, if you’re entering the professional world, this book is a roadmap of practical tips to help you avoid forming bad habits and feeling lost when challenges arise—tilting the odds in your favour for career success.
+ RYse Journal, a self-coaching journal for mastering the behaviours to motivate yourself and succeed at work.
"Talk is valued because the quantity and quality of talk can be assessed immediately, but the quality of leadership or management capability, the ability to get things done, can be assessed only with a greater time lag."
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton (The Knowing-Doing Gap)
Successful or Effective Managers
Is your goal to be successful in your career or the most effective you can be for your organisation?
As they don't necessarily mean the same thing.
As Fred Luthans shares in the book Real Managers, based on real-world observations of what managers do in their jobs,
The truth is that success and effectiveness are very different attributes.
Successful: Organisations publicly reward their managers by promoting them. Therefore, success can be measured by how quickly people are promoted.
Effective: in the Real Manager research, they measure effectiveness across three dimensions: 1) output of the team, 2) team member satisfaction, and 3) team member commitment.
Successful or effective, successful or effective? We are back to my opening question: is your management goal to be the most successful in your career or the most effective manager for delivering for your organisation? Real Managers exposes the myth that being successful and effective is automatically the same thing and, therefore, requires the same managerial approach. Their research categorised specific observed behaviours of managers going about their day-to-day work into four high-level groupings:
Networking: Interacting with people outside the organisation, such as clients, regulators, and other external stakeholders, and engaging internally with superiors, peers, and more broadly.
People management: Motivating and supporting, training and development, hiring and dealing with conflict within the team or involving other teams.
Communicating: Exchanging information with team members, other teams and peers. Replying to emails and messages and providing management information that is routinely requested.
Traditional management: Involves setting goals, holding meetings with subordinates and the team, planning, budgeting, allocating resources, making decisions, and ensuring adherence to policies and procedures.
Key Traits and Strategies
The researchers used these groups to identify the activities that contributed most significantly to success and effectiveness. Their crucial insight was that:
Successful and effective managers engage in different amounts and types of managerial activities.
The most successful managers carried out substantially more networking and significantly less people development and traditional management activities than effective managers. In contrast, the most effective managers spent significant time communicating and on people development activities and significantly less time networking than successful ones. Traditional management activity levels were broadly similar between the two camps.
The research is sending a clear signal: to get ahead and be successful within organisations and hence be promoted to more senior levels, you need to give a lot of time and attention to networking. That means socialising, politicking with insiders, and interacting with people outside your organisation. These activities are focused away from your team and the development and support of your subordinates and helping them achieve the team's goals. Unfortunately, focusing on these specific behaviours and activities will often give you more exposure to senior managers and decision-makers, so they know you and what you do.
This conclusion regarding how to get ahead in the workplace is consistent with the fact that promotion processes are not always robust. They are not the fine wire mesh sieve that one might envision to capture only the very best for elevation. Instead, like many organisational processes, they are prone to biases and flaws influenced by perceptions of performance arising from visibility, politics and favouritism. The unfortunate result is a gulf between the perception and the reality of the newly promoted manager. People who are effective at getting promoted are significantly different to work with compared to those who are effective at teamwork and developing their teams.
Building High-Performing Teams
There is an important distinction to make as some of my coaching clients don't spend anywhere near enough time on networking and building relationships: Managing up to curry favours and position yourself for promotion is all too common in the workplace; however, managing upwards and networking with peers to help your team accomplish its goals is desirable. The clear signal from the research is that effective managers are getting on with carrying out the activities focused on their team, communicating to share valuable information and provide guidance, and motivating, supporting, and developing their subordinates, all in service of increasing the team's output.
Figure: The difference between work that is focused away from or on your team
I posit that so-called successful managers correlate with bad managers, especially absentee, seagull, inconsistent, and poor communicators. Hopefully, your managerial goal is to thread the needle to be successful and effective. It is possible to do everything the most successful and effective managers do and have your managerial cake and eat it. I will expand on how you do this in future newsletters, so subscribe automatically to get future updates.
📫 - A quote that I am currently pondering
"Data is not Information, Information is not Knowledge, Knowledge is not Intelligence, Intelligence is not Wisdom, Wisdom is not Power, and Wisdom without Power is just Data."
Arthur C. Clarke
🤔 - If you did have the answer to this question, what would it be?
If you can only do one thing for the rest of the year and nothing else, what would it be and why?