The Manager’s Dilemma – Work, Life, and the Myth of Balance
Why Technical Expertise Alone Won’t Prepare You for the Human Side of Management
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 a few 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.
The reality of being a manager
Managing is not supervising. Supervising involves informal responsibilities such as monitoring someone and helping more junior people with specific tasks. Supervisory responsibilities are an important early step towards becoming a manager, but the manager is the one accountable for them (and you). That's because managing means being accountable for people: what they do, their performance, and how the team members present themselves in front of a client and your broader organisation.
Typically, management responsibility is formally documented on an organisational chart. People report to you as they are your direct reports. The manager will be responsible for formal feedback and appraisals, promotion, and development and ensuring their direct reports adhere to the employing organisation's policies and procedures. This formality is essential to document accountability when things go badly wrong. When things go wrong, people, even the best-intentioned ones, will rapidly point out they aren't responsible for that person or that project. It is human nature to do this.
The management reality is the formal reporting line on the organisation chart, especially in the highly regulated world of financial services. You are not currently a people manager if you don't have direct reports. However, as indicated above, you may carry out some management tasks for the manager. Supervision being conflated with managing is especially common in consulting because of the temporary nature of their project delivery teams and more senior practitioners often being involved in several projects simultaneously.
Two seminal books, The Lessons of Experience and Becoming a Manager, are essential for understanding management. I strongly recommend reading both, whatever stage you are in your managerial career. They contain many evergreen insights for aspiring and seasoned executives alike.
In The Lessons of Experience, the authors examine what the first managerial job is like for their new managers. They identify several crucial early discoveries that I want to share with you:
There's more to managing than technical knowledge or corporate policies and procedures—knowing the technically correct answer was much easier than selling it to and working with the people to implement it.
The primary thrust of learning was about people. In order to manage effectively, their sample of new managers first had to learn to become aware of and sensitive to the psychological needs of their new direct reports.
Technical experts find it most difficult to switch from solving technical problems to solving human problems, "Perhaps because people simply aren't subject to the rigorous laws of logic or measurable with the precision they are accustomed to."
Unlike the areas in which people demonstrate their technical expertise and hence is what gets them their first managerial opportunities, such as advising on M&A, building highly detailed cash flow models, mapping out business processes, or understanding the financial markets, the new managers quickly learn that people are different - you can't manage everyone the same way.
Humility about their ignorance and the ability to manage something new without having the chance first to master it themselves required them to develop their skills in motivation, persuasion, and influence. Otherwise, they stumbled when attempting to exercise their legitimate authority.
Managing the widely different stakeholder expectations and reconciling them with your best guess of what you should be doing as a first-time manager is highlighted in Becoming a Manager as an unexpected challenge. This key learning was identified as being "emotionally unsettling, for the managers had to act as managers before they understood what their role was." The key differences in expectations were highlighted as being:
New managers' initial expectations: were mainly one of formal authority and managing the task, not the people, with an emphasis on rights and privileges instead of duties.
Subordinates' expectations: the manager's job is to support them by creating the conditions for the team members to succeed and not infringe on their ability to perform as individual producers.
Superiors' expectations: to contribute to the superior's agendas and meet the objectives set for them—both in the team's short-term production and the business unit's longer-term strategic goals. They emphasised the duties involved in the role, specifically being accountable.
Peers' expectations: to give clear guidance so the team would be forthcoming in sharing information and work collaboratively with other teams in the business.
Many of the managers interviewed in Becoming a Manager, one year into their new roles, shared a realisation,
"That the managerial role required balancing fundamental tensions. They came to understand that overload, ambiguity, and conflict were inherent in the managerial role. They had to learn to live with imperfect solutions and with the knowledge that they could not be experts about everything. Their job was to manage the trade-offs."
This aligns with the prominent American economist, social theorist, and political philosopher Thomas Sowell's opinion from his book The Conflict of Visions
"There are no solutions, only trade-offs."
This statement is a profound observation for managers. This guiding principle applies to another aspect of your work as a manager: the inevitable conflict between work and life outside work. Often referred to as work-life balance. But as Seth Godin writes in his blog,
"There's no such thing as work-life balance. There's simply life. And you spend part of your life at work.
One way to change the pressure of work is to expand or contract the size of the container that holds it. It's a trap to embrace a productivity shortcut that isn't a shortcut at all - simply more time spent.
Boyle's law helps us realise the same thing about any gas in the physical world. The pressure is related to the volume.
The challenge in making a life is to think about the size of your work container.
That's not easy. It comes with trade-offs."
This is another crucial discovery for new managers. Paraphrasing Andy Grove from his book High Output Management,
"Your work as a manager will never be done. There is always more to be done, more that should be done. Always more that can be done."
This observation means that managers often have to put work first to be considered successful. I am not saying it is correct; it is an axiom for all intents and purposes. Let's use an example to demonstrate. No doubt most of you will agree with the statement that "Family is the most important thing." So if you are about to leave the office or sign off for the day to get home for date night, or to put the kids to bed or something similar, but one of your team grabs you with a pressing issue relating to a deal you are trying to close or a vital client wants to talk about a significant move in the markets. What do you do? For most of you, it is probably easy - you are ambitious. You will stay and deal with the new crisis your direct report brought you.
But appreciate that there will always be another problem or crisis, as they are never-ending. Managing conflicts and trade-offs to ensure your team remains focused is foundational to success in your role.
📫 - A quote that I am currently pondering
"You need to have a high tolerance for disorder but do not tolerate disorder. Because your role is to drive order and hence increase your teams' output.”
Andy Grove (High Output Management)
🤔 - If you did have the answer to this question, what would it be?
What are you hiring yourself to do?