As managers, particularly as we become more senior and accumulate more responsibility, it’s tempting to get lost in our own growing sense of self-importance and start to believe that we are the ones that add the real value. The reality though is quite different.
As we shift from doer to leader, we remove ourselves further from the processes that create the real value for our customers (and I use customer in the broadest sense, to include – for example – the beneficiaries of not for profit organisations or the communities that government agencies serve). We spend less and less time, if any, on directly delivering services to our customers or making the goods that they need. Hence we become an overhead cost (consuming our salary, the supervisory attention of our manager, the time our team spends with us etc.) that the organisation must support from the value surplus generated by our frontline colleagues.
So how do managers add value?
Managers add value to the organisation indirectly, by enabling our teams to be more impactful than they would be without us. The marginal difference between team performance with us leading them versus its performance with an average manager represents the total value that we add as managers and from which we must subtract our costs. When we are effective in our roles, we add value (the top right of the chart below), but when we do our job poorly, our marginal impact will be negative (the bottom left of the chart below).
If our team is no more impactful given our presence than they would be without us (and with another, average manager), then we’re failing to deliver any value in return for the organisational resources that we draw upon and represent a negative return on investment for the organisation.
So what?
Once we start to recognise ourselves as overhead, we can focus our mind on how we can be most helpful to our teams, to help them grow their impact in a way they wouldn’t without us. We stop seeing our teams as being there to support us and instead see ourselves as being there to support them.
We need to shift our gaze from the traditional upwards orientation toward serving our boss, and turn it instead to serving our teams. To removing roadblocks, developing their capability, improving processes, creating purpose and alignment, engaging them and doing what it takes to make them more impactful. Every hour that we spend with our teams should enable them to create even greater value for our customers.
This also creates an inconvenient truth for some managers who tend to underperform and for all of us who might find ourselves off our game at one point or another in our career. If our teams are performing below average (when compared to a similar team in a comparable circumstance), then our managerial effectiveness at that point is below average (and, if we all think we’re above average, roughly half of us will be wrong). This isn’t the end of the world though, it’s just time for us to take responsibility for the situation and commit to lifting our managerial effectiveness.
Sadly, I have encountered situations in my career where frontline managers reporting to me were quick to blame their team members for team underperformance. With the exception of the limited period that comes after we take over managing an established team (which is measured in months, not years), the team’s performance holds a mirror up to our own effectiveness.
If a manager looks around at his or her team and thinks people are generally underperforming, they themselves are almost certainly the underperformer.
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