A colleague sent me a link to a John Hersey blog post about the role of a leader. He argues an effective leader is not one who can come in and solve problems single-handedly, leaving people wondering how this miraculous solution was enacted so quickly. No, a real leader/manager is one who sets up his team to solve (and I would add prevent) their own problems. The manager’s job is to make sure the right problems are getting solved, but not to go in and solve each one directly, even though she may be very capable of doing so. A true leader does not try to appear the hero, but sets up her team to be successful themselves.
One bit of Hersey’s post that rang a few bells was the following:
It is very common to hear managers talk about the quantity of emails and voice mails they receive, about the amount of projects, meetings, and endless hours they work, and one never knows if they are bragging or complaining. One thing is certain though, these managers get trapped into this vicious cycle because it makes them feel important, because it puts them in the heart of the action, because they are making things happen. They depend on the adrenaline rush that comes with solving urgent problems, on being the savior of their poor and ill-fated team.
Boy, have I seen that before! Particularly in institutions that have not yet made the transition from construction and commissioning to operations, which describes nearly every astronomy institution I’ve been involved with – even those that should have clearly been in an operations mode already!
Getting projects up and running on time and budget while pushing the frontiers of current technology, doing what none have done before, is exciting stuff. The rush from being completely absorbed in your project and heroically solving the latest challenge is addicting, but it’s not a sustainable way of being and it’s certainly not for everyone. At some point, in addition to (or perhaps rather than, in some cases) bringing new capabilities online, you have to stop and make what you already can do more efficient. You have to stop to smooth the rough edges and establish a system that doesn’t require regular heroics to operate. While you want your key innovators to be working on that next project, you want their previous projects to become stable and operable by mere mortals. In other words, you need a staff for construction, commissioning, and innovation, and you need a different staff for regular operations and maintenance. (You may need another staff to make that transition for you as well.)
If you don’t make this conscious shift in staff and their organizational roles as your project matures, you end up with just the kind of bravado Hersey describes. You end up with staff that continues to find rewards mainly by finding (and sometimes even creating) fires so they can then heroically swoop in and put them out, when what you want is a staff that predicts what fires might occur and works behind the scenes to prevent them before they ever have a chance to start. Being a hero for answering 300 emails a day and solving 6 problems at the last minute may be far removed from the challenges of bringing a new facility to life, but a real fire fighter lives to fight fires, wherever they are, or can be created!
In a typical project, the stars from the project’s start-up phase end up being promoted to managerial positions by the time the project should be switching to a more sustainable operations phase. But this approach clearly results in a classic mismatch. Managers trained to, and rewarded by, putting out fires end up trying to manage a team that isn’t designed or made for fire-fighting. The newly-hired operations staff will not be the fire-fighting innovators that started the project (people like that would never take an operations job), but they are often managed by those that are. Unless these managers make a very purposeful effort to switch gears, a fire-fighting culture and generally unhappy employees will be the result. Much better to give new projects to your innovators and hire (or train) new managers to run a stable operations staff.
Having helped set and put out several fires of his own, Scot spends most of his time these days trying to predict and prevent trouble before it bursts into all-out flame. It’s perhaps less noticeable work, but personally, very rewarding.