Leadership, the great unresolved challenge

For more than 15 years I have been involved in transforming organisations. In this process, after such a long time, I can identify key aspects that I come across time and again when I drive change and transformation, especially when it is cultural. Managers, both top management and middle management, play a decisive role in change: they can act as major accelerators, or as happens most of the time, as major obstacles. If the former is the case, congratulations, you have come across a visionary leader who is sensitive to what cannot be seen… “What is essential is invisible to the eye”, said The Little Prince. That sensitivity lies in thinking, plain and simple, that people are the most important thing.

Leadership, and giving the right tools to this group, is a never-ending and still unresolved issue. We all know that this is a key group, and therefore we should devote all our time and effort to understanding how to motivate and activate the right levers.

Their importance is often decisive in generating a good working environment: 86% of the impact of an employee’s satisfaction when talking about the most important relationships in their working environment comes from their relationship with their bosses. The remaining 14% is attributed to their colleagues (McKinsey & Company article entitled “The Boss Factor” published on September 22nd 2020).

If we want to change the culture of an organisation, bosses are going to be key factors. Probably because culture, that abstract entity, manifests itself in behaviours and habits, and what child does not look to his or her parents when learning the rules of the game of life; what portrays us better, what we say or what we do? Culture is what unites a collective through a set of beliefs, many of them tacit, and behaviours that are mainly directed by those people who influence us and whom we want to resemble.

As the Gartner study “9 Future of Work Trends” anticipated at the beginning of 2023, the constant complexity, infinite change and consequent uncertainty in the world we live in does not make the road easy for managers, and the report recommends that we relieve the pressure put on managers. That manager caught between a highly demanding management and the expectations of his or her teams.

At a time when everything that was already happening before the pandemic is taking on a new magnitude, we need more than ever to focus our efforts on accompanying the manager. To equip them with skills that were previously unthinkable. Helping them to transition to a much more facilitating leadership, for example, helping them to set up autonomous teams quickly and agilely, generating the right environment for teams to decide, achieving a greater and better connection between people, understanding the different personal realities in order to work better….

Between team productivity and manager productivity, no one would hesitate to choose team productivity. This allows us to achieve exponential productivity. In this context, in the analysis we carry out with our clients at bicg, we often ask managers how they distribute their working time, in response to the time they spend today with their teams, with their management or with other managers or stakeholders. . All of them agree that they spend little time with their teams and their aspiration is to spend more time with them. Even today, we still find managers who are not very accessible and who are entrenched in an office, carrying out individual tasks, protected from the rest of the team.

The hybrid context has exposed the more traditional management based on micromanagement and shielded by face-to-face team management. And it has rewarded the manager who recognised work by results and objectives.
In a recent Stanford study, they highlight the gap between the manager’s perception of productivity and that of the collaborator: employees perceive that their productivity has increased (7.4%) and senior managers, on the other hand, believe that it has decreased by 3.5%.