In times of continued economic turbulence where many organisations are cutting costs, down-sizing and demanding more for less the pressure on leaders has increased exponentially. Many leaders find themselves taking on additional tasks – the activities which were previously done by members of the team who are no longer there. It is often a natural reaction, especially where the leader has been promoted from within the team or from within the department and has the required skills or knowledge. Short-term this helps and may even boost the overall team productivity as others see the leader mucking-in.
But the long term impacts of leaders ‘doing’ rather than ‘leading’ may be stored up in both companies and the economy, leading to skills shortages through under developed people. You may have a different view and we’d love to hear it.
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Interesting angle. Its pretty clear that if manager is promoted from with then team productivity is bound to drop off at least in the short term. The 'distractions' of leadership, which in reality should be the new manager's prime concern, mean that the individual can not give the same effort and attention as they once did. In addition the team will also be likely to allow their own productivity to be adversely affected now they have an 'ally' at the helm.
ReplyDeleteNormally, the 'succession plan' such as it is has identidied the individual through there work ethic, skill at 'doing' and productivity. No thought is given to the presence or otherwise of any innate or rudimentary 'supervisory' skills. This leads to a sticky situation - 'managing mates'!
If the new manager does not assert herself quickly (which is unlikely) she is on a rocky road to hard-times 'mucking in' for the foreseeable future.
As the team sees her 'doing' they'll subconciously (sometimes conciously) adjust to the leader not being present as a leader and productivity will drop away even further.
With all this negative pressure on performance, the newly appointed leader neds a helping hand. The advice is therefore simple and can be succintly put in a corruption of a familiar saying....
Don't just do something - sit there!