Macrovisions and micromanagement

Introduction

Much has been written about leadership,  management and the difference between them.   The former is associated with creating a shared vision and strategy for the future whereas the latter has administrative and bureaucratic connotations. Most organisations  celebrate leadership but consider management to be little more than an operational necessity.

In view of the exaggerated rhetoric regarding leadership it is of interest to ask how it is actually practiced on the ground.  This question was investigated by Mats Alvesson and Sven Sveningsson in a brilliant paper entitled, Good Visions, Bad Micro-management and Ugly Ambiguity: Contradictions of (Non-) Leadership in a Knowledge-Intensive Organization.  In this post I elaborate on one of their key conclusions:  that there is a gap between  the espoused view of leadership and its practice.

Leadership in theory

The emphasis on leadership in management theory  has lead to the widely accepted notion that leaders matter and that their actions can affect organizational performance and effect change in a positive way. Moreover it is also assumed that it is straightforward to identify leadership qualities in people as these manifest themselves through a set of well-defined behaviours and attitudes. In other words, leadership is a stable and robust concept. The main aim of the authors was to find out how well this theoretical conception of leadership holds up in the real world.

The case study and research methodology

The authors conducted a detailed study of how managers in a knowledge-intensive organisation viewed and practiced leadership.  The study consisted of extensive, multiple interviews with managers at different levels in the company (from the CEO to project managers) supplemented by observations made at management meetings.  Two rounds of interviews were conducted. In the first round, the authors asked the interviewees what their jobs entailed. Most responses centered on vision, leadership and strategy.  However, when asked to elaborate on their responses, most managers described their day-to-day work in terms of administrative and bureaucratic managerial procedures. This pointed to a gap between espoused leadership and how it is actually practiced. In the second round of interviews, the authors attempted to gain some insights into the reasons for the gap.

Macrovisions: the espoused view of leadership

The authors observed that when asked questions about their jobs, most managers spoke of leadership and how they practiced it. Big picture topics such as vision and strategy – what I call macrovisions –  were recurrent themes in their responses . Most managers claimed that their job was to articulate such macrovisions while leaving the details of day-to-day operations to their subordinates.  As examples, consider the following responses from interviewees:

A strongly knowledge intensive work as ours build on independent and active employees who has (sic)  the ability to take their own initiative.

This is consistent with modern themes of worker autonomy in decision, particularly in knowledge-intensive organisations such as information or biotechnology.  Reinforcing this, another manager said:

 I try not to interfere too much in operations. That would be wrong in every way, no one would benefit from that, but I am available if anyone has an operative question, otherwise it’s more me trying to make myself unavoidable in strategic issues but avoidable in operational issues.

Yet another manager spoke of macrovisions in the following way:

And if you provide the big picture, if there is a sense that these [minor decisions] are in the context of the wider strategy and it is not just, bang, bang [shooting with finger from the hip] we shoot this one and now we shoot that one, and now we gallop off in some other direction; if it fits a bigger picture, then I think we can manage. But that is where leadership comes in I think, we need to provide that context and the picture and the overall direction, to say “we are not here in the middle and you cannot [be allowed to] ride off in just any direction.

Macrovisions thus appeared to provide a broad framework within which employees had the freedom to make decisions that were broadly consistent with the organisation’s strategy.

Again, it is important to emphasise that managers were not specifically asked about visions, strategy or leadership, yet their responses invariably alluded to these themes.  The responses suggest that most managers in the company viewed leadership rather than management as their primary role.

This was consistent with the overall management vision set by senior executives.  As the authors put it:

The expectations formulated by higher-level senior managers and made explicit by the CEO on various occasions, is that managers should refrain from detailed management

Indeed, some managers spoke of managing details in derogatory terms. Consider the following response:

Requesting detail which is of no value to your personal job or position, and that can be detail about a specific office, budget thing through to really me going down to the project level and saying, “Well, how are we doing on that project and I really want to know”, so it is about the ability not to do that, and delegate and trust the people.

In short:  most managers felt that their work involved articulating and implementing macrovisions rather than practising micromanagement.

Micromanagement: the practice of “leadership”

A natural question arising from the above is: how did managers actually practice leadership? What are the things they did in their day-to-day work that exemplified leadership?

To answer this question, interviewees were asked what they did in their day-to-day work.  Strangely, most managers reverted to themes they had described in uncomplimentary terms. For example, when asked to elaborate on how he practiced leadership, one manager said:

There are many different ways of working. I think that as a manager here one has to implement significantly more directive ways of handling people, that is, that you say to people that you will spend the next month occupying yourself with this development, I want you to learn about this. I think that you have to have a much more directive way of handling of people in these operations.

This was not an isolated case;  another manager said:

I do get involved from a technical viewpoint, I expect, obviously my knowledge is still developing here, but I expect to understand quite consciously what the group is doing.

Yet another manager, when asked about the leadership tools that he used, referred to things such as budgets, recruitment etc. – things that are usually concerned bureaucratic, administrative procedures. There was little if any reference to activities that one might associate with leadership.

There is thus a clear gap between what the managers professed to practice and what they actually practiced. In the authors’ words:

…the responses brought forth aspects of managerial activities obviously quite far removed from most understandings of leadership in contemporary management literature and also from the more ‘grandiose’ ideas on the subject that they also claim to believe in and base their work on. Managers therefore talk of themselves as leaders without doing much that clearly and strongly refers to ‘leadership activities’. The case study exhibits the contrary: the activities of managers are more closely related to what is understood as micro-management…

Indeed this view was confirmed when the authors spoke with lower level managers. A project manager said:

Perhaps there’s a dialogue about that (leadership) that doesn’t really percolate down to those in production and it tends to become reactive. And micro-management, there’s a will to know too much in detail, when perhaps they should really be working with empowerment, that people are able to take responsibility, to send responsibility for the budget to me and have faith that I take responsibility for my colleagues, and all the positive talk such as “we are going to be the company of choice”, how are we going to realize all that, there’s too much administrative detail going through my superior.

…so much for all the talk of leadership.

The rhetoric and reality of leadership

From the above it is clear that we have a paradoxical situation:  managers believed they were being leaders when they are actually weren’t leading at all. The question is: why did this happen?

The authors offer a number of speculations for this, which I briefly outline below.

Firstly, leadership qualities are generally seen as desirable. Management literature and education tends to place leadership at the pinnacle of managerial practice. Consequently, there is considerable pressure on managers at the middle and senior levels to display these qualities.

Secondly, there is the issue of identity; how managers see themselves. Like those described in the case study, most managers would like to view what they do as leadership rather than “mere” management or administration. As a result, they may unconsciously describe what they do in the flattering language of leadership rather than the mundane terms of management.  However, as the authors stated in the paper, “Leadership talk and fantasies seem to leave a thin spray of grandiosity on the ‘leaders’” Clearly,  this may be of more use in bolstering managerial self-esteem than anything else.

Thirdly, managers often have to deal with conflicting agendas and requirements. In the case study managers were expected to display leader-like behaviour. However, at the same time, they were held responsible for specific and very tangible results. To deliver on the latter, they often felt they had to keep track of the details of what their teams were doing and step in when things were going wrong. There was a continual pressure to get involved in detail while maintaining the illusion of being leaders.

Another point that the authors do not mention explicitly is that middle and frontline managers are often expected to lead without being given the autonomy to do so.

It is likely that some or all of the above factors lead to a divergence between the rhetoric and reality of leadership.

Conclusion

The central message of the paper is that the concept of leadership is an idealization that is often compromised in practice.  Most people who work in organisations will not find this surprising: managers are generally  aware that their day-to-day work has little in common with the  rarefied notions of leadership promoted by management schools, while  others are likely to have worked with  micromanagers  who are masquerading as macrovisionaries.