The Manager’s Paradox

by Rod Collins

 

Today’s managers are confronted with a challenge that previous generations of business leaders never had to handle: navigating between two worlds. Whether we realize it or not, one of the consequences of the sudden and rapid emergence of the technology revolution is that we are in the midst of a massive paradigm shift that is changing all the rules for how the world works, especially the world of business.

For well over a hundred years, managers and workers have shared a common paradigm that assumes that the best way to organize the work of larges numbers of people is to build top-down hierarchies. Regardless of how they feel about their working arrangements, most people assume that projects are best handled when we break them into discrete parts, divide the labor, and then reassemble the finished work under the direction of a cadre of supervisors. Accordingly, the longstanding visual model for this century-old management paradigm has been the organization chart. Until recently, hierarchical organization charts have been the one thing that all companies had in common.

However, that began to change at the start of the new millennium when the technology revolution spawned an entirely new paradigm for organizing the work of large numbers of people. Thanks to the proliferation of the Internet, people began to discover new ways of working together by doing something that was never possible before: self-organizing their own work. Up until this time, the working assumption was that large numbers of people could not effectively coordinate their activities unless there was someone in charge. However, two of the earliest incarnations of self-organization, Wikipedia and Linux, disproved that assumption when they demonstrated that self-organized online networks are capable of working smarter, faster, and cheaper than their bureaucratic counterparts.

Managers who hold onto old assumptions and deny the realities of a post-digital world may be doing so at their own peril. Regardless of managerial preference, the arc of today’s technology clearly favors networks over hierarchies. That’s why the fundamental paradigm for effective management has already begun an inevitable shift from top-down organization charts to peer-to-peer networks. Going forward, companies are more likely to look like Google than General Motors.

Whenever dramatic change like this happens, there is a period of time when both the fading and the emerging world-views coexist. Coexistence is rarely smooth because large-scale paradigm shifts, by their nature, are highly disruptive. Right now there is a unique and unprecedented challenge for many managers because they suddenly find themselves caught between two worlds. On the one hand, because they work closely with younger workers who are fully versed in digital technology and its new ways of thinking and acting, managers intuitively grasp—even though they may not fully understand—that the world is rapidly changing. On the other hand, these managers must continue to please the corps of senior executives who remain fully invested in the old ways of a fading paradigm.

According to a recent study by CEO.com , only 32 percent of top CEOs have at least one social network account. This means that two out of every three CEOs have no social media presence and are essentially clueless about the dynamics of the most significant economic transformation since the industrial revolution. Bridging the paradoxical gap between these digital strangers and a growing workforce of digital natives is the single most important management task for today’s middle managers. The successful managers are those who resolve this paradox by skillfully learning how to navigate the digital divide.

Until business leaders come to terms with the reality that networks really are smarter and faster than hierarchies, managers who understand the paradigm shift have to find ways to resolve the manager’s paradox. One way to bridge the digital divide is for middle managers to leverage their combined authority by building their own internal networks and involving younger workers in discovering new ways to achieve better business results.  Building politically acceptable networks, where possible, inside traditional companies is a useful strategy for resolving the manager’s paradox, provided these internal networks can clearly create better results. Senior leaders tolerate behavior that produces results. They’ll tolerate new—even “weird” ways—of managing from managers who can effectively navigate between two worlds by leveraging networks to create extraordinary performance. 

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World.