Council has spent quite a bit of time over the past few months reading resumes and interviewing a slate of absolutely fantastic applicants for the position of Chief Administrative Officer (CAO). Naturally I can’t talk about any of them individually, but one thing that stood out from the candidates that were interviewed is that they value leadership over management. I mentioned this briefly in my last post about CAOs, but it’s worth talking about in more depth.
Management
Traditionally, organizations were very hierarchical: everyone had a boss, usually called a manager, who made sure that your work was done correctly and in a timely fashion. A manager often has other administrative duties, but a big portion of their job is about directing and coordinating the staff who report to them, supervising the work and ensuring that the right inputs are turned into the right outputs, and then reporting on that work to their own manager.
I want to stress that this is legitimate work: that kind of coordination is important to having an efficient department. But there are a lot of pitfalls to this approach.
Micro-Management and Motivation
In many cases, employees are quite capable of coordinating amongst themselves. Some jobs are fairly straightforward, and require no supervision or coordination; other jobs are quite complex, but highly collaborative, so inserting a supervising and coordinating position into the middle of an already complex collaboration is unnecessarily complicated. In those situations, a manager’s main job (coordinating the work) also happens to be part of their employees’ job, which leaves them with little to do other than looking over other peoples’ shoulders and looking for things to correct or improve. Rather than producing anything themselves, the manager exists largely to do performance reviews and produce reports – i.e., to critique the people who are doing the actual work.
Nobody likes having someone else tell them how to do their job. Having a structure in which someone else gets paid more than you just to tell you how to do your job, or to otherwise find fault with you, is inherently demotivating.
There are two main types of motivation: intrinsic motivation comes from inside, extrinsic comes from outside. The old-school hierarchical management style is all about extrinsic motivation, and usually includes carrots (rewards) and sticks (punishment). In that mindset, it is the boss’s job to motivate employees by providing rewards (praise, bonuses, promotions) or punishment (disciplinary action, or getting fired). In that approach, employees tend to work just hard enough to not get fired, as brilliantly shown in the classic film Office Space:
In this clip, the only motivation options are extrinsic: Peter explains that he has only negative motivations, which results in him working just hard enough not to get fired. The management consultants respond by offering a positive extrinsic motivation: some reward for working harder, rather than just a punishment for not working hard enough. That’s an improvement from Peter’s perspective, but notice he isn’t very excited about that either. His work is itself inherently demotivating: it’s boring and arbitrary, so even when he’s working hard it doesn’t feel like he’s accomplishing anything. He can’t see the bigger picture, or the importance of those TPS reports he’s constantly having to write.
Leadership
Leadership, on the other hand, is not about checking up on what other people are doing. It is about casting a vision for the work that we do together, and then supporting the entire team as they move toward that shared goal. It shifts all of the focus to intrinsic motivation, our inner drive to accomplish something.
People are typically motivated by the satisfaction of accomplishing something, especially if it’s something that feels important to them. A leader, then, needs to be able to cast a clear vision of the goal and why it is important. Once a person has a clear vision that they’re tasked with working toward, we will naturally exercise our own creative problem solving skills (which feels really good) to apply our own specific skills and talents (which makes us feel good about ourselves and our abilities) toward the shared goal (which makes us feel like we’re contributing, and gives us common ground for interacting with others). For most people, in most settings, that’s worth a whole lot more than stock options, at least in terms of what motivates us to work hard. And the most effective and important extrinsic motivation comes from recognition and respect, more than money or punishment; people will move mountains if they feel respected for their work. And nobody needs to check up on us to make sure that we’re doing our jobs; the rest of our team will know that we’re struggling or disengaged.
At that point, we still need someone to look out for the group as a whole and do some of the management work we talked about before; one person struggling can cause problems for the team as a whole. But while a traditional management approach might be a matter of talking to an employee about their job description and working out extrinsic motivations (i.e., disciplinary matters), a more positive management approach that’s often linked more to leadership is to look at the bigger picture and ask “do you need something to help you?” Often low performance is a matter of lacking resources, training, or sufficient time to get something done. Sometimes the thing an employee needs to be productive is some rest, sick days, or therapy, so that they can be healthy enough to work well. Leadership-oriented managers are more likely to trust their employees to ask for what they truly need, and provide it. Traditional managers might require sick notes for any time off; a good leader will establish and trust that their employees are looking for the best way to achieve their goals, and give them the latitude to take time off or arrange their schedules as needed.
CAOs as Leaders, and Managers
There is not a clear distinction between a leader and a manager; “manager” and “leader” can both be used to refer to the position of responsibility, as well as the approach to working with others. I’ve used “manager” to point to all of the negative aspects of that approach and “leader” to point out positive approaches, but there is such thing as a bad leader and a good manager. Every Chief Administrative Officer will be a bit of both: they are ultimately responsible for the work of the municipality as a whole, and they will need to motivate and organize their team to get that work done.
The candidates we interviewed talked about their role with clear reference to leadership themes, rather than traditional (micro-)management tropes. I heard terms like “servant leadership”, which is about inverting a hierarchy so that the person at the top of the pyramid is actually the servant of all, seeing their primary role as supporting the workers rather than making demands of them. I heard “flat structure”, which is an anti-hierarchical approach that is increasingly common, in which everyone on the team has their own responsibilities but nobody is “above” the others. I heard candidates talk a lot about mentoring their staff, and collaborating with others. There was a broad recognition that many of our staff are seasoned professionals who know their jobs extremely well, and don’t require anyone telling them what to do; they talked about the importance of recognizing good work in such people, and rewarding the value that they bring to the municipality. I was very impressed with the approach to leadership exhibited by all of the top candidates.
The CAO’s leadership role also puts them in a bit of an awkward space, because while they are the leader of municipal staff, council is the leader of the municipality more broadly. Council decides the strategic direction of the municipality, casting a vision that the CAO must then translate into operational objectives: they decide how to do the things that we decide should be done, and then municipal staff carry out those objectives, using their own creativity and skills to do so. So the CAO embodies the leadership of council for staff, and embodies the creative capacities of staff when reporting to council. In that respect, one of their key skills is restraint, to constantly avoid stepping into the roles of staff or council. It’s a fine line to walk, but when they do it well it allows all of us, staff and council, to do our jobs better.
Our current CAO’s term will end in March, and shortly after that we’ll have a new CAO. The transition will take some extra care and attention by everyone at the municipality, but residents shouldn’t notice a difference right away, if at all. Our staff are excellent at their jobs, and I have full confidence that they will continue to provide excellent service to residents. My general impression is that we will be going from good to good in this transition, which is good! But I’m so encouraged to know that these leadership perspectives are so common, because the top-down hierarchical management style has dominated for far too long. I’m proud to be a leader of an organization that recognizes and supports the creative problem solving and collaborative capacities of our amazing staff!