The Good Enough Manager

The Making of a GEM

Aaron Nurick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000055795
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Nearly ten years after he wrote this humanistic exploration of The Good Enough Manager, or GEM, Aaron Nurick returns with an updated edition. What makes a GEM at the dawn of a new decade? The book's central questions remain: How do the best managers behave? What sets them apart from their peers? What impact do they have on their subordinates and co-workers? The GEM concept stems from the psychological theory of the good enough parent who provides an environment where an infant learns to develop an autonomous and genuine self. Just as there is no such thing as a perfect parent, managing people in organizations is an inherently human and fallible endeavor, mainly because managing occurs by and through human relationships.

Through the words of over 1, 000 study respondents, GEMs are shown to be mentors and teachers, relationship builders, and models of integrity for their workers. Each of these themes is explored, making connections to the "right brain" thinking of artists and other creative professionals, managing with emotional intelligence, and historical ideas about management and leadership as adaptive human processes. The central humanistic theme of the book, along with its practical implications, resonates more than ever in the current divisive and turbulent environment. The second edition incorporates up-to-date trends and themes, including the impact of increased globalization; increased tribalism, cultural and political polarization, and populism; the great expansion and proliferation of technology; and the emergence of the "gig economy."

Upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as practicing managers, will be inspired to rethink their own approaches to management in business, government, and other organizations.

one
What Is a “Good Enough” Manager?

Humans are complex social and emotional beings. Relationships forged in the earliest stages of our existence are continually recast and recreated as we bring these interpersonal elements of our humanity into new relationships in all realms of life, including the workplace. This book is based on a primary principle: Just as there is no such thing as a perfect parent, managing people in organizations is an inherently human and fallible endeavor, mainly because managing occurs by and through human relationships. The central questions addressed in the following chapters are: How do the “best” managers behave? What sets them apart from their peers? What impact do they have on their subordinates and co-workers? What can we learn from them?

Whenever I am introduced to someone and reveal my identity as an organizational psychologist and management professor, the response is often a variation of “You need to come to my company,” or “My boss is nuts.” As a culture, we hold ambivalent views about those who supervise and manage our workplaces. While we long for strong leaders who take charge and solve problems, we sometimes resist when a leader actually puts his or her authority into practice. Maybe it is a built-in suspicion and skepticism of authority or our simultaneous admiration, fear, envy, and contempt directed at those whom we elevate to positions of status and power. Often “the boss” is the subject of ridicule and the butt of jokes in the form of characters and caricatures on television and in other media, such as the comic sections of newspapers. This ambivalence was brilliantly depicted in the somewhat lovable yet dangerously incompetent character of Michael Scott in the popular television comedy The Office. The comic strips in newspapers and other media are less subtle, as managers are shown to be amoral and clueless buffoons like Dilbert’s pointy-haired and nameless boss, or explosive, hostile tyrants such as the aptly named Mr. Dithers, the tormentor of Blondie’s husband, Dagwood Bumstead.

While most corporate leaders quietly manage their companies out of the limelight, a chosen few of today’s CEOs have blended into our celebrity culture. Modern corporate titans such as Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Michael Bloomberg, and Richard Branson paved the way for Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Howard Schultz, and Elon Musk as innovators and leaders who have become larger-than-life media figures accorded the celebrity status we give to rock stars, athletes, and politicians. They are our modern-day barons similar to Rockefeller, Ford, Morgan, and Carnegie, who dominated the business world over a century ago. Others such as Donald Trump and Martha Stewart long ago transcended their corporate roles and became famous (or infamous) media personas with mega-brands, existing at the center of multiple media shaped in their image. Interestingly, several cultural and political observers have noted that it was Donald Trump’s reality television persona on The Apprentice rather than his more mixed success as an actual business leader that captured the imagination of a significant portion of voters who were looking for solutions to continuing economic strife in the 2016 US presidential election.¹

While we may enjoy reading their books, and watching their television, news, and tabloid (and court) appearances, the mega-bosses, who may have a profound effect on business innovation, culture, and modern life, are not necessarily the ones who have the most immediate impact on the work life of the typical employee. Most of us interact with day-to-day managers who try to anticipate and respond to a multitude of economic, social, and behavioral challenges in order to accomplish the goals of a company or other organization.

Business observers say that bosses get too much credit or blame for the performance of their companies, in keeping with the human tendency to attribute success or failure to the person and downplay the complex interplay of systems, markets, and external forces beyond the leader’s control. Yet research on managerial behavior reinforces the fact that immediate supervisors can have a profound effect on their employees and co-workers, even to the point of influencing their mental and physical health. One study demonstrated that a bad boss can dramatically increase the incidence of employee heart attacks by as much as 20–40%.² The behavior of the manager permeates and shapes the culture of an organization. Employees at lower levels keenly observe and even mimic their managers’ actions, as organizations function in a similar manner to the status hierarchies of primates and other animals. Neurotic bosses create “neurotic organizations” as employees act out the paranoid, compulsive, dramatic, or inhibited behavior of the leaders.³ Given the immediate impact of bosses on the well-being of their employees, it is no wonder that managers are the focus of a multi-billion-dollar consulting industry aimed at promoting, training, and coaching them, evidenced by a plethora of motivational and inspirational programs and books providing Six Sigmas or seven habits in our never-ending search for excellence—and wanting to accomplish it all in one minute.

My continuing interest in the behavior of managers comes from over 40 years of observing, studying, teaching, and writing about those who try their best to organize and lead groups and organizations. Fueled originally by youthful ­idealism and the perpetual curiosity of a graduate student, my life’s work has been about finding ways to improve work life and to make workplaces more human and humane. Most of my efforts have been in the classroom, teaching the psychological underpinnings of life in organizations to undergraduate and graduate students, with an occasional foray into management training and organizational consulting along the same themes. Rather than taking the strategic perspective of “the view at 30,000 feet,” my focus is more at the micro-level—the daily interactions and relationships that shape and color one’s immediate work experience and its emotional undercurrents.

The fields of management and organizational behavior are replete with theories and practical guides to leadership, dating back to early management scholars such as Henri Fayol, Mary Parker Follett, Chester Barnard, Frederick Taylor, and the prolific writings of Peter Drucker.⁴ My own “interpersonal relations” view has been historically shaped more by the ideas of the organizational humanists: Elton Mayo, Fritz Roethlisberger, Douglas McGregor, Kurt Lewin, Eric Trist, and their intellectual descendants Abraham Zaleznik, Harry Levinson, Chris Argyris, Warren Bennis, Manfred Kets de Vries, Anthony Athos, and John Gabarro. As described by Roethlisberger in his autobiography, these scholars, who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, were greatly influenced by the clinical, humanistic, and existential psychologists of the era such as Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Erich Fromm, and James Bugental.⁵ Their emphasis was on the social system, group dynamics, and interpersonal processes, and took institutional form at the Harvard Business School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan Center for Group Dynamics, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, and the National Training Laboratories in Washington, DC and Bethel, Maine. My doctoral research was a direct outgrowth of this intellectual tradition. In my dissertation, I concluded that more direct employee participation in organizational change processes increased their ownership and acceptance of changes, and satisfaction with their work life. This work was firmly grounded in the cognitive-empirical (and highly statistical) domain of my graduate training in organizational psychology. The focus was on showing relationships among measured variables, such as the degree of employee participation and perceived influence (measured on five-point scales) and determining the significance of the results. While the outcomes were illuminating and useful, important questions remained: How do managers create such environments? What attitudes and skills are necessary, and how are these developed?

As my thinking deepened, I diverged from the cognitive and linear models and became more fascinated with psychodynamic interpretations of organizational life, largely influenced by my own experience and training in psychotherapy, and my study and many years of teaching of interpersonal relations in management. It is at this deeper level that one can reveal something beyond surface behavior and begin to approach what is the essence or perhaps something that approaches the soul of a human being. As the writer David Brooks describes, it is “the unconscious realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, character traits, and social norms” that guides our behavior, decisions and relationships.⁶ Building upon my appreciation for and understanding of these unconscious processes, I embraced the “object relations” theories that specifically focus on those significant relationships created in the earliest stages of human development, and that continue to be recreated in various forms throughout one’s life. My study and inquiry led to the discovery of a compelling underlying idea: good enough.

The Meaning of “Good Enough”

The concept of “good enough” is based on the psychological theories of Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst who observed and developed ideas about humans’ earliest interpersonal encounters. His approach to his clinical work with children and patients has been described as deeply personal and intuitive, and he came into each encounter as an authentic presence, feeling the mutual interactions “in one’s bones,” maintaining a paradoxical balance between discipline and freedom.⁷ Such an intuitive orientation begins in our earliest relationships. In Winnicott’s view, the “good enough” mother provides an atmosphere known as a “holding environment” where an infant learns to develop a sense of him- or herself as an autonomous and genuine self in relation to the mother (now, of course, including the father or other primary caretakers). Through early interactions that are primarily nonverbal, the mother allows her child to react to her inevitable imperfections, natural absences, and other “failures.” As Winnicott states:

The good-enough mother … starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure.⁸

This primary relationship is presented as a process of continuous mutual adaptation, a balance between the mother’s complete control and the child’s developing independence, ultimately creating the foundation for the experience and development of interdependence in relationships. The balancing of these forces requires one to work at the boundary between certainty and uncertainty, and the known and the unknown that provides the basis for continued learning and growth.⁹ The good enough mother has the capacity to observe and question her own actions and potential shortcomings, and to respond with empathy to the needs and emotional reactions of her growing child. She can suspend her certainty about what is happening in the child’s developing inner world and remain open and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• CHAPTER 1—What Is a “Good Enough” Manager?
• CHAPTER 2—Discovering GEMs: A Study of the Best and Worst Managers
• CHAPTER 3—GEMs as Mentors and Teachers
• CHAPTER 4—GEMs as Relationship Builders
• CHAPTER 5—GEMs as Models of Integrity
• CHAPTER 6—Becoming a GEM
• Appendix: Manager Survey Results
• Index