The Manager's Dilemma

Balancing the Inverse Equation of Increasing Demands and Shrinking Resources

J. Sostrin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137485809
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

This groundbreaking book provides a framework and set of key concepts enabling leaders to exert their influence over the difficult choices and competing priorities they confront. Compelling stories and vivid case studies help to deliver a serious game plan to any leader who is grappling with burnout caused by the manager's dilemma.

PART 1

EMBRACE THE DILEMMA

Successful managers solve problems, but problems are like holes in the ground. Our solutions fill them with dirt, but that only gets us back to level ground.¹ As more problems show up, we repeat the exhausting process until the cycle drains our capacity and eventually buries us. If you want to do more than exchange recurring problems for temporary solutions, know that some challenges cannot be solved. Managers face an intractable situation where there is not enough time, energy, resources, or focus to meet the increasing demands they face. This impossible circumstance is a true dilemma, but there is a better response than just shovels and dirt. To gain this leverage, you have to understand the origins of the manager’s dilemma and come face-to-face with the causes and conditions of your own.

INTRODUCTIONS

THE MANAGER’S DILEMMA EXPLORES THE widening gap between the increasing demands we face and the shrinking resources we have available to meet them. However, this is not a time management book to deal with the avalanche of e-mails, meetings, and tasks dropped on your plate. Nor does it offer a packaged set of clever work-arounds to deal with the overflowing and stressful priorities you face. As you will see, it is time for managers to take off their capes once and for all; the superhuman notion of getting more and better work done with fewer resources is a profoundly damaging myth whose time has passed.

Instead, this is a book about the effect that living within the gap has on one of the largest categories of workers in the world: the millions of managerial professionals embedded within every sector and industry of our economy. More importantly, it is a book that reveals how the tension between shrinking capacity and increasing demands forces us into an unwanted status quo where we constantly struggle to make progress, but never really catch up.

Regardless of your experience and rank, if you are responsible for managing people, projects, and priorities, then you are susceptible to this vicious experience that I call the manager’s dilemma. When it emerges for you, it not only reduces your productivity and effectiveness in the short term, but also erodes the quality of your working life in the long run.

Considering the scope and importance of the topic, I wanted to start the book with a remarkable introduction. When I thought about the perfect way to introduce it, I considered setting the tone with a series of thought-provoking questions that would leave no doubt about the importance of the book’s evocative concepts:

• Why are managers flooded with practical advice and credible solutions about what they should do—yet those prescriptions so often fail to make an impact?

• Why do so many managers work hard, follow their plan, and do everything right—yet still fall short of the outcomes and experiences they want?

• Why—despite herculean efforts—is there never enough time, energy, resources, or focus to meet the demands managers face?

At first, I believed that questions like these could stir both curiosity and a deeper sense of urgency to understand what the dilemma is and what can be done about it. But in the end, I realized that these and other important questions need more room for adequate exploration, so I decided they would have to wait to be fully unpacked throughout the chapters.

Abandoning the questions, I wondered if a better introduction would be a series of compelling statistics that would hit the reader hard with unavoidable facts, like a gut punch right out of the gate. For example:

• a full 58 percent of managers say they did not receive any management training¹;

• 80 percent of managers say that the demands they face are increasing²;

• 66 percent say “workload” is the top cause of their stress, outranking “people issues” and “job security”³;

• nearly half of managers say they struggle with a lack of focus and clear direction⁴;

• 61 percent of managers say they are working below their optimal level of energy⁵;

• 51 percent say increased workload has a direct, negative effect on their well-being⁶; and

• over 25 percent of managers admit they were not ready to lead when they were promoted.⁷

While I find numbers like these compelling evidence for the ubiquitous presence of the manager’s dilemma, I wanted a single data point that could somehow tell the story of the book in one powerful statistic. Then I found it—a simple but undeniable measure from a Corporate Executive Board study that revealed: The average manager has 12 direct reports, compared with 7 before the recession.⁸

At face value, this leap represents a 40 percent increase in the average manager’s workload. Between the lines, this means a significant draw on the dwindling time and resources associated with everything managers do, from setting expectations, to establishing priorities, monitoring accountabilities, supporting ongoing productivity, and managing the countless small moves required to sustain the overall effectiveness of their teams. Said another way, it is 40 percent more goal-setting discussions, weekly check-ins, difficult conversations, annual reviews, and so on.⁹

Initially, I was convinced that this would be an exceptional introduction to the book. Both as a statistical fact and as a powerful metaphor, there is a 40 percent drain on your already limited capacity to do what you need to do in the way you want to get it done. This stark number forces you to confront an inevitable question: Where does your additional 40 percent of time, energy, resources, and focus come from to meet the demand?

Compelling statistics, a better way to open the book? Statistically, you’re likely to derail because companies fail to hire the right candidate for managerial positions 82 percent of the time.¹⁰

Despite the logic of the numbers, I still did not feel like this was the best way to start The Manager’s Dilemma. After all, it is a book about the real experience of managers and not about statistics—no matter how compelling. So I wanted to brainstorm a story, a metaphor, or a clever anecdote that could take readers beyond the numbers in order to paint a fuller picture of this complicated phenomenon.

Then, I struck gold: “An umbrella at home won’t keep you dry in the rain.” This obvious, but all-too-familiar, experience really does sum up an essential aspect of the book. The truth is that managers know what they need to do, and in most cases they even know how to do it. However, because of the dilemma’s distracting effect, all of the best practices, first-class advice, and logical prescriptions intended to ease our stress and resolve our challenges are just an umbrella sitting by our front door when we’ve already rushed out of the house and into the storm.

There are thousands of management books about selecting the right umbrella and avoiding storms, but this is a book about how you ended up without yours at the precise moment you needed it most. Even more to the point, it is a book about the practical changes you can make to eliminate those hectic days that cause you to rush out and forget it in the first place.

I was certain that this was precisely the kind of pithy introduction that would intrigue readers, but I ultimately decided against this one too. No matter how creatively it might set the tone, The Manager’s Dilemma is not a high-concept argument; it tackles concrete challenges and presents time-tested tools to resolve them. Therefore, I knew that the introduction needed to be more direct than some abstract analogy. To achieve this (and because the manuscript was due), I chose to go back to basics with a simple statement for the opening line of this book: There is not—and never will be—enough time, energy, resources, or focus to meet the demand.

This is not hyperbole or negative thinking; it is a by-product of structural forces in the economy and society that have combined to squeeze more out of worker productivity while providing fewer resources to sustain those gains. Unfortunately, this is not a new phenomenon either.

For generations, credible voices have described the dangers of what we have literally baked into the role of managers.¹¹ From epidemics of managerial burnout, to the current tidal wave of disengagement that affects leaders and their teams in profound ways, the signs have been there all along. This book just interprets the writing on the wall. Every manager, no matter how talented or experienced, is now vulnerable to the dilemma’s push and pull because it is an intrinsic part of work.

PROBLEMS WITH NO SOLUTIONS

This is not a book about managing your time better, using your energy more wisely, or acquiring resources more ambitiously. Those things help, but in reality the book does not promise conventional solutions because by definition, a true dilemma is unsolvable. Dilemmas cause a tug-of-war between the two competing ends of the continuum where equal and opposing forces (both imperfect and therefore undesirable in some way) remain in tension. The manager’s dilemma reflects this push and pull of irreconcilable choices that are at the heart of what makes leading so difficult.

• Which goal rises above all your other priorities?

• Which “fire of the day” gets extinguished while others are selectively ignored simply because there are too few resources available to put them all out?

• Which project receives funding while other high-potential opportunities languish?

• Which team member gets your attention as other deserving candidates are inadvertently overlooked?

These are just a few examples of the critical assessments, judgment calls, and decisions that frame the ultimate concern for managers. Within each of these difficult questions, you see the endless set of trade-offs managers must make when stuck in the dilemma. In this zero-sum game, each managerial move gene...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part 1   Embrace the Dilemma
• Part 2   Balance the Equation
• Part 3   Flip the Scales
• Conclusions
• Appendix: Blank Nav-Map Templates
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index