#favouritemodels No. 30 – Leading managers

If your own employees themselves have management responsibility for teams or parts of the organization, the leadership role is expanded by very decisive facets. This is because as they move up the organizational hierarchy, managers increasingly take on an intermediary role in which their direct influence on employees is limited and it is more about influencing an organization indirectly through the next level of managers.

The leadership of managers is therefore no longer (solely) about classic leadership in the sense of creating a framework in which others can perform at their best (Favorite Model No. 1), but about using one’s own leadership work to create and maintain a shared leadership culture with the “co-leaders” in which everyone is motivated and acts on their own responsibility.

Leading other leaders therefore includes the responsibility to create an environment and atmosphere that enables other leaders to lead effectively.
To this end,the focus of a continuous learning process with the management team is primarily on the joint discussion of values, convictions and supposedly self-evident principles that should guide management behavior. Accordingly, leadership at this level is no longer operational, but focuses on the following topics:

… Creating a shared management culture. As with all culture shaping, our Reflect-Talk-Walk-Repeat model (Favouritemodel No. 25) also helps here. However, the core responsibility lies in coordinating the leadership approaches of the entire management team with each other in such a way that they provide effective orientation for joint leadership behavior. Of course, everyone will maintain their own individual forms of leadership. At the same time, it is important that the specific leadership practice itself is made an explicit topic. As part of this continuous communication about leadership within the management team, expectations regarding desired and undesired leadership behavior are clarified.

… Observation and questioning of how leadership is practiced. Based on a common approach to leadership, it is important to continuously monitor how this is actually practiced. This means obtaining and giving feedback on leadership behavior within the team and thus regularly discussing the topic of leadership.

… Introduction of rituals and routines. As culture is mainly maintained through rituals, it is the responsibility of managers who lead managers to establish rituals and routines that serve to support the desired leadership culture. These interventions can vary according to the company’s stage of development, e.g. from annual reflection meetings, to fixed rounds of exchange on the topic of leadership, to the agreement of concrete leadership goals.

… Giving leadership a value in itself. If leadership itself does not generate tangible or visible results, but instead enables others to generate these results, this leadership action needs to be explicitly appreciated. Otherwise, it could be more attractive for a manager to remain active at the operational level and thus generate results themselves instead of enabling others to be successful. Leadership and leadership behavior should therefore be an essential component when measuring a manager’s performance.

… Using and balancing the different perspectives and needs within the organization. To achieve results through others, one of the key leadership tasks is to ensure that the full potential of an organization is realized. Therefore, the leadership responsibility is to look carefully at the preferences and dominant perspectives within the organization to identify which other perspectives could also be helpful in achieving goals. Based on these observations, formats must be developed that enable and recognize the variety and diversity of perspectives. For example, the constant use of creative methods helps to “lift” all ideas and thoughts from the team. The integration of different perspectives is also often successful if they are made a topic at process or meta level, so that people learn in the long term how necessary different points of view are for securing and developing their own business model.

… identify and break unfavourable patterns within the organization. Every organization reproduces itself through a series of constitutional operations. These repetitive actions are patterns that provide orientation for those involved, as everyone seems to know what to do. Sometimes, however, these patterns are still applied even when their original objectives are no longer being pursued. It is therefore the task of managers who lead other managers to observe and question these patterns that exist within the organization. Particularly where they are maintained for their own sake, they must be broken in a targeted manner to enable improvement.

… Enabling others to make decisions based on transparent criteria. The task of managers is not necessarily to make decisions alone. Managers must make decisions when no one else does. First and foremost, however, they must enable others to make decisions. The key leadership responsibility is to make decision-making criteria transparent. As a manager of other managers, it is important to sensitize your own team to this. In addition, the decision-making criteria should be an elementary part of the exchange within the management team to ensure that both decisions and the culture of decision-making are aligned between the teams. This aspect in particular contributes enormously to a coherent management culture.

How does my #favoritemodel help you?

As a manager of managers, direct influence on one’s own organization is limited. As a rule, this only occurs indirectly through the next level of managers.
The key question is therefore: “What leadership intervention could trigger the desired leadership behaviour within the next level and thus achieve the desired influence on the entire organization?”

Accordingly, as a manager of managers, I have to constantly think and act in terms of interventions on several levels.

How should the organization act?
Which leadership behavior favors this action?
Which leadership behaviour fosters leadership behaviour at downstream levels that promotes the desired behaviour throughout the organization?

At the same time, since the concrete leadership actions of the next level cannot usually be observed directly, it is crucial to continuously make the desired and concrete leadership actions in the management team a topic of discussion in order to consolidate the lived leadership culture and to continuously question and further develop the leadership behavior of the management team in personal discussions, for example with the help of second-order observation (Favouritemodel No. 22). As I often find that this perspective on leadership is not so well developed in practice, this favoriteite model is particularly important to me.

Feel free to write to me if you would like to discuss this. By email or on LinkedIn. You can find direct links to these channels in my profile.

Author

Marc Chmielewski
Managing Director