There are several management levels in every organization, however, there is one distinction worth noticing: demarcation between managers who build and managers who destroy. They will both remain relevant in their own unique ways. However, understanding the attributes and strategies employed by each one of them is the cornerstone separating the successful growth from chairing operational disarray.
The Manager Who Builds: The Architect of Growth
Builder managers are called when the need to engineer something sustainable and progressive arises. They are passionate about development, creating new things, and looking into the future. These managers are not mere number pushers; they cultivate ecosystems which people want to be part of,
Key Characteristics:
- Visionary Thinking: They plan from a timeline that is beyond a quarter and does not end with the quarter’s profits. They consequently develop plans for growth in a health way.
- Empowerment: A builder is able to let his/her team do the work, accept titles and responsibilities and take ownership of things. They are not micromanagers.
- Collaboration: A cross functional approach and the ability to bring down walls between departments are two aspects that they are very good at.
- Mentorship: Builders create people. They develop their workforce to keep pace with the growth of the organization.
- Patient with a Purpose: They are aggressive in their pursuit of goals, but they are cognizant of the fact that the return on effort invested is on the long-term and so they pace themselves for gradual advancement and not quick gains.
Approach:
- Focus on Strategic Growth: A builder manager is an active person who looks for opportunities in the market and tries to innovate and expand it.
- Cultivate Culture: They foster an organizational culture that makes people wish to attract, deliver and think creatively. They value employee engagement and motivation as much as they do the financial performance.
- Long Term Play: Every decision made is done so with an eye on the desire for an enduring purpose. Builders do not like to put themselves in a position where they are too far in debt or where they leap into disastrous risk-taking adventures, they prefer slow steady progress, not boom and bust.
Example:
Satya Nadella, the Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Corporation since 2014, is a good architect/builder case in point. He took over a company that was frozen by the success it had enjoyed in the past. Under the leadership of Nadella, Microsoft moved towards clouds, utilized open source platforms, and altered its bureaucratic culture. The man was all about long term strategies while encouraging creativity and intra-preneurial environment for growth within the company. The stock price of Microsoft grew three times and once more made ‘Big Blue’ among the most expensive companies in the world.
The Manager Who Destroys: The Bulldozer of Efficiency
Destroyer managers function best during periods of conflict, reorganization, and recovery.
Usually they seek out short-term survival or finance. Their strategies may seem to be cruel but sometimes they can be contrary to the tendencies of the times—though in the long run, they tend to profit at the cost of dissatisfaction and wasting organizational resources.
Key Characteristics:
- Efficiency Over Everything: Destroyers in this regard, tend to aim at mast pulling from the least pushing. Efficiency is their leisure time activity.
- Top-Down Control: Since they are detail-oriented: Extreme micromanagement, which results in crushing of creativity and autonomy.
- Short-Term Gains: So, everybody is looking for high temp improvements, and does not pay attention to what will happen after a year or two. These are one made and focused on the next quarter. Sustainability would be some else problem. Most likely, the problem of the next manager.
- High Pressure, Low Morale: Destroyer managers not only do well in stressful situations; they tend to create stressful situations. Results may be achieved, but in return – tired and burnt-out employees leave the workplace.
- Risk-Taking: They do not shy away from any deviations which are sometimes radical and unnecessary to the level of shaking some structures.
Approach:
- Slash and Burn: Their strategy instead focuses on quick return on investment rather than employee talent development. Their toolkit includes, among others, downsizing, reorganizing or divesting low performing business units.
- Culture of Fear: They exert control through where deadlines or KPIs that cannot be achieved are established. This may achieve adherence but very few if any, encourage creativity or dedication.
- Ruthless Prioritization: Their decisions are made purely for the financial bottom line, cutting out anything that is not enhancing revenues or creating value in some way.
Example:
For a tacit demolition style in business management exemplification, Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap of Sunbeam in the 1990s comes to mind, often associated with this demonic term. It became customary for him to fire over 6000 employees or half of the welcomed staff in the company he joined within dwelling months of his nested chair. Dunlap received admiration for his extreme cost-cutting measures and short-term gain driven by increasing the stock price. And he drifted an arch foe of the company from its inside and back the sinking ship in disarray. The fierce degradation of the company left it in starvation, and not long after his exit due to terrible accounting, the company declared insolvency.
Who Do You Need?
The best companies know when it is appropriate to use each type of manager. When it is an up market where resources are sought, when expansion, investment, or any form of transformation is being attempted, then a builder is very appropriate.
When it is about surviving and changing quickly enough, a destroyer may be required – however, be careful and make sure that a builder will be called in sooner or later. Balanced approach in the corporate leadership strategy usually has elements of both, however, changing the vehicular angle at the appropriate time is vital for all.
In my humble opinion….
Destroying managers: often wear a fixed smile, likely thinking about the great bonus they will receive once they are done making a mess. Managers in this area gladly accept any and every communication from the top management irrespective of the solutions or implementations and hardly ever offer any viable dissent or option. They are simply being told to go out, bring short term measurable targets: at all costs. To them, it’s all about running targets behavior, not people or synergies.
Constructive managers, on the other hand, feel good looking, stressed out, or busy, or sometimes all of these feelings in the same day. They find themselves in the crossfire of delivering results for the current period but growing the company into the future. They find themselves having to manage senior leadership expectations against the backdrop of the organization’s long term vision, this skill is essential. Unlike destroyers, builders are dependent on other peoples’ efforts for success teamwork and standing among peers is necessary. And as for the reward for builders? Most often it is not even the bonus that counts, but the sheer sense of accomplishment from actually having built something worth building and that will stand the test of time.