How to be a more effective manager

TUESDAY, JANUARY 22, 2008

Linda Hall

"Becoming a manager is not about becoming a boss. It's about becoming a hostage." That's what one manager told Harvard Business School Professor Linda Hill, author of "Becoming a Manager."

In her studies of star performers who move into management roles, Hill offers insights that can help many managers lead their teams more effectively.

"When most people first become managers, they focus on their formal authority—the rights and privileges associated with getting a promotion," Hill writes in her chapter of the book "Leader to Leader." But before long, "Most managers feel incredibly constrained."

One challenge is managing across the organization, not just up or down, she writes. "The fact is, most of the people who can make a manager's life miserable are people over whom one has no formal authority: that is, bosses and peers. Management has just as much, if not more, to do with negotiating interdependencies as it does with exercising formal authority."

Effective managers develop interpersonal judgment in three areas, says Hill:

• Establishing credibility rather than relying on formal authority
• Building commitment rather than seeking control
• Leading the team rather than managing individuals

Most of the people who can make a manager's life miserable are people over whom one has no formal authority.

They also develop self-awareness and comfort with paradox, Hill says.

"Effective managers realize that every group has its informal leaders, who often have greater standing with the group than the boss," she writes. One manager "learned to listen to these leaders always, to defer to them often, and to let them announce a tough decision occasionally. And he came to see that by sharing powering in this way, he was actually gaining power."