Government
organizations are transforming by overhauling their
processes for creation and delivery of services, empowering
the front lines to respond to citizens and constituents,
racheting up expectations of all employees, integrating
technology tools, radically shifting responsibilities
and needed competencies, redefining and deepening their
contractor and constituent relationships, and recrafting
the way they do business. The middle manager works
at the fulcrum of these profound changes. The success
of transformation turns on the ability of the middle
manager to translate for, communicate, negotiate, inspire,
tinker with, and restructure his or her part of the
organization.
|
This article was published
in the Winter
2006 issue
of Perspectives.
Please refer to our Terms
of Use policy regarding acceptable
use of content on the ICF International Web
site. |
|
 In
change management, much is made of the leader's role in setting
the vision, communicating, engaging in the change, setting
and maintaining expectations, and holding his or her lieutenants
accountable. Much also is made of fostering action at the
grassroots level—
empowering
employees to act, taking advantage of their more exact knowledge
of the customer and market trends, valuing employees technical
expertise, and flattening the organization to quicken decision-making.
Grassroots action and leadership are essential to effective
change. However, employee engagement in transformation efforts
is dependent on the employees taking their cues from their
immediate manager, seeing the transformation through the
manager's eyes, witnessing the manager's struggle
in coming to terms with the transformation and his or her
role in it, and looking for the manager to interact and set
direction. The ability of the leader to catalyze his vision
into action rests on whether he has the active support or
only the half-hearted assent of middle managers. According
to Gallup and other sources, employee satisfaction is dependent
on the manager-employee relationship.
During transformation,
the engaged middle manager must make the hardest choices.
It is most often the manager's decision to change a process
that puts the jobs of a set of employees at risk because
staff may not have the analytical skills to work effectively
in the new process. And it is the middle manager's responsibility
to communicate with those employees; to discuss the impact
on their jobs; to provide the rationale, resources, and options
available to employees; and to be firm about the changes
while compassionate about the impact. If a function is identified
as more efficiently and less expensively conducted by a contractor,
the middle manager plays a role in that decision and is responsible
for facilitating the transition.
Without the middle manager's
engagement, the most valuable employees may walk out the
door in reaction to the insecurity or lack of recognition
in their jobs. Without the middle manager's direction, the
employees may understand the broad vision at the organizational
level, but never be able to make it operational for their
own work, day to day, hour to hour. Without the middle manager's
voice, employees may ascribe ill motives to the organization
and its leadership to fill the information vacuum. Without
the middle manager's relationships, contractors and constituents
may become disenchanted as the methods or nature of their
transactions shift as a result of the transformation.
A Manager's
Role in a Transforming Organization
In ICF International's work
with government agencies, the private sector, and nonprofit
communities, we have found that middle managers play five
essential roles in a transforming or transformed organization.
The Transformation Crucible: The Middle Manager's Roles
(1)
Manager as Information Conduit and Translator.
Managers play
a critical role in translating and conveying information,
meaning, and application to their employees. They are the
conduit—the path through which a leader's intentions
are made actionable during transformation efforts. However,
the conduit is not a one-way path, but at least two directions,
and frequently travels in multiple trajectories given the
networked nature of the work of most organizations. Managers
can reinforce messages with peers, project teams, consultants,
contractors, and others inside and outside the organization.
Managers can pass along information on employee reactions
to transformation, consider reasons to adjust transformation
projects as a result of credible employee objections, and
push for developing clear directions when there is ambiguity
in the transformation vision. Managers must step up, inhabit
this role, and start talking. Leaders, project teams, and
stakeholders must seek out the information managers to adjust
and make their transformation projects more effective.
(2)
Manager as Configuration Wizard – Part 1 (Processes).
Linear, horizontal organizational processes
of the past created and delivered services with clear handoffs
between departments and specialized job functions to complete
each stage of the process. In contrast, these processes are
anything but linear in a transformed, networked organization.
Managers today have a wide array of tools in their toolkits
to reinvent and manage their business processes. To be competitive
and meet performance requirements, they need to weave together
different kinds of work and workers (full-time employees,
contractors, remote suppliers, service centers, temporary/detailee
workers), resources, the capacity of all their different
types of employees, technologies, suppliers, stakeholders,
and customers in a networked process that creates value.
This becomes a configuration challenge of matching the right
set of skills and capabilities with the resources and necessary
outputs at each stage of a networked process. This configuration
role must include building in the sensing mechanisms so that
the organization can adapt quickly to changing customer conditions
and ensure that the system actors learn new information to
apply in the next customer or production interaction.
(3) Manager as Configuration Wizard – Part
2 (Relationships).
In addition to configuring operations
and processes, managers also must organize and structure
the nature of their relationships across the constellation
of the network. In supply-chain management, suppliers and
contractors are stratified depending on their prices, quality
of work, capacity, the history of the relationship, willingness
to collaborate, ability to reciprocate with knowledge and
innovation, and other factors. The suppliers with closer
relationships cost more and reap greater benefits; those
with more transactional relationships have less at risk,
but do not receive the same benefits. Each transaction has
the potential to deepen and make more vital the relationship
or to weaken and compromise it. Absence or low-frequency
interactions or transactions is an indicator of relationship
atrophy. In working during transformations, managers must
intervene to shore up or let go of relationships, internally
and externally, as the short-term and long-term needs of
their operations change.
(4) Manager as Interpreter.
A single, long-time customer complains about
response time that has not increased. An isolated contractor
describes a piece of technology another client organization
is using to track projects and communicate more effectively.
Middle managers work every day with employees on the front
lines of customer, supplier, regulated community, and other
networked stakeholder interactions. Subtle shifts in requirements,
expectations, service quality, and needs happen in those
interactions. The employees are the first to experience these
changes—the manager the second.
Employees engaged in the heat of the transactions between
themselves and other members of a network frequently miss
the patterns and larger meaning behind these highly nuanced
changes. The manager is the one who can make those connections,
recognize the patterns, and communicate them in a meaningful
way throughout the organization. Transformations spring from
these interactions, and their effectiveness is influenced
by the changes in customer conditions—in workforce
demographics, technologies, and supplier relationships. The
manager plays the profound role of making these changes meaningful
and actionable on the part of the organization.
(5) Manager as Appraiser.
Home appraisers assess
the condition of houses, compare them to the local market,
and develop and estimate price ranges for the houses. Managers
play an appraisal role by constantly monitoring, adjusting,
and enhancing the value their operations provide for,
and the costs and resources invested. Managers must create,
update, and maintain the specific measures that track
how value is created for all the network participants
involved in their operations. These appraisals not only
include measuring cost and financial performance, but
include balanced indicators, such as the quality of the
supplier and customer relationships, the relative value
created at each stage of operations, and development
learning and its speed to application. During and after
transformation, managers must create, update, and maintain
the specific measures that track how value is created
for all the network participants involved in their operations.
While
organization structures are flattened to speed up decision-making
and improve response time, senior executives leading transformations
recognize the roles middle managers plan in making the
transformations successful. Middle managers bring meaning,
energy, and operational acumen so that the entire organization
can attain the opportunities available in transformation
initiatives.
Learn more about ICF International's capabilities in organizational
development and transformation.
|
