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| Between a Rock and a Hard Place |
| Columns - Management Corner | ||||||||
| Written by James E. Burgin, MDiv, MAC | ||||||||
| Tuesday, 22 July 2008 | ||||||||
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A manager in a workshop I was conducting for leaders recently said: “I
feel like I’m between Scylla and Charybids.” Puzzled, I told him he
would have to translate that for me. He told us an ancient story that
is as modern as your next management challenge. He explained that the phrase came from Greek mythology. Scylla was a horribly grotesque monster living in a rock that endangered seamen on one side of the Straits of Messina. On the other side of the strait was Charybdis another sea monster that, taking the form of a whirlpool, devoured anything within range. Thus, there were risks on both sides, anxiety, a call for careful navigation. We use a more modern metaphor to express the same anxiety when we say we are “between a rock and a hard place.” It is hard to move forward in constructive directions when powerful forces exert pressure on both sides. Managers confront this feeling with some regularity. Organizational life is as complex as personal and family life. Often a manager is caught between competing priorities, competing demands, competing vested interests and competing centers of power and influence — many rocks, many hard places. As a manager matures in the ability to see and understand organizational challenges, dimensions of the complexity become more evident. His view gets more broad and more deep. Listening to a great many managers, I find that they are usually drawing on one of two different models for understanding the challenges. • A static model. Call it the broken part model. Organizational challenges are understood to reside in one area: one team, department, function or individual. This part must be repaired or replaced. • A dynamic model. Call it the rock-hard place model. Organizational challenges are seen as systemic. The architecture for work raises the potential for dynamic stresses — creates a web of influence in which one functions, supports or encumbers, one another. This web of influence must be addressed and every part of the organization aligned with, and made supportive of, every other part. Employees have personalities, are cranky some days, and not always ready to follow leadership. Organizations and their several departments have histories and assumptions that they have difficulty viewing objectively. The environment in which the organization provides service is changing in ways that are challenging. Effective managers work out of each of these models — using now one and now the other, depending on which seems to offer the best insight and hope for constructive intervention. The choice is often made in the absence of certainty of outcome, leaving managers wondering: “Do I provide closer coaching for this counselor, continue working to improve the interface between counseling and the business office, or refer him to our Employee Assistance Program (EAP)? Or, do I do all three? And do I have the emotional wherewithal to do that?” Rocks and hard places. Currently there are at least two places where managers in our field can help themselves by use of the rock-hard-place model: • Their wish to lead needed changes in the culture of our organizations • Their personal/professional development in management Leading culture change Our field is passing through culture change on a cocktail of steroids and amphetamines. Rocks and hard places are everywhere. Clinical practitioners are being called to integrate a business perspective with their historic professional values. Addiction counseling is being remodeled with new modalities and best practices research. Accountability to the tenth power is demanded. More services are competing for fewer dollars. Managers are called to facilitate these processes — to lead changes that will increase services and improve quality. But they recognize competing forces (rocks and hard places) in each of them: business — clinical, old models of care — new models, accountability to professions — accountability to third parties. Kurt Lewin provided a framework called force field analysis that helps managers who are assessing the relative force of the rocks and the hard places. While his method can be discounted as only a novel way of showing the obvious, creative managers will on occasion find that a blinding flash of the obvious gets organizational processes moving forward. Once a manager gets clear about desirable change directions, force field analysis helps her think through how to increase the strength of the forces that will drive the change. She can use Lewin’s framework for analysis and strategy development by building a chart. Forces are revealed while writing that may not have been obvious earlier. When there is no change, the opposing forces are equal, or the restraining forces are too strong to allow movement. Managers using this analysis then think through how to magnify or add to the list of driving forces, or reduce the power of the restraining forces. Navigating culture change in an organization is something like being in the Straits of Messina. Anxiety for the comfortable lost past on one side, and anxiety over the unknown future on the other. Managers sensitive to this will signal an understanding of both anxieties and the opportunity that lurks in the uncertainty. They show the connections between the old and the new so that team members do not find themselves adrift and hyper-anxious. Personal and professional development One month you’re complaining about how short sighted management is and the next month you are management. The change is personal, not just professional. Most managers in our field come from the ranks of front-line direct service providers. This lays down a development issue that often extends for several years and must be addressed if a manager is to reach his potential. Unaddressed, this issue can leave a manager feeling mid-stream, caught in unsettled identity. As a provider the focus was on developing yourself. As a manager it’s on developing others. Things over which you have relatively little control have become very influential in your success: the behavior of direct reports, the level of support from your peers, the organizational resources that top administration assigns you. Managers represent their teams to administration and represent administration to their teams. During times of stress and rapid change this positions them between a very substantial rock and a very hard place. Reducing the anxiety here often requires a more full transition from a former identity as a provider of direct service. An insufficient transition leaves a manager feeling torn between loyalties. It is a formula for ineffectiveness. I was providing coaching for a manager who had recently taken a new assignment to manage a direct service team caught up in a painful struggle with organizational culture change. She said that the new job was driving her to distraction because every time she tried to facilitate change her team would say, “Oh, the executives are doing it to us again. They . . . They . . . They.” She explained that her team seemed to want to position her as “the good guy,” and top leadership as “the bad guy.” The manager felt caught in the middle — and she was. I suggested that she empower her leadership by taking herself out of the middle — that she position herself clearly as a manager and avoid over identifying with the anxieties of the front line. The next time her team blamed the executive group I suggested that she respond something like this: “Look, I am they. There is no absent villain. And you are the A-Team. You can do this, and I’m here to show how we can get it done together.” She lit up like a five-year-old on Christmas morning. “I can do this,” she said. “I’ve got to own my voice of leadership, get out of the middle and be more of a manager and less of a peer.” She did. A few weeks later it was clear that her team had turned a corner. Caught between a rock and a hard place, there is sometimes a way to step outside the narrow Straits of Messina and chart a new course.
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