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Time to ditch 'manager'​ and 'leader'​?

 

‘Manager’, ‘Leader’, or something different? Do we need a new word for the person who, traditionally, is at the head of a team and responsible for old fashioned annual appraisals?

Why? Well, I’d argue that the world of human interaction at work has step-changed and neither word is appropriate as we move forward: To my mind, ‘to manage’ is to keep things in order, to keep things as they are, to maintain the status-quo; and any team, organisation or board thereof, that thinks innovation is only for small furry animals that scurry around in the undergrowth is going the way of those cretaceous dinosaurs.

‘To lead’; well, that suggests a cult of personality, of someone on a white horse shouting ‘follow me’ and that we all should be heading off in the same direction and thinking the same thing.

However, modern workplaces are more about “What do I need to do for you?” It is about Servant Leadership, about putting the right things in place for the Team to perform as effectively as possible.

Here in the UK, we have developed, for far too long, a culture of ‘Accidental Managers’; individuals who rise through the grades because they are good at what they do, until suddenly they are managing people and somehow expected to be good at that instinctively because they have been good at their previous roles. That will need to change and I suspect that will have profound effects on the type of people that are put into these new roles that we don’t have a name for yet.

One term we are hearing more and more of these days is ‘Psychological Safety’, where an individual knows they can make a mistake and it is seen as a learning opportunity for all in the process. Both terms, Manager and Leader, suggest that underlings are expected to follow and to do so without question or error. Given that employees are now looking for inter-organisational associations at work, and not simply transactional ‘work = pay’ relationships that space for psychological safety is of key importance, as is the relationship with the team …….

 

The team………. What?

 

Someone who puts things in the right place is an organiser, someone who stands back a bit and lets things happen is a facilitator. Someone who gets the best out of assets is a developer, someone who plans is an architect. Someone who is needed for a process to work is a catalyst, someone who starts things is an implementer. But for my money, I’m proposing that the individual who is in the middle of a team and is moving pieces around quietly and carefully to get the best out the resources is a ‘Coordinator’.

To me, it suggests someone who is part of the team and not separate from it, someone who brings things together as well as moving them around, someone who understands the whole.

Traditionally, both managers and leaders have been more extrovert, ‘having all the answers’, brash go-getters’, dare I say it; alpha males? I’d suggest that future Coordinators are more likely to be thoughtful, empathetic and emotionally intelligent. Arise the Quiet Coordinator.