The Lasorda’s Law! Date:   Wednesday , June 08, 2011 The Lasorda’s Law! Well that is what world’s one of the most leading thinkers, Dr Robert Sutton calls as key to being a successful manager. This is attributed to Tommy Lasorda who served as the Los Angeles baseball team as a player, and then as a coach from 1949 onwards including a two-decade long stint as its manager. According to Lasorda, good managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, you kill the dove; but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it altogether! In effect, what Dr. Sutton conveys is that the essence of managing lies in the delicate balance that every manger seeks between managing too much and too little. Let us accept that it is not easy to get this balance even if we readily recognize this as critical. In fact, most of us managers do appreciate this balancing act, but when it comes to practicing it, there is so much of a challenge. Effective managers understand that it is best to leave the people alone except where a decisive intervention is necessary because the junior is a rank outsider to the organization needing handholding or is handling a difficult job that requires a bit of frequent guidance. Keeping a close eye or snooping over the shoulder often has no effect on performance, but worse still such micromanaging may actually undermine performance. It is far from being warm and fuzzy! Balancing does not imply that managers shower their people with unconditional warm fuzziness. Savvy managers travel through every day at work in search of the sweet spot between interjecting too little and too much. Management literature is full of advices on delegating and coaching the teams to take responsibility. Situational leadership shot into prominence and has remained very relevant till date. Here, managers are advised to understand and assess the ‘task-relevant maturity’ of the team members and determine what style of leadership would be best: directing, coaching, supporting or delegating. When a team member’s ability to do and motivation to do are both high, a delegating style becomes a more appropriate one. When both dimensions are low, a more directive or telling style works. And therefore, it is not one style that helps a manager be successful, but the ability to adapt a style that fits in with the maturity of the team member that does the trick in balancing. Prof Robert Simons of Harvard Business School has researched extensively on this subject and has even written a few articles and books sharing his perspectives. In his path-breaking article titled: “Control in an Age of Empowerment” published by HBR (March-April, 1995), Prof Simons has the following to say: * Competitive businesses with demanding and informed customers must rely on employee initiative to seek out opportunities and respond to customers’ needs * There are enough cases of failures of management controls leading to disastrous consequences for their organizations * It is not even realistic to think that managers can achieve control by simply hiring good people, aligning incentives and hoping for the best Now, the above situation is nothing to new to all of us as managers. We all would like to balance freedom with control as appropriate so that we can accomplish the Lasorda’s effect. Prof Simons has thoughtfully provided four clear and reasonably easy to navigate control levers for achieving the balance: Belief Systems: Clearly, this is a grossly underleveraged lever by many organizations and most managers. Belief systems are concise, value-laden and inspirational. Those managers who use the missions as living documents and as a system to guide acceptable employee behaviours have discovered a powerful lever to balance freedom and control. Belief systems are only a part of the answer for this balancing conundrum. Prof Simon considers this as “the yang of the Chinese philosophy – the sun, the warmth, and the light. Boundary Systems: This revolves around a key question: “if we want our employees to be creative and entrepreneurial, are we better off telling them what to do or what not to do?” The answer is latter as smart managers know. Boundaries in modern organizations are embedded in standards of ethical behavior or code of business conduct. They are an organization’s brakes and every business needs them in right measure. Interactive Control Systems: As organizations grow in size, managers tend to have less and less personal contact with people and yet the need to achieve the balance between managing too much and too little persists. Interactive control systems are the formal information systems that mangers use to involve themselves regularly and personally in the decisions of their team members. Prof Ram Charan has written extensively about the need for “Social Operating Mechanisms” that are critical for execution. These are pretty much the interactive control systems we are talking about here. Diagnostic Control Systems: This deals with the critical performance variables that managers monitor on an on-going basis. This includes the traditional business plans, budgets, performance goal-setting & reviews and cost control systems and the like. It pays managers to recognize that in the knowledge era in which we run our organizations today and manage people, there is a clear need to continue to sharpen our skills is knowing where to draw the line in control. When in doubt, control was the old school. When in doubt, free up is the new norm. Manager will do well to unleash, monitor and tighten as they go along in managing people. Clearly this is more than an art and science. Managing people is clearly a craft that comes with practice! The Author is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer with Symphony Services Corporation. He can be reached at mahalingam.c@symphonysv.com