I never expected to write this book. As a researcher and consultant, I had always focused my attention on the “big” challenges of strategy and structure that large organizations grapple with, leaving others to work on individual-level issues, such as how to motivate, influence, or develop others. However, over the last five years I have found myself drawn increasingly towards the nitty-gritty, practical challenges of how individuals actually get things done in large, complex organizations. It has been an enjoyable and surprising transition in my outlook on the world.

This journey of discovery began in 2006 when I founded the Management Innovation Lab (MLab) at London Business School with my colleague, Gary Hamel. The MLab mission was to accelerate the evolution of management, and our intention was to work closely with companies to design and run a series of management experiments that would help create new management practices and processes.

The MLab had some successes – we facilitated some important initiatives in companies, we wrote up our insights and ideas in some influential publications, and we spoke about the importance of management innovation in events around the world. However, we weren't as successful as we would have liked to be, especially when it came to making change stick. On many occasions, we helped groups of mid-level managers design and implement management experiments: a new approach to innovation, a way of bringing customer experience into the workplace, an initiative for eliminating bureaucracy. Even though the experiments typically worked well, they rarely made it to the next step. Instead, the ideas were killed off by invisible forces of inertia.

It was an eye-opener for me to observe first-hand how little support these mid-level managers were getting for their management experiments. Many observers have said that companies should become better at trying out small-scale experiments, as a way of de-risking their change programs, but it turns out that these small-scale experiments don't actually make much of a difference: they overcome the corporate immune system's first line of defence, but there is typically a second and then a third line of defence as well.

This led me to realize that reinventing management isn't just about rethinking the “system” of management, that is, the structures and processes through which work transpires. It is also about rethinking the “role” of management – the way individuals behave in the workplace in order to get things done. We have all observed individuals working in large organizations who are able to rise above the rules and procedures and to get things done through the force of their conviction. We can see such individuals as outliers and we can endeavor to build a better system to help ordinary people achieve the same results or we can see these individuals as role models who are showing others how to deal with the inevitable limitations of large bureaucratic organizations.

So over the last three years, I switched my focus – at least in part – to exploring the role of the individual manager in large complex organizations. This led me to develop my thoughts further on what makes for a successful “intrapreneur” – thoughts that I had first pursued in my doctoral dissertation 17 years earlier. It also led me deeper into the relationship between the manager and the employee. Management, it is often said, is about getting the most out of your employees, so a good manager is someone who really understands what makes his or her people tick. Of course, the notion that managers need to see the world through the eyes of their employees is an old one, but I was still surprised how few of the current writers on management actually gave much attention to it. Most preferred to write about management from a rather elitist perspective – from the point of view of the person doing the managing, rather than the person being managed.

This new focus resulted in a report on “Employee Centred Management” that I published in 2011, with funding from HCL Technologies and help from my co-authors Lisa Duke, Vyla Rollins, and Stefano Turconi. This study included a lot of data from employees in large companies about their fears and motivations at work, and their manager's style of working. It also included materials from my research interviews and from my own “ethnographic” experiences of life working on the front line. I have now expanded on those findings and developed my ideas further, and this book is the result.

I see this as a complement to my previous book, Reinventing Management. If Reinventing Management was a roadmap to help you make better choices in the “architecture” of management in your organization, then Becoming a Better Boss is about helping you, as an individual, to function effectively. I wrote it particularly to help those managers who are frustrated by the lack of change in their organizations and who are seeking to make a real difference. However, the ideas are actually relevant to pretty much any manager, regardless of their level of ambition. Becoming a Better Boss is about understanding your employees, your organization, and yourself more acutely, and developing a way of working that treats these components as they are, rather than as you would like them to be.