Before we launch into our discussion of high-level attributes, let's first review what we think managers need to be able do. Figure 10.1 depicts the elements of the manager role architecture and performance model we've defined. It takes the components illustrated in Exhibit 3.1 and shows the connections among them.

At the center sit the five basic job segments and time allocation opportunities available to an individual manager. Those structural components are expressed through the action elements of the performance model: executing tasks, developing employees, delivering the deal, and energizing change. As the graphic shows, strategic requirements inform job structure and task definition. Development of human capital gives individuals and teams the capability to carry out those strategically critical tasks; delivery of an engaging, intrinsically valuable deal reinforces task-execution success. The world doesn't stand still, however, so good managers must maintain momentum by responding to and inspiring change. When managers perform well in all these elements, demonstrating authenticity and building trust in the process, engaged employees accomplish their goals. When that happens, organizations win in the marketplace and prosper as a result.

Figure 10.1. How the Manager Performance Model Works

Executing well in this system requires managers to possess a generalized set of cognitive, emotional, and action-oriented characteristics. They must have the intellect to plan work and monitor results, ensuring a consistent focus on what matters to business strategy. They must have sufficient social and emotional insight to structure fulfilling jobs, ensure meaningful learning, understand individual reward needs, and sustain employee engagement. And they must know how to identify and exploit organizational resources to keep their teams executing and moving forward.

It's a daunting list of requirements, but we think not an impossible one, provided managers bring the right human capital to the job. We define the right human capital as a set of broadly scoped elements, each with plenty of room to comprise more precisely specified competencies. We're suggesting the main ingredients for manager success. Competency experts can translate these into a recipe.

We've intentionally left some contributors to manager performance off the list. For one thing, we haven't touched on the technical side of the job. We know from thinking about the S-Zone (Exhibit 4.1) that technical knowledge plays a role in managerial performance. However, we're leaving the definition of "technical competence" to individual organizations and functions. We simply reiterate that outstanding manager performance relies more on other elements than on technical prowess. We also haven't touched on the abilities and attitudes required of everyone in the organization, factors like business acumen, or comfort with diversity. Instead, we've concentrated on the classes of factors specifically required for supervisors and managers to be successful within the performance model and role structure we've defined.

We have constructed the definitions so that they apply to any strategy category and across any organizational function, albeit with varying interpretations and applications. For instance, navigating the organization will take on a specific meaning for a store manager in a retail operation with a widespread network of outlets but a highly centralized corporate training function. It will mean something different for a high-tech engineering manager who works in a small regional office but has a development team scattered across three continents and five time zones. Catalyzing action will take on different forms for an Internet service provider with an evolving business model, a video rental company facing cost pressure from a Web competitor, and a bank trying to recover from a global financial shock. On the one hand, social intelligence will retain its fundamental meaning in any situation requiring interpersonal interaction. On the other hand, we would expect it to feel different for R&D, marketing, and call center managers.

You will also notice that the performance elements do not fall neatly into leadership and management categories. We have suggested that managers will rarely stop in the middle of an activity and ask, "Am I leading or managing at this moment?" Instead, they should be asking, "What can I do at this moment to help the people in our unit perform best at executing this process and producing the results for which we are responsible?" As they answer this question, managers will think about systems, assets, and processes (the substance of managing) and about how people can exercise self-determination in working with these to execute tasks (the essence of leadership). When we speak of navigating the organization, for instance, we intend it to apply to managing (for instance, identifying and acquiring important assets, such as budget funding for a project or information to guide a decision). But we also mean it to encompass leadership (keeping people focused on strategic goals as they move through an organizational matrix, for example). In a similar way, cognitive fluidity enables a manager to see how two systems might be combined to improve efficiency (a management challenge) or to envision how to foster cooperation among three differently talented technicians to develop a novel solution (a leadership situation).

Here then are the summary attributes that we believe contribute most directly to a manager's success at playing the roles we've outlined, across strategies, companies, and functions.

By defining this set of fundamental elements, we've tried to create a general definition of what characterizes a strong manager. It follows that, even across organizations with different strategies and across various functions, high-performing managers should be more similar than dissimilar. But let's consider several variations of the question that heads this section. Sometimes, the question takes this form: "Should we move our R&D manager over to product development?" This idea assumes that the R&D manager has amply demonstrated the knowledge, skills, and talents that we've defined here (and the subordinate competencies they embrace). Otherwise, why would he be a manager in the first place, let alone a candidate for transfer and possible promotion? If an individual demonstrates these high-level attributes, then the question of transfer feasibility boils down to an assessment of technical skills and knowledge. How important are these to the manager's credibility and ability to guide, coach, and develop employees? Does the candidate possess them now? If not, how feasible would it be to develop them (see the make-buy discussion in the next section)? Answers to these questions govern the practicality and advisability of cross-unit transfers.

Another variation on the good-manager theme has to do with hiring from outside the organization: "Can we bring in a new sales manager from our main competitor?" In Chapter Three, we made the case that firm-specific human capital is important to achieving strategic advantage and is often a barrier to successful external hiring. It is risky to bring people from the outside into positions where success depends strongly on company-specific knowledge or idiosyncratic applications of technical skills. We would caution that, in many cases, adding a firm-specific inflection to already developed knowledge and skills will prove either too time-consuming for the individual or too expensive for the organization, or both.

We often encounter this question: "Should we move our best technical performer into a manager role?" As we've tried to make clear, we think promotion chiefly for technical reasons is a big mistake. An exception would be made for a candidate who occupies the far upper right-hand corner of the S-Zone (Exhibit 4.1). This person has strong performance ability along both the managerial and technical dimensions. When you have a candidate with these qualifications, close the deal. Conversely, promoting someone from the lower right-hand corner of the grid is a formula for disappointment across the board. Doing this takes a top producer off line (hurting output); creates at best a mediocre manager (decreasing employee engagement and well-being and diminishing unit performance); and puts an individual into an untenable position (talk about a stressful job!).

Perhaps the most fundamental question facing companies seeking to ensure a population of great managers is this: is it better to develop the performance requirements or to obtain them through hiring and selection? Psychologists debate the degree to which personality elements are subject to change, either from affirmative efforts like training or simply from the effects of maturity as people age. On the one hand, exhaustive analysis of personality traits and their manifestations, often through twin studies, suggests that the five foundational personality factors—extroversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience—are between 40 and 50 percent heritable.^[320] Personality features, like other characteristics of homo sapiens, evolved for a reason: they helped our early ancestors survive long enough to reproduce and be attractive enough to the opposite sex to find a mate. Those traits therefore have a deeply ingrained quality that makes individual change difficult. Psychologist Martin Seligman summarizes the situation like this: "Evolution, acting through our genes and our nervous system, has made it simple for us to change in certain ways and almost impossible for us to change in others."^[321]

Dr. R. Grant Steen believes that we must separate the part of the personality that remains stable over time from the part that changes under the influence of life events, including learning experiences. The first element he calls temperament; he labels the second character. He describes the interplay between our genetic programming and our experience this way: "In a crude sense, we cannot do what we are not programmed to do. But equally true, we cannot do what we are programmed to do if the environment does not facilitate so doing. Environment can amplify or blunt the effect of genes, but environment cannot replace or displace genes. After the connections between neurons are made during development, it is up to the organism to use those connections." Steen also points to the work of Donald O. Hebb of McGill University, who taught that "heredity determines the range through which environment can modify the individual."^[322]

Which takes us back to our basic question: given what can be changed and what can't, what's the best way for an organization to create a cadre of managers who possess the attributes we've defined? We suggest that the process depicted in Figure 10.2 provides a way to approach the issue.

The thinking begins with the question of feasibility. The behavioral traits that are most deeply embedded in the personality will prove most difficult to train. We would place elements like requisite variety in this category. Developing this in people who demonstrate little flexibility in responding to others' emotional states will prove a sizable challenge, perhaps not impossible with enough time and attention, but difficult nevertheless. In contrast, aspects of catalyzing action (a skill) and navigating the organization (a bundle of knowledge) will more likely respond to training.

Figure 10.2. Building Manager Attributes—Make Versus Buy

Once feasibility has been sorted out, the next question relates to cost and timing. For simplification, we have assumed that formal development programs can be brought on line fairly quickly. An organization can often purchase or design and deliver a training program in relatively short order. We have also assumed that informal learning takes longer to have an effect. On-the-job training and mobility strategies unfold at a pace more measured, less predictable, and more particular to each individual. Conversely, formal training brings a higher price tag than more informal, organic forms of learning.

In any given case, of course, cost and timing advantages and disadvantages may not align so neatly with the formal and informal learning categories. But the point remains that analyzing these factors can help an organization determine whether and how to invest in development approaches. These come down to strategic choices—how much time has the marketplace given us to put great managers in place in a particularly critical function? How much can we afford to spend on building manager capability, given the cost pressures we're feeling? Often, we believe, organizations will conclude that the most sensible approach to populating the company with great managers will chiefly depend on careful assessment and selection among internal candidates. Occasionally, with all the caveats we've suggested, outside hiring might prove feasible. However, this will require the organization to show patience as an individual's preexisting schemas and scripts are rewritten for the new company.

In all this we must remember the thoughts of Stanford's Carol Dweck. She would remind us that executives and learning and development strategists owe it to managers and manager candidates to keep an open mind about the potential to learn. Even Prof. Dweck wouldn't argue that all human traits are infinitely plastic and therefore subject to remolding. She would say, however, that no one, including individuals themselves, can fully understand a person's potential to grow. To those assessing and developing managerial candidates, she would say that they should maintain an optimistic realism about the ability of people to change and grow. They owe it to the organization and to employees to have faith that human capital can evolve and increase. She would admonish them to back up that faith with a thoughtful assessment of how best to create and build an organization's managers.

Organizations shouldn't expect managers to execute all the elements of the performance model by themselves. Like all employees, they need tangible and intangible resources to meet the demands of their jobs. The executive group and the Human Resources function both play important roles in helping managers effectively perform their task-execution, people-development, deal-delivery, and change-energizing roles. We have some specific thoughts about the support that executives and HR need to provide.