The desire of managers to create

“What is your motivation to be a manager?”

This is a question I like to ask at the beginning of my workshops with managers.

Over the past three years, I have conducted many workshops with people from a wide range of industries. In one form or another, they have always revolved around agile transformation, how it can be shaped, and what role management could or should take within the change process.

Of course, the participants in my workshops know that we talk about agile, and most of them have at least a vague idea of what leadership means in the agile context. The answers to my question are thus certainly influenced by the setting and context. Moreover, stronger than this bias, may be the social control we impose on ourselves. No one likes to openly admit that they want to be a leader in order to exercise power over other people. In fact, I have never received such a response either.

However, there was and is an answer that – in one variation or another – is really significantly common. Perhaps pause for a moment and reflect on the question “What is your motivation to be a manager?” before you read on…

The answer I receive most often is: “I want to create”.

The desire to create and the hierarchy pyramid

If we question “I want to create” as a motivation for wanting to be a leader or manager, we realise that it says a lot about the organisational system within which my workshop participants typically operate.

First, let’s take the employee perspective: obviously, in organisations it is necessary to become a manager in order to be able to create. Consequently, employees are less able to create, if at all, and serve their leader in exercising their will and scope to create.

The manager’s perspective is a mirror image: once given this status, they can create, at least gradually more than the employees entrusted to them. They are used to be able to live out the manager’s creative will.

Let’s think of the system in terms of hierarchy all the way to the top: at every level there are people with the will to create, but only limited possibilities to actually do it. The limitations decrease with each level of the hierarchy that managers move closer to the top management.

So at each level of the hierarchy, apart from the lowest, I have people who are there because they want to live out their will to create things. As long as they are not yet at the top of the hierarchy pyramid, they remain restricted – not only by the manager above them, but also by the ones on the same level, who have equivalent creating rights.

Another interesting question is how the decision is made in such an organisation as to who is allowed to create more or less, or in translation to the system logic, who is higher or lower in the hierarchy. Obviously, for promotion it is necessary that the individual employee stands out on his hierarchical level in the implementation of his creative competence within the framework set for him, which then ultimately ennobles him to receive more leeway.

The effect of the creation principle

Admittedly, the illustration is so pointed that it seems unlikely that a workshop participant, once confronted with this analysis, would really want his creating wish to be understood in this way.

I argue that it is nevertheless very close to the actual circumstances. This becomes clear when we consider the organisational reality we often encounter in our everyday lives:

The creation principle is visible in typical conflicts at all levels. It restricts the employee who is exposed to the creative will of others and thus, if the employee is ambitious, contributes to dissatisfaction. At all management levels it is a driver of stakeholderism: the manager does not want to give up his creative space and especially does not want to let anyone else have an effect in his creative space. After all, he or she became a supervisor in order to have this creative space.

In this sense, “creating” never has anything to do with people, which makes the general phenomenon plausible that professional excellence is usually the driver for hierarchical advancement rather than interpersonal competence. The latter – and this is also in line with common experience in conventional organisations – is more important for putting one’s own performance in the right light (and thus one’s personal ability to create things) and less important for exercising actual management. In the leadership of employees, a possibly existing social competence can certainly play a role, but it always works, since it is about creating, at best as a means to an end and in its exercise not as an end in itself in the leadership task.

Ultimately, a significant difficulty of the creation principle is the individualistic component it carries. The aspiring manager wants to meet his or her own personal ideas, which often enough are not in harmony with the company’s goals, but are shaped by individual interests. Have you ever wondered why there are so few functioning management teams? This may be one of the reasons. Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister already shared an empirical value on this in the eighties – even if not further substantiated:

“For all the talk about management teams, there really is no such thing …”¹

More leeway for managers with rising hierarchy?

Let us turn to the question of whether, in a lived reality in which the creation principle is the leading motive of managers, it actually turns out that the scope for creation becomes greater with hierarchical advancement.

Let us imagine a group of managers at one hierarchical level who are driven by the desire to be able to create as much as possible individually. If we leave this group to the free play of forces, a competitive situation will arise all on its own – because the leeway of one limits the leeway of the others.

The more the actors in the group have to invest in the competition that prevails among them, the more likely they are to perceive it as a real restriction of their scope for action. Every effort, whether temporal or intellectual, that goes into defending the scope for action is ultimately no longer available for its use. When competition reaches a certain intensity, it ties up so much energy that the individual manager must even feel that he or she can in fact use less leeway than was possible before the promotion.

Competition as such can be influenced by different leadership patterns of the group’s superior. In essence, it is enough that he is simply indifferent to the fact that competition is raging between his subordinates. However, he can also approve of the competition and deliberately fuel it, e.g. through erratic preference for one or the other, asymmetrical distribution of information or conscious control according to the principle of “divide and rule”.

Thus we can see that a system that follows the creation principle runs a great risk of counteracting itself. The managers, driven by the desire to create, drive each other into a deadlock at the middle management level. Relief only comes when the person penetrates the clay layer and climbs up the hierarchy until he or she ends up at the very top of the organisation.

Considering something normal that should not be normal

If someone had asked me 20 years ago what motivates me in my role as a manager, I would have answered the question with “I want to create”. I was driven by the image that hierarchical advancement would automatically open up more scope for action for me.

So I experienced what I have just deduced theoretically in practice at the peak of my career as an employee. As a member of an eleven-member management team, the three-member executive board was part of this group, we systematically tore each other apart in the fight for our sinecures. The board, although highlighted and ultimately decisive, exhibited behaviour that – as described earlier – exacerbated rather than calmed competition. When it was not thwarting itself with internal competition and leaving the other board members to their own devices, it was fuelling the competition with a fatal mixture of patronage and indifference.

It is astonishing that people who are motivated and want to create things get caught in such a trap and do not even notice it. In my case, fatalism set in, based on the firm belief that it obviously had to be this way, although it would only have taken a little effort to recognise that one’s own actions were completely unproductive and thus in fact damaging to the business.

If the executive in this situation enjoys the political intrigue, he may even find fulfilment in it. The will to create is thus directed towards a personal preservation of power. I have never found fulfilment in this.

There was no awakening moment either. At some point I realised that I was actually investing 80% of my time in unproductive political games. However, this realisation alone was not enough to free myself from this situation. In the end, however, it did.

I still want to create!

Let’s face it: I actually still want to create, I have remained true to myself in this respect. Over the years, however, I have found a different approach to how this is reflected in my leadership in such a way that the effects described do not occur.

What I want for myself and for all employees is autonomy. Unlike the concept of creation, autonomy encompasses self-regulation and respect for the rules of the society within which I move.² According to this understanding of autonomy, the individual’s freedom of movement is quite automatically restricted by the movement of others. This consideration is not known to the individualist principle of creation.

I want to be free in my actions, restricted only by the rules of the system. As a manager, I do not set myself apart from the staff in the world I try to create around me. We all share the same dance space.

What sets me apart is the fact that I play a decisive role in determining the ground rules and the outer guardrails of the system, the boundaries of the dance area. However, this right belongs to me more because of my capacity as an entrepreneur.

In the end, I would like to create in the original sense, entirely according to the creation principle, in one more respect: I would like to create an environment that enables all participants to act autonomously.

Notes:

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[1] DeMarco, Tom; Lister, Timothy, “Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams”, 3rd Edition, Addison Wesley, 2013, p. 149.
[2] Autonomy understood in the Kantian sense.

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