Managing Leadership^®

In physics, a phase transition is a point at which a material passing through it undergoes a sudden and dramatic change. Water is a solid, and remains unmistakably and completely so until the moment it passes through a specific temperature threshold. Then it is, on the instant, wholly transformed. Though still water, it now has a distinctly different appearance and behavior. The same thing happens, just as abruptly, on its entering into another threshold as a liquid and reappearing on the other side as a gas.

And the same thing happens at work, as well. Moreover, it happens in the same degree (albeit metaphorically) and even the same number of times. A Management-Issues item of a short while ago indicates that most people view the transition into management as the most stressful event in a career; very few, however, feel the same way about the change from manager to executive.

But that’s wrong. Certainly, those surveyed believe that it correctly describes their experience, but what that really means is that their experience is incomplete: they haven’t really become fully-functioning executives, themselves.

Actually, many, if not most, executive positions are filled by managers who do not fully comprehend the magnitude of the change their circumstances and duties have undergone, and that their thinking and behavior must undergo. They no longer are to make decisions that keep the organization running, but set policies to shape its strategy and direction. They have crossed an imperceptible but dramatic threshold from tactics and lower-level operations to the operational/strategic realm of management. But they don’t understand the implications of this, and the demands it makes of them; the news is full of examples of this stubborn misapprehension.

Let’s extend the metaphor a little further. The point at which the phase transition of water from a liquid to a gaseous state occurs is not simply at a fixed temperature, but at one that varies according to the prevailing atmospheric pressure. You can have the notionally required temperature, but if the atmospheric pressure is insufficient, you still have liquid water, not the gas you expected.

Similarly, if you put a manager in an executive position without preparing him or her for it, providing the required training and socialization to this level of work, then for all that he or she is in a notionally executive post, he or she will probably still be a non-executive manager, thinking and acting like one, and consequently proving unable to deliver the results expected of a fully transformed executive manager.

Unfortunately, as the referenced article also points out, many top managers don’t feel they need training. This sort of self-congratulatory blindness is what causes the putative mighty to fall. Hail is likely to be in the forecast; don’t be found among it.

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