Magazine Fall 2022 Issue

Saving Management From Our Obsession With Leadership

Lofty notions of leadership have captivated our collective imagination — and we’ve underappreciated and underinvested in the everyday management skills that organizations desperately need.

Jim Detert, Kevin Kniffin, and Hannes Leroy Reading Time: 21 min 

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For decades, business thinkers and the executives who look to them for insight have elevated the visionary, inspirational leader over the useful yet pedestrian good manager. But evidence all around us suggests that we devalue management practices at our peril: What we’ve come to denigrate as mere management (done by those who are merely managers) is incredibly difficult and valuable.

It becomes all the more vital during times of disruption and crisis. Take the COVID-19 pandemic: Whether we’re talking about navigating supply chain disruptions, operating safely on the front lines, or simply keeping doors open for customers, businesses have desperately needed people who know how to coordinate action, solve technical problems, and deal skillfully with the myriad human challenges that employees and other stakeholders face. The same goes for organizations involved in developing, manufacturing, distributing, or administering vaccines and treatments. To meet the moment, we’ve needed managers who can keep things running and support employees — not leaders who give stirring speeches but remain detached from day-to-day operations.

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The so-called Great Resignation has been quite telling in this regard. The people quitting in droves haven’t done so because their company’s top executive is insufficiently visionary or inspirational. Rather, people have quit lousy jobs — jobs that lack autonomy, variety, or opportunities to grow; jobs that pay poorly and don’t reward performance fairly; jobs that aren’t clearly defined and structured; jobs that lack guardrails that prevent chronic overload and frustration.1 They’ve also quit their direct bosses, whose lack of everyday managerial competence, trustworthiness, inclusiveness, and care is no longer tolerable.2 And they’ve quit organizations that have breached their psychological contracts with employees by violating the unwritten rules of trust, fairness, and justice.3

While the number of workers who have left jobs has been extraordinary, particularly in certain sectors, the reasons aren’t new and shouldn’t surprise us. Organizational researchers have been studying turnover for decades. The causes cited today — including the low job satisfaction, commitment, and engagement associated with poor management — are the same ones identified in hundreds of individual studies and multiple meta-analyses. In the decade before the pandemic hit, for example, the percentage of highly engaged employees never exceeded 22% among millions surveyed, and the relationship between low engagement and high turnover was well documented.

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About the Authors

Jim Detert is the John L. Colley Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and the author of Choosing Courage: The Everyday Guide to Being Brave at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021). Kevin Kniffin (@kevinkniffin) is a professor of management and organizations at Cornell University in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at the SC Johnson College of Business. Hannes Leroy is a professor of management at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University, where he also serves as academic director for the Erasmus Centre for Leadership.

References (31)

1. M. Schwantes, “Why Are People Quitting? Burnout’s Just the Tip of the Iceberg,” Inc., Sept. 14, 2021, www.inc.com; A. De Smet, B. Dowling, M. Mugayar-Baldocchi, et al., “‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The Choice Is Yours,” McKinsey Quarterly, Sept. 8, 2021, www.mckinsey.com; and T. Smart, “Study: Gen Z, Millennials Driving ‘The Great Resignation,’” U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 26, 2021, www.usnews.com.

2. De Smet et al., “‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’?”; “2021 People Management Report,” PDF file (Westwood, Massachusetts: The Predictive Index, 2021), www.predictiveindex.com; and “The Great Resignation Research Report,” PlanBeyond, accessed May 31, 2022, https://planbeyond.com.

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Comments (2)
Adam Jeske
Very interesting, necessary and on time article.
Like the authors, I too believe that charismatic, lofty and visionary leadership is rarely needed in an organization, especially at the middle management level. But that set of managerial skills mentioned in the article (designing a good, motivating and engaging workplace, defining roles and tasks and providing the resources to carry them out, creating psychological safety and treating all employees fairly, making demands and challenges on employees and informing them about the quality of their work, while showing sensitivity and empathy, personal concern, kind interest in the employee, not avoiding difficult conversations or difficult situations, without being disillusioned or indulgent) is nothing more than a set of competencies of a team leader. It is these competencies that distinguish a good manager (with whom people want to work), from a poor one, who supervises, controls, orders and often manipulates and disrespects people (from whom frustrated employees quit). And this set of managerial competencies, in my opinion, should be taught in all kinds of leadership training courses.
Kevin Sauter
I think the authors have totally missed the mark by continuing to make a distinction between a leader and a manager.  This kind of writing, from the perspective of a university role without current experience other than a survey is, in my opinion, not helpful.  In fact, it serves to separate out people.  One person is a visionary leader expected to have a broad, sweeping view with high level targets and not expected to "get into the details of a manager."  The other is a person who is good at managing, but can't be expected to be a good communicator and a source of inspiration and growth for the people in their span of care.  There is not one mention of courage in either perspective the authors outline and perpetuating a suggestion from 1977 that only academics would reference illustrates their need for a more holistic approach and writing from personal experience of being a leader who has to manage many facets of our changing landscape and people entrusted in our care.