Stop talking to them about coaching a team. 20% of French executives do not want to manage or no longer want to, according to a 2021 OpinionWay survey carried out after successive confinements. But it would be wrong to put this disaffection on the account of the pandemic. If the Covid has caused changes and required adjustments, the evil is deeper. Contradictory injunctions coming from above, new employee expectations, acute meetingitis… managers – middle management in particular – are at their wit’s end. The buffer manager lived. Archaic organizations too. May it be the same in certain large French companies, which in the name of a short-term vision of performance inspired by the worst standards of the Anglo-Saxon model justify the unjustifiable. Witness the chilling practice of “ranking” described by the journalist Violaine des Courières in her book totalitarian management.
Fortunately, more demanding and less docile than their elders, Generation Z is shaking up the codes. And the need for greater employee autonomy is becoming more and more central. Management is no longer just vertical, it is everyone’s business, “everyone can and even must play this role”, believes Julien Dreher. Like him, a new class of entrepreneurs is rethinking the relationship with teams, testing other methods. As evidenced by the book DreamTeam by Ludovic Girodon who compiled the best feedback from some 400 decision-makers. Recent discoveries in neuroscience are also a mine of information for leaders who have every interest in being wary of the biases inscribed in their brains. Because there is no effective management in a failing organization, scientists also shed light on certain absurd practices that are nevertheless widespread in many open spaces. The Surprising Science of Meetings by researcher Steven Rogelberg points out that meetings are time-consuming – an American executive spends an average of eighteen hours a week there! – and energy guzzlers are not inevitable. The organizational science professor makes several recommendations based on research.
“Chinese-style management” teaches us that brainstorming is good, but not spending the year there is better. Its foundations? Agility and responsiveness, valuable leadership qualities in an emergency, as described by Sandrine Zerbib, co-author of the book Dragon Tactics: “We have a problem, we have to understand it perfectly in order to react immediately.” The context of the pension reform reminds us that we are all going to work together longer. So let’s waste no more time and apply tomorrow’s management methods today.