Teams Do, Leaders Understand

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Leadership   Strategy   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

When it comes to the functional requirements of strategic initiatives, how much of the ‘mechanics’ do leaders need to know? It is important to have a broad, credible understanding of the work and roles involved, but it is not necessary, or even desirable, for leaders to be able to step in and do the work.

A colleague of mine has an interesting perspective on functional knowledge requirements of leaders. In an only slightly facetious way, he suggests that if a staff member is unexpectedly absent the direct manager should be able to fill in for them for a week. He also suggests the next-level manager should be able to fill in for a day, and the level above that should be able to cover for an hour. It’s an interesting idea, and one I find problematic for a few reasons (more on that later), but I think it’s worth exploring.

The fundamental issue at the heart of this idea is the extent to which specialized job knowledge is important for leaders. Clearly the closer a leader is to the work the greater the expectation is for that leader to have a deeper level of comprehension, but how far does that go? How much of a leader’s time and effort should be focused on understanding the work carried out by the team, and how much should be focused on managing and leading the team? I suspect the problem in some organizations is that there is no distinction between managing …

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