Managerial styles: meet the authoritative manager

Miranda has been a team manager within a large accounting firm for several years now. She is known for her pro-active style, and prides herself on the frequency with which she is moved between teams as a motivating “kick up the backside,” as she puts it.

Earlier this year, Miranda took on the customer complaints department. This group was one of the most demotivated and uncooperative that she had thus far encountered, and she recalls the challenge with a mixture of frustration and satisfaction:

“In-trays hadn’t been cleared since the previous July,” she says. “Letters of complaint would arrive, and if they couldn’t be settled with a pre-written form, then they’d be passed around until being left in their files and forgotten. Customers would ring our hotline number, and the staff would play a game of hot-potato with the call, counting how many telephones it passed before the caller gave up.”

Turning this team around has been one of Miranda’s greatest motivational successes to date.

“The first thing I did, on the Monday morning at 9am sharp, was call all of the team into a separate office and hit them with the punchiest pep talk since Churchill was on the soapbox.”

She told the team what the company objectives were, why they were important, why the team was vital to fulfilling these company objectives, and how they were going to do it.

“I left no room for manoevre,” she recalls. “When you’ve got a bunch of people who’d rather be on the rack than in the office, you’ve got to become the Commander who knows everything, who has a clear plan of attack in mind, and who brooks no weakness or dissent.”

However, Miranda was careful not to make her team feel like chivvied foot soldiers: “There’s no better way to make staff lazy than to do the thinking work for them, and no easier way than to stop them caring than to take away all responsibility.”

By setting the team objectives rather than tasks, Miranda forced them to take responsibility for their own work. When time commitments clashed, Miranda gave team members the long-term objective and deadline, and forced them to work out their own system of priorities.

“By the third week their in-trays were cleared, the old files empty and the team were working as a group, instead of shifting responsibility onto the shoulders of everybody but themselves.”

Following this success, Miranda deputised for team manager who was on maternity leave. Her new team had a far better reputation in the office: they were the IT staff, responsible for developing and maintaining the software used to manage the accounts.

As with every new team, Miranda called them into a separate office on day one and started to explain to them the company objectives, the importance of the company objectives, the importance of the IT staff to those objectives – but she had not got halfway through when one of the technicians raised his hand and said in a world-weary tone, “Do you really have to go through all of this? I’ve got a computer to mend and a meeting to attend before lunch.”

Miranda was stunned. How had a team member dared to interrupt her, the boss? She hurried to a shaky conclusion, and then let the team go. Afterwards she spoke about the interruption with the team’s usual manager, who said:

“You can’t treat them all like children, Miranda. Maybe the ones who really don’t know what they’re doing, or don’t care. But when you’ve got a skilled and hardworking bunch like mine, acting like a school-teacher is only going to get their backs up.”

Miranda’s authoritarian style carried her through many management situations. It proved a success when she was dealing with teams who were in need of a strong leader and clear direction. However, it failed spectacularly as soon as she was in charge of a team who knew what they were doing, were already doing it, and wanted only the direction and encouragement of their manager to continue on the right course.