Spotlight on situational leadership

By Mary Helen Gillespie, 4/19/2005

Fresh from back-to-back theater trips to London's West End and New York's Broadway, the Savvy Manager is just gobsmacked over the ability of diverse, highly skilled teams, from accountants to artists, to create, develop and sell stunningly fabulous products like "Mary Poppins" or "Monty Python's Spamalot."

How do you market genius, much less manage it?

Whether clapping my hands raw, sniggling over 30 years of killer rabbits, or stifling my own "I love you, Mary Poppins" sobs, I always come away from these moments of dramatic magic thinking "How do they do that?" The manager in me is mystified as much by the myth as by the logistics, the contracts, the action plans, the rehearsal space, the tantrums, and all the rest of the inventory and the resources that go into making sure that the play's the thing.

So often in management circles when we hear the world 'team' it is followed by metaphors for sports outings and other athletic feats. I've just never sat down in Fenway Park - either before or after the World Series Championship - and wondered in glee and amazement at the back story. It's bats and balls and a lot of practice, and if you want to ascribe to the Theo Epstein Rule of Analysis, numbers. Lots of numbers. Not that there is anything wrong with numbers. Or cleats.

It's just when I think "team,' I tap into my own version of "Five minutes to curtain, ladies and gentlemen. Places, please." And on this stage, everybody's a star.

Mark Hurd, the new big cheese at Hewlett-Packard Co., contends that management is a dynamic process. "When you look at the ability to build a great company and great management teams, management is really a team sport,"" he tells The Wall Street Journal.

Okay, sounds like the perfect sound bite for a chief executive officer plunging into the biggest act of his 25-year career. It's also, some might say, a not-so-gentle tweak in the nose to the ghost of Carly Fiornia, whose own C-level star search across the fruited plain prompted internal and external grumbles about her leadership style and management ability.

And as other head honchos at places like Wal-Mart and AIG continue to get the hook (much to the jeers of the audience as well as the SEC), look for the new kids in town to sing a new tune, one that casts a great, bold and shining klieg light on the team thing.

If the former one-note cheer was "It's all about me," then the new chorus CEOs are definitively singing is "It's all about us."

Look for the revival, then, of the situational leadership school of management performance. This theory subscribes to the belief that if all management is team-driven, then each individual member of the management team is tasked with leading the team at a single point in time. Note that we are not saying "at any given point." What happens is that as the challenges and issues crop up in the cycle of the business problem, the appropriate resources respond from the team level.

So if senior management finds itself with a sticky little brand boo-boo after a paid celebrity endorser gets caught with his you-know-what in the you-know-where, marketing and its crisis communications experts take the helm. The bean-counters and the operations gurus can sit this one out. Truly, what value does it bring to hear the audit guys spew on and on with their goofy jokes about controls and mitigation risk when the corporate logo is the lead item on both the business and the entertainment news programs? Answer: none.

But once the situation is under control, and the credentialed vermin with the body mikes go back to the boldfaced-name beat, the situation leadership team is back in neutral. With the next challenge, the appropriate subject matter experts take charge. There is ebb and flow to the work, not just waves. And the CEO, rather than trying to manage the entire task at hand with only one paw, is able to trust and leverage the experts on his or her internal team. This, of course, makes loyalty a critical performance metric.

So, when it comes to management teams, sometimes we dance. Sometimes we sing. Sometimes we do both. But we always face the audience, and thus the music, when we do.