The Shape of Management: Deep, Broad & Round
Things They Forgot To Tell Me In Business School

We all know the importance of selecting the right leadership team. While qualifications and experience play the most obvious roles, personality is the great intangible. And by personality, I mean not just interpersonal skills but also characteristic patterns of thinking around professional issues. Individuals have different strengths and interests and it is critical to ensure a good fit between your team and the tasks at hand. There are no hard and fast rules and people are never uni-dimensional, but nor do they excel in all situations.

There are many different ways to think about prospective leaders within your organization. One useful way is to explore their relative inclinations to move down into issues (depth) or across them (breadth): the archetypes adopted here are the project manager, the program manager (or business unit manager), and the corporate manager.

A good project manager sweats the details and likes it. Depth of understanding is key, and a ‘project environment’ allows for it and rewards it. Even the largest projects have hard limits and can be examined from all angles, allowing one to swim in the minutiae. Good project managers demand a lot of timely information before making decisions.

A good program manager (or business unit manager) requires greater perspicacity and a talent for moving across issues while understanding the impact that changes to one will have on others. Programs are still contained but have more pieces in play with more internal and external interfaces. Good program managers can make sound decisions based on varying levels of information.

Corporate management is 360°. A good corporate manager must have pronounced abilities to move back and forth across issues (to ‘spin plates’ in the parlance), to compartmentalize, and to play both short and long games at the same time. In the corporate arena, breadth pays more than depth, but being comfortable diving in deep, grasping the essentials, then making confident decisions based on this snapshot is the little extra that corporate positions demand.
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So make your choice, deep, broad, or round.

Another way to think about the character of your management team is to identify the hill climbers and the valley crossers. Hill climbers have a singular focus and are most comfortable taking existing lines of thought onward and upward. They are the specialists and crave definition and detail. Valley crossers have a broader focus, strong intuition, an ability to see familiar topics in new ways, and a penchant for connecting different lines of thought.
They are the integrators, and better able to work with ambiguity. Both types of people are necessary in any organization, but in our age of ever-increasing specialization, hill climbers are by far the more numerous. [A thank you to Lee Smolin and Eric Weinstein for the terminology.] By the above definitions, project managers are the hill climbers and program managers the valley crossers. Corporatists, for their part, do a lot of valley crossing and a little hill climbing.

Yet another way to think about the character of your management team is to explore their relationship with data. Today, data management skills rank right up there with people management skills. The ‘rise of the machines’ is disrupting industries and forcing huge changes on management, as with life in general. The question remains as it has always been, ‘What do I know?’, but the premise has now flipped; whereas previously I ‘ran blind’ because I saw nothing, today I ‘run blind’ because I see too much and cannot make sense of it all. 

​Managers themselves rarely have to be great manipulators of data as most of the heavy lifting is undertaken by a limited number of specialists using a host of software, and increasingly AI tools. To be effective, however, managers must have a strong intuitive sense of the value and appropriateness of a wide range of data presented to them in any given situation. One cannot exaggerate the importance of pulling the signal from the noise in a data rich world. [A thank you to Nate Silver for the term.] The fact the world is being more accurately and voluminously recorded than ever before has done nothing to diminish the importance of intuitive skills, coming as a reaction to data heavy environments that exceed our capacity to comprehend. While data science excels at telling us what something is, many complex situations still require a person to determine what it means within the context of the business decision. Doing so effectively is a skill requiring a soft touch and sense of feel, not unlike tuning an antique radio where it is easy enough to find the station, but difficult to get rid of the static.

These are just a few useful constructs that can be used when considering the make up of your management team. It is a balancing act, as challenging people with a range of different responsibilities is a critical management development tool but placing people too far out of their comfort zone rarely serves the needs of the person or the organization. Just ask Peter and his principle.