Bigger Picture
I mentioned elsewhere that individuals are under immense pressure to become expert in their own field. However, it doesn't stop there. Today’s complex challenges also call for that very same individual, especially those at the top of the enterprise, to see the 'bigger picture' and to contribute to an agenda much wider than that of their function or unit.
So, in addition to the professional and technical skills needed to be effective and expert in their speciality, today’s experts also need to know and understand the business, have good interpersonal skills and be able to conceptualise and analyse.
However, the truth is that as the individual specialises and, de facto, knows more about less, it is not uncommon for what I've termed - 'executive glaucoma' - to set in.
Even at senior levels, you'll find individuals so narrowly-focussed that they have little or no appreciation of the roles and contributions of those working in other functions or units.
Today most professionals acknowledge, however begrudgingly, that the success of their enterprise calls for the combined attentions of those operating at the 'coal face' and those behind the scenes with the skills and time to focus on key business issues.
In the not-too-distant past, it might have been a surgeon who managed a hospital (perhaps along the lines of the fictional, Sir Lancelot Spratt, he of the '60s 'Doctor' films).
When not performing heart transplants, teaching junior doctors, undertaking research and seeing private patients, she or he would have provided the everyday management and strategic vision for a costly public enterprise caring for entire communities.
Today that very same surgeon will still be involved in surgery, teaching, research and private medicine. But now they will share the leadership and management role with general management colleagues who can bring to bear the weight of their business skills in finance, personnel, marketing, service delivery, etc. and turn the vision into reality.
Law is another example. Traditionally, barristers appointed an individual from within their ranks who, when not defending a serial murderer in the High Court, provided the overall leadership and management to chambers. However, in recent years, greater competition from solicitors and pressures from Europe have prompted barristers to employ a generalist to assist them with the increasingly complex management agenda.
Those in other professions might recognise certain similarities.
Over the years, a number of new management tools or processes have appeared on the scene, each with the promise that it can help bring some order out of chaos. Most have stumbled 'out of the blocks' as I saw first-hand in two large mergers in banking and the NHS where enterprises were ripped apart by internal division, parochialism and the demands of the most powerful professional cabals, e.g. finance, marketing, etc or, in the case of the NHS, by the doctors, nurses and managers.
Today’s highly functional, segmented and professional enterprises need something more - a process that focuses the minds of all the key players on all the major issues and allocates and balances effort and resources across the entire agenda.