From Subject Matter Expert Supervisor to Project Manager: 

 Leadership Case Analysis and Leadership Profile Recommendations 

By Su-Cheng Wu

Abstract

Within my organization, a natural career path is to move up from Subject Matter Expert Supervisor to Project or Functional Manager.  However, the transition comes with a change in the required leadership skills.  Supervisor Star is the star leader of an advanced 3D graphics group.  In this setting, his Pacesetter transactional leadership produces outputs of impressive quality with extraordinary efficiency.  Nevertheless, Star’s high standards and reliance on his technical excellence alienate part of his team.  Additionally, his leadership style does not translate well to interactions with other managers and clients as he moves into higher positions.  Therefore, it is recommended that Star learn to empower his subordinates through Principle-Centered Power and a more Transformational, Democratic or Coaching style of leadership.

Research Description and Hoped-for Findings:

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in an organization who reach the supervisory level of other SMEs often face a crossroad in their career path: should they stay as a SME supervising other SMEs, or should they start pursuing the position of a project manager? This paper examines one of my co-workers’ leadership style and relates his case to leadership qualities important in the transition form an SME to a project manager.  First, by drawing upon literature and my personal observations, this paper will analyze the pros and cons of Supervisor Star’s current leadership style, as well as their impacts on his project deliverables and his crew in general.  Secondly, the paper will discuss the environmental factors in my organization, specifically the different managerial roles of supervisors, project managers, and functional managers in the organization. Finally, the expected outcome of this research paper is a recommended practical leadership profile for SME supervisors in my organization who plan on pursuing a managerial path in project management.

 

The “Pacesetter” Supervisor Star

Known throughout the organization, Supervisor Star is the lead performer of a specialized advanced 3D computer graphics SME group. Based on actual records, Star’s productivity can be as high as 3 to 14 times higher than our average employee. He demands nothing short of excellence and produces everything with the utmost quality and efficiency.  In “Leadership Style: Is There One Best, Or Is Flexibility Worth Developing?”, Zervas, C. & Lassiter, D’s “Pacesetter” leadership style sums up Supervisor Star:

Pacesetters are star performers who lay sole claim to the limelight and seek it as a core goal…Leadership is achieved through setting an example, rather than through instruction or intentional staff development, establishment of high standards, and through imparting enthusiasm. (Zervas, & Lassiter, 2007)

 

Transactional Leader by Nature

 

Fundamentally, Supervisor Star is a transactional leader. Transactional leadership uses contingent rewards, and active and passive management by exception.  (Den Hartog, Van Muije, & Koopman, 1997). The effectiveness of Star’s methods is well documented in managerial research and easily seen in the results that he achieves.  Star freely shares all his expert techniques and knowledge with his crew, but in return expects them to meet his expectations with hard work and as much talent and creativity as himself. He rewards his crew with insider technical know-how and high profile works that come with their reputation; at the same time, he punishes underperforming workers with less visible and tedious work. In two documented cases, he punished ill-performing contracted workers by sending them home for repeated offenses in work-unrelated internet surfing and excessive tardiness.  

 

Transactional Leadership’s Mixed Impact on Project Team members

 

When one examines Supervisor Star’s deliverables purely from the product’s standpoint, one would conclude with only the best possible impressions. Nevertheless, when examining Supervisor Star’s leadership from the crew’s perspective, a slightly more polarized image becomes apparent, depending on if the crew in question is McGregor’s Theory X or Theory Y employee (McGregor, 1960). Naturally, people react differently to different leadership styles. When Star’s crews are examined within the framework of leader power and influence proposed by Strang, more would fall under stages (3) and (4); with only selected few reaching the advanced stages (1) and (2): 

 (4) Resistance - follower is opposed to request but may respond, and will likely make excuses why request cannot be complied with, try to persuade the leader to use another course of action, seek an overruling by appeal to higher authority, delay and procrastinate to make it all too hard, and finally sabotage, or outright refuse to comply. 

(3) Instrumental compliance - follower is willing to comply but only for reward…if…the value of the reward ceases to be attractive, then team member compliance will cease.

(2) Identification - follower target complies based on relationship and affiliation motivates but if the leader becomes less attractive, then commitment is withdrawn.

(1) Internalization - follower becomes committed…commitment is independent of rewards offered as values and beliefs are the driving forces. (Strang, 2005)

This has likely become the case because Supervisor Star leads a cross-functional team. Crews who fall into stages (1) and (2) have the tendency to be pacesetters themselves, and are highly competitive and talented individuals who derive substantial benefits from learning with Supervisor Star. However, some workers fall into stage (3) or even stage (4) often because they perform tasks that Supervisor Star is less familiar with (such as project coordination, communications, and business functions). While Star demands just as much quality and efficiency from these employees, he is limited in his transactional leadership because he lacks the appropriate basis for making performance judgments, making him unable to reward or punish fairly. Additionally, whether consciously or subconsciously, Star shows signs of disrespect to processes that are outside of his area of expertise. To him, any task besides direct product development appear to be trivial and sometimes downright superfluous or even borderline “evil” or “politically dirty”.  

 

Summary: Supervisor Star’s Leadership’s Generally Positive Impacts

There is no doubt that Star is a star supervisor when it comes to delivering quality products with efficiency and reliability. The advantage of his leadership style is that since he sets the bar very high in everything he does and leads, from the client’s and Sr. Management’s perspective, any project under his supervision is automatically considered of the highest value with guarantees in quality and efficiency.  His brand is so effective that even in the face of extreme scope changes, when quality is usually compromised by necessity, no one would doubt that Star would still deliver the highest possible quality within the given budgeted time and resources.  The main shortcoming of Star’s leadership style is that it requires highly skilled and specially motivated workers to follow him, and it carries the risk of reducing a crew’s productivity in the long run by alienating part of the team. However, in a large organization such as ours where large numbers of temporary specialists are hired to gather around projects, the long term effect is often less measurable. In the end, Supervisor Star’s leadership style’s effectiveness and impact correspond closely to the analysis in Zervas, C. & Lassiter, D’s “Effects of Pacesetter style”: 

The Pacesetter is often the darling of boards of directors and can have a beneficial effect on the organization…One necessary precondition for the effective use of the Pacesetting style is that subordinates be self-motivated and highly skilled...The Pacesetter tends to become coercive when a subordinate fails to live up to expectations or when there is trouble. Pacesetting tends to undermine organizational climate over time:  1) by producing burn-out in subordinates because of the demanding pace required; 2) by the absence of clearly stated guidelines for performance; and 3) by the failure of the Pacesetter to allow people to work in their own way which tends to make work boring and routine. 

In short, Star’s transactional leadership with a Pacesetter style (Zervas & Lassiter, 2007) has allowed him to perform extremely effectively as a supervisor to deliver quality and efficiency.  Despite potential long-term negative impacts to some of his crew, Star’s transactional leadership promotes creativity for the individualists (e.g. computer graphic artists) on his team, thus allowing them to perform the jobs of this group exceptionally well.  (Jung & Avolio, 1999)

 

Organizational Environment Factors: Self Managed Work Team

While proven to be an effective supervisor, whether Star’s leadership style would serve him as well in a project or even functional management role is not clear.  To answer this question, it is important to examine our organization’s environmental factors. Unfortunately, our business environment dictates a promotional path from supervisor to manager, which often requires a change in leadership style with the ability to use different kinds of power sources. Our business is classified as an internal Product Development Service Group. Our main business function is to support other Product Development Groups’ (PDG) innovation and product development. We focus on 3 domains, assisting our PDGs in: 1) specialized works development, 2) research and development works, and 3) overflow works development. The first and second domains focus on increasing quality, while the last one focuses on maintaining quality. Clearly, quality is a significant element in our corporate culture, which demands that we are foremost a quality-oriented business that focuses on outputs of the highest quality.  Therefore, efficient total quality management is very important in our organization. Ideally, many of our project teams would resemble what Roper, & Phillips describe as “self-managed work teams.” (Roper, & Phillips, 2007):

Self-managed work team … is expected to lead to an increase in efficiency, quality control and overall effectiveness.  In a total quality management environment, the convergence of democracy and independence is essential … [Team members’] common denominator in skill requirements [are]: experts with complimentary and non-overlapping technical expertise, problem solving, decision making skills and interpersonal skills.    

 

Matrix Organization Structure

From an organizational structure’s perspective, according to the PMBOK, we have a weak to balanced “matrix” organizational structure (PMBOK, 2008). The fact that our teams are mostly project-centered, self-managed work teams with a weak matrix structure further dictates that many of our part-time project managers serve more as coordinators than true project managers. Even fulltime project managers must act more like coaches and facilitators because in a team with many complementary expertise, it is too difficult for them to enforce technical standards (Uhl-Bien & Graen, 1998).  For this reason, our organization has different managerial foci for our supervisors, project managers, and functional managers. Our organization culture rewards and demands more transformational leadership as one rises through the ranks.  While the demand for quality is a constant given, our projects are often full of turbulence and changes due to their creative nature. Bass (1985a, 1990b) states that transformational leadership is particularly valuable when the situation facing a firm is turbulent and thus major changes within the company are needed.

 

From Product Centric to People Centric: Managing vs Influencing

By definition, supervisor, project managers, and functional managers all perform the following managerial activities: Decide, Organize, Plan, Control and Lead. (Leybourne, 2010). Supervisors focus on product quality management, specifically competent delivery per scope requirement, as well as timely, efficient execution by designing appropriate pipelines that use their “given” resources well. Project managers focus on time, scope, and stakeholders management, which include risk, assumptions, resource acquisition and management, especially in maximizing resource performance in leader-to-follower, peer-to-peer and follower-to-leader situations. Finally, functional managers are accountable for all 3 elements of a project triangle - quality, time and resources (cost) - via effective people and client management. As we can see, the managerial focus shifts from product to resource and ultimately to market (client). 

Conclusion: From Transactional to Transformational 

Having established that one needs more transformational leadership skills both in leading subordinates and in interacting with peers in a Self-Managed Work Team, we are now ready to analyze the kind of leadership style that Star would need to develop in order for him to become an effective project manager for our organization.  As a star performer, Star has many qualities that he can leverage towards transformational leadership. Consider the four characteristics of transformational leadership: (Lowe, Kroeck, & Sivasubramaniam, 1996, Rose, 2010).  

1) Idealized influence - referring to leaders behaving admirably; the subordinates hold their leader in high regard; 

2) Inspirational motivation - referring to leaders motivating and inspiring subordinates through their optimism, vision, persuasion, and enthusiasm; 

3) Intellectual stimulation - referring to leaders challenging assumptions and encouraging innovation and creativity from their subordinates; and, 

4) Individualized consideration - referring to leaders attending to the growth and development of their subordinates  

Star’s technical excellence potentially allows him to garner admiration from his workers, and to inspire them and stimulate them intellectually.  However, it would appear that Supervisor Star needs to work on being more persuasive rather than imposing, more encouraging rather than demanding, and more considerate of individual needs rather than doing management by exceptions.  The following chart, showing 3 out of Goleman’s Six Leadership Styles (Goleman, 2000) (Appendix A), illustrate Supervisor Star’s current leadership style vs what he could be: (Zervas, & Lassiter, 2007)

 

	PACESETTING	DEMOCRATIC	COACHING
The leader’s modus operandi	Sets high standards for performance	Forges consensus through participation	Develops people for the future
The style in a phrase	“Do as I do, now.”	“What do you think?”	“Try this.”
Underlying emotional intelligence competencies	Conscientious, drive to achieve, initiative	Collaboration, team leadership, communication	Developing others, empathy, self-awareness
When the style works best	To get quick results from a highly motivated and competent team	To build buy-in or consensus or to get input from valuable employees; valuable when teamwork is essential	To help employees improve performance or develop long-term strengths
Overall impact on climate	Negative	Positive	Positive

 

 

As we can see, both the Democratic and Coaching styles show positive overall impact on climate, and are more suitable for Self-Managed Work Teams as they encourage collaboration and respect among teammates and between leader and follower. As one moves from being a supervisor to a manager, it becomes increasingly important for the leader to know how to best induce others to contribute as opposed to doing everything by oneself.  As Goleman stated, good leaders are effective because they create resonance. (Goleman, 2000) For Supervisor Star to be effective as a project or functional manager in our organization, it is vital that he develops the ability to influence without authority. This could be accomplished via the development of Principle-Centered Power. (Lee, 1998) This skill is particularly important when dealing with peers and clients. The recommendation here is for Supervisor Star to consciously not rely solely on his transactional leadership style, but to learn how he can effectively influence across and above since authority would not be effective in peer-to-peer (project manager to supervisor) or follower-to-leader (manager to client) orientations. 

 

Principle-Centered Power

The 10 basic Principle-Centered Power skills that would benefit Star in a higher managerial position are: Persuasion, Patience, Gentleness, Teachability, Acceptance, Kindness, Knowledge, Discipline, Consistency and finally, Integrity. The key note here being that “integrity” is a perceived character trait that could only be achieved via one exhibiting motivational qualities as opposed to being manipulative. (Lee, 1998) For our organization, a manager’s ability to deal with people must grow proportionally as the ranks grow higher, going from “managing” to “inducing” internal resources to “influencing” external clients. In short, within our organization, from supervisor to project manager we see a reduction in the effectiveness of transactional leadership style that uses coercive or authoritative power. Since expert or legitimate power has less effect on peers, sponsors, and clients, both project and functional managers require more transformational leadership skills. Thus, Supervisor Star is advised here to 

1) Make a conscious effort to develop more transformational leadership quality by being more motivational and providing individualized considerations to his crew

 2) Transition his leadership style from Pacesetter to that of a Democratic and Coaching leader, and  

3) Develop Principle-Centered Power so he can prepare to influence others without authority, which is a vital skill when one not only must manage below but have to induce peers and influence clients. 

References

 

Bass, B.M. (1985a). Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations, New York: The Free Press.

 

Bass, B.M. (1985b). Leadership: Good, Better, Best, Organizational Dynamics, 13 (Winter), 26-40.

 

Den Hartog, D.N., Van Muije, J.J., & Koopman, P.L. (1997). Transactional versus Transformational Leadership: An analysis of the MLQ. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.70, 1, 19-34.

 

Douglas McGregor. (1960). The Human Side of Enterprise. McGraw Hill Higher Education

Goleman, Daniel. (2000). Leadership That Gets Results. Harvard Business Review Mar. – Apr. 78-      

 

Jung, Dong I., and Bruce J. Avolio. (1999). Effects of Leadership Style and Followers’ Cultural Orientation on Performance in group and Individual Task Conditions. Academy of Management Journal 42.2 208-218

 

Leybourne, S. (2010). Lecture 1 – Relationships between Management, Project Management and Implementation, AD643-Project Communications Management: Boston University, Boston, MA.

 

Project Management Institute. (2008). A guide to the project management body of knowledge: (PMBOK guide, 4^th Edition), Project Management Institute, Inc.

 

Kathy O Roper, & Deborah R Phillips. (2007). Integrating self-managed work teams into project management. Journal of Facilities Management, 5(1), 22-36. Retrieved November 10, 2010, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 1294906001).

 

Kenneth David Strang (2005). Team Performance Management., Bradford:. Vol. 11, Iss. 3/4; pg. 68, 36 pgs

 

Lee, Blaine (1998). The Power Principle: Influence with Honor.  New York: Fireside.

 

Lowe, K. B., Kroeck, K. G., & Sivasubramaniam, N. (1996). Effectiveness Correlates of Transformational and Transactional Leadership: A Meta-analytic Review of the MLQ Literature. Leadership Quarterly, 7, 385−425.

 

Raven, B.H. and Kruglanski, A.W. (1970)."Conflict and power", in Swingle, P. (Ed.), The Structure of Conflict. Academic Press, New York, NY.

 

Uhl-Bien, M. and Graen, G. (1998). Individual self-management: analysis of professionals’ self-managing ativities in functional and cross-functional work teams. Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 41 No. 3, pp. 340 – 350

 

Zervas, C. & Lassiter, D. (2007). Leadership Style: Is There “One Best,” 
Or Is Flexibility Worth Developing?.Leadership Advantage, Retrieved October 27, 2010.

Appendix

(A) Goleman’s “THE SIX LEADERSHIP STYLES” (Goleman, 2000)

 

	COERCIVE	AUTHORITATIVE	AFFILIATIVE	DEMOCRATIC	PACESETTING	COACHING
The leader’s modus operandi	Demands immediate compliance	Mobilizes people toward a vision	Creates harmony and builds emotional bonds	Forges consensus through participation	Sets high standards for performance	Develops people for the future
The style in a phrase	“Do what I tell you.”	“Come with me.”	“People come first.”	“What do you think?”	“Do as I do, now.”	“Try this.”
Underlying emotional intelligence competencies	Drive to achieve, initiative, self-control	Self-confidence, empathy, change catalyst	Empathy, building relationships, communication	Collaboration, team leadership, communication	Conscientious, drive to achieve, initiative	Developing others, empathy, self-awareness
When the style works best	In a crisis, to jump-start a turnaround, or to deal with problem employees	When changes require a new vision or where a clear direction is needed	To heal rifts in a team or to motivate people during stressful circumstances	To build buy-in or consensus or to get input from valuable employees; valuable when teamwork is essential	To get quick results from a highly motivated and competent team	To help employees improve performance or develop long-term strengths
Overall impact on climate	Negative	Most strongly positive	Positive	Positive	Negative	Positive