CMJ Strategies

Role Play

Do you want to be a manager or an analyst?

A former boss once asked me this over coffee. It was still pretty early in my career and I had just started managing a small team. Some time before that I had worked for him – as an “analyst” I guess – analysing what did and didn’t work in public service delivery to advise the Prime Minister on his strategy for reform.  I think my title was ‘Policy Adviser’, but it could easily have been Policy Analyst. I spent my days either knee-deep in data or out and about talking to all sorts of people about what it was really like trying to deliver and how things needed to change.

From there I dutifully worked my way up the Civil Service career ladder, at each step taking on greater responsibility for people and budgets and with job titles as mysterious and unfathomable to outsiders as they could be: “Desk Officer”, “Band A”, “Grade 6”. It was only on reaching the Senior Civil Service that the nomenclature became vaguely comprehensible to the outside world (and my Grandad): “Deputy Director” and then “Director”. But the equivalence was still blurred. When I went out to work in the private sector and talked about having been a Director of School Standards Policy, I got quizzical looks. Wasn’t “policy” what they did in HR or Finance – like expenses? (The budget and team numbers resonated a bit more, but I think sometimes they thought I had a typo on my CV – yes, responsible for the £4bn Nursery Education Grant.)

Years later, another mentor asked me whether I was more interested in leading people or shaping policy. The question catapulted me back to the coffee decades before. What was it about this apparent dichotomy between managing and analysing, between leading and thinking, between ‘the us’ and ‘the it’? I wanted to do both – to lead people and organisations well so that they could make a difference. It was a great question of course, and he didn’t imply that you had to choose one or the other, just that it helped to be conscious of both in all sorts of ways: your motivations; skills; strengths… and, of course, your blind spots.

And this is what I notice about the senior people in the public sector that I work with now: they are engaged in a constant dance between their roles as leaders of people and leaders of thinking. Even in business, leaders often tell me of the grief they feel at doing less of ‘the work’ because now they have ‘people stuff’ to do. It was one of the things that most stood out when I made the transition from Deputy Director to Director in the Civil Service: Yes I needed to deliver through others and “could no longer be the expert on everything”, but the Minister (especially a new one) would also expect me to have a grip – and a clear opinion – on everything in my brief. 😬

So how do we perform this dance?

💃Find the right partners. Build spaces where you can reflect with peers and others about the steps you’re taking. Use it as a space to practise, a space where it’s OK for you to share when you tripped over yourself and fell in a heap, because others are there to help you up and try another way.

🙈Name it. When you feel pulled in different directions, just facing up to the reality of competing pressures can help you take a step back and make conscious choices. So if Ministerial demands and your concerns about team performance combine to mean that you want to step in a take a tighter rein on something, be clear that that’s what you’re doing. And don’t ignore the underlying problem when the spotlight is off.

♾️Keep circling back. Rather than picking a side a sticking to it (“because that’s what I’m really good at”), think about this as a constant movement between parts of a whole that both matter. Sometimes you’ll be more over there but you’ll need to come back over here. And again. The trick will be getting into the groove of that movement and doing it with ever greater elegance and joy…

How do you see yourself?