Weekend Leadership Reading: 4/23/21

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Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular workdays. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles about articles are about whether we need managers.

From Art Petty: It’s Past Time to Rethink the Role (and Label) of Manager

“People don’t want to be managed—they want to be supported, encouraged, challenged, exposed to new opportunities, and coached, but not managed.”

From the Harvard Business Review: What Does It Mean to Be a Manager Today?

“Managers used to be selected and promoted largely based on their ability to manage and evaluate the performance of employees who could carry out a particular set of tasks. But three disruptive, transformative trends are challenging traditional definitions of the manager role: Normalization of remote work, automation, and changing employee expectations. These three trends have culminated in a new era of management where it’s less important to see what employees are doing and more important to understand how they feel. To be successful in this new environment, managers must lead with empathy. This will require organizations and their HR functions to develop their managers’ skills, awaken their mindsets to manage in new ways, and create the capacity across the organization to enable this shift. The authors present a holistic strategy that invests in all three of those strategies.”

From the Economist: The usefulness of managers

“IS YOUR manager really necessary? It is not always clear to workers how much their supervisors are contributing to the success of an organisation. It may not even be clear to the managers themselves. After a long day filled with meetings, many bosses must wonder what they have actually achieved.”

From the London Business School: Do we still need managers?

“Traditional workplace hierarchies could become a thing of the past. Julian Birkinshaw reports.”

From Forbes: Work-From-Home Might Prove Managers Are No Longer Necessary

“Our recent shift to work-from-home is revealing something many companies don’t know how to handle yet—that many employees don’t actually need to be managed.”

Every Monday, I do a blog post about business reading and business books. Follow this link to my recent list of book recommendations for business leader.

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