Managing Professionals

Hans de Bruijn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415565080
• eBook ISBN: 9781136947209
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Managing Professionals deals with the tensions between managers and professionals within organizations, such as hospitals, universities, banks and judicial organizations. Often managers rely heavily on the skills and expertise of the professionals in their organizations, yet these professionals consider management a source of bureaucracy and paperwork.

This tension is explored head on in order to answer the question of how to manage an organization effectively. With numerous real-world examples, the book analyzes the problems and complexities of management in professional organizations and makes recommendations on how to manage professionals. The book focuses on a number of key issues, including:

• Management as a problem
• Management as a solution
• Knowledge and innovation
• Strategy
• Cooperation
• Performance

Managing Professionals presents an empirical analysis of the problems and offers solutions to the tension between management and professionals and will be of interest to managers and to students of management, organizational behaviour and business administration.

Chapter
1

THEY CAN'T LIVE WITH EACH OTHER, CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT EACH OTHER

A BOOK ABOUT PROFESSIONALS AND MANAGERS

This book deals with a relationship full of tension: the one between managers and professionals. Professionals are the people who do what is called the ‘real work’ in our society. They are engineers, judges, medical doctors, teachers, police officers, actors, pilots, and so on. They maintain power plants, they pass verdicts, they operate, they teach, they catch criminals, and they move and inspire us. Their work often requires specialist knowledge, which they can only maintain by constantly gaining new experiences. For many professionals, their profession is their passion: they are strongly motivated because they love what they do.

In the past few decades, professionals have increasingly been confronted with managers: non-professionals who manage the professional organization. The often-heard complaint is that there are too many managers, and that they are too powerful while they know too little about the profession. The added value of all these managers is unclear to many professionals – especially when it concerns managers who do not come from within the profession. Management causes hassle, and as soon as managers are in charge, things no longer happen spontaneously.

PROFESSIONALS NEED AUTONOMY …

This is an often-heard wisdom that will appeal to many professionals. Professionals should be allowed to do their work and should be bothered with as little organizational and bureaucratic hassle as possible. Someone who performs complex tasks needs autonomy and has a right to be trusted with the responsibility to perform these tasks well. Managerial control mechanisms are superfluous in well-functioning professional organizations. Professionals are always embedded in a professional community, with its own codes that contribute to the quality of the service delivery. This mutual professional control has much more added value than managerial control mechanisms. In addition, there is the phenomenon of professional pride: professionals generally have a strong intrinsic motivation and take pride in their work. By definition they will make an effort to do their work to the best of their capabilities. Professional autonomy is the best guarantee for a high quality professional service delivery.

… AND THEREFORE MANAGERS ARE THE PROBLEM

Much of the hassle in professional organizations is caused by managers. Managers know less about the profession than their subordinates do, and therefore they resort to useless protocols, plans and procedures. Protocols, plans and procedures result in an enormous burden of proof imposed upon professionals. Before they can act, they have to prove that their actions meet the requirements of the protocols, plans and procedures. There is no room left for what is called ‘professional audacity’: acting professionally, also when there is limited information or time. Managers break the basic rule – that professionals need autonomy. Someone who seeks refuge in protocols, plans and procedures will deliver a sub-optimal professional performance in the end. The conclusion should be that fewer managers equals less hassle and more professionalism.

Of course no one will deny that there is a need for managers. After all, someone needs to take care of the buildings and the equipment – but the question in a professional organization should always be: what is the added value of the echelons above the professional? Professionally, a university professor is the one expert in his organization. His organization's raison d’être is to enable research, including his own. The logical question is: what is the added value of the echelons above the professor? What is the added value of the dean of his faculty? And of the board? Of the various staff departments? It is the managers who carry the burden of proof; in fact they should be the ones to go through the hassle of protocols, plans and procedures, instead of our poor professionals.

… AND THEREFORE MANAGERS ARE ALSO THE SOLUTION

So far this line of reasoning will be appealing, but it calls for a critical note. Society is becoming increasingly demanding and complicated. This gives rise to new questions, which do not always correspond with the interests and the values of professionals. Technological developments and the ageing of the population strongly increase the need for medical professionals, both quantitatively and qualitatively. At the same time, there is a strong cost increase. The logical consequence is that an effort is made to limit these costs. The strong demand for legal services – and other professions – is resulting in increasingly long waiting lists. It may therefore be necessary to introduce new standards that are different, sometimes even radically different, from the existing professional standards. We want our professional organizations to use new and often very costly technology, but some of them are too small for this and can only do this by merging with other organizations. We want teachers to listen to the parents; we are sometimes frustrated because they don't, and wonder why the school has not come up with a solution for this kind of situation. Cost control, new standards, mergers, complaint arrangements: they do not always spontaneously emerge from the professional community – professionals may even oppose them – and yet we want these issues to be addressed. Not addressing them may affect the quality of the service delivery. Moreover, some of these issues require a kind of expertise that differs from the professionals’ substantive expertise. Or, put differently, they require another kind of expertise in addition. It is not unlikely that a professional, when asked for his initiatives in relation to these issues, will refer to the manager. The idea that professionals need autonomy can also be used as an argument in favour of more management. Questions that are directed at the organization and that have nothing to do with the content of the profession should be answered by managers. This will allow professionals to focus on the things that are important to them.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

If all of this is true, then there are two obvious conclusions. One: managers exist, they do useful things, and they will therefore always keep existing. Two: there will always be tension between professionals and managers – they are often each other's countervailing power. The doctor represents medical quality, the manager represents cost control, and both of them are right. The manager and the professional represent two different world views that are both correct. They often cannot live with each other, but they cannot live without each other either. And perhaps they are both unsatisfied in the end. The manager is unable to achieve the cost control that he envisioned, and the doctor has to compromise what he sees as quality.

In this book I will therefore assume that there are managers in professional organizations and that they can have a useful task. Managers and professionals cannot live without each other. This does not mean, however, that managers are always right. On the contrary: management can be a major problem in professional organizations – all too often, managers and professionals cannot live with each other. But we should keep a certain balance in mind: managers can also be a solution to problems that exist in professional organizations. Therefore Chapter 2 will illustrate why managers are often a problem, while Chapter 3 will explain why they can also be a solution.

Reality, in other words, is often less simple than it appears to be. We will often have to look beyond simple management bashing, but also beyond the many all-too-simple tools and models that suggest that professional organizations are ordinary organizations.

Based on the observations in Chapters 2 and 3, I will deal with a number of themes: strategy (Chapter 4), quality (Chapter 5), coordination and cooperation (Chapter 6), knowledge and innovation (Chapter 7), performance (Chapter 8) and change (Chapter 9). Chapter 10 contains a few concluding remarks. The bottom line is that ‘either/or thinking’, whether from a professional or managerial perspective, yields a picture that is too simple. This means that some pictures that I describe may be counter-intuitive – for the professional, for the manager, or perhaps for both these groups.

Chapter
2

MANAGEMENT AS A PROBLEM

MANAGERS CREATE BUREAUCRACY, introduce unnecessary procedures and place too much confidence in management gurus and their model talk. Too often they resort to the paper reality of their planning and accountability systems. They create so much hassle that they prevent professionals from getting to the core of their work. Managers, in short, are a problem rather than a solution – in contrast to what they often believe.

All of this can be true: management can become a power that leads to nothing but deprofessionalization and bureaucracy, and doesn't add any value to the profession. In this chapter I will look into the causes of this. These can easily be found by examining three central characteristics of professional organizations: professionals’ expertise, variety within the professional organization, and the way professionals innovate.

FIRST CHARACTERISTIC: TACIT KNOWLEDGE – A PROFESSIONAL DOES NOT RECOGNIZE HIS OWN INTELLIGENCE

The central characteristic of professionals, of course, is that their activities are knowledge- and skill-intensive.¹ The classic example is the medical doctor. Having completed his graduate degree in medicine, he has to spend several years gaining practical experience as a resident. The process continues after that: a doctor can only maintain and renew his knowledge and skills if he is professionally active. Each year he has to perform a certain minimum amount of medical interventions. Apparently a doctor who does not succeed in this can lose his skills despite many years of study and practice. This leads us to an important characteristic of professionals: the skills they need are knowledge-intensive and they maintain and develop these skills through the daily practising of their profession.

There is more: many professionals are hardly aware of this process of maintenance and development. It just happens. The surgeon just operates and is often unaware of the fact that he is learning continuously. In addition, the knowledge that he gains is so natural to him, so intimately connected to his person, that he often doesn't even know all the things he knows. This is what we call tacit knowledge.² Professional knowledge is often tacit or implicit: it has grown slowly by continuous professional action, and a professional often finds it hard to make this knowledge explicit and explain to others what he knows and why he acts the way he does.³ In other words, he doesn't recognize his own intelligence.

WHY A NON-NATIVE SPEAKER KNOWS MORE ABOUT A NATIVE SPEAKER'S LANGUAGE THAN A NATIVE SPEAKER

The simplest example to illustrate this point is a person's knowledge of his native tongue – a metaphor that helps us to understand the tension between managers and professionals. Almost everyone speaks his or her own native tongue fluently and almost flawlessly. We do this naturally. We have learned the language from birth, first at home and then at school. We use this knowledge on a daily basis. Without further consideration we produce the most complicated grammatical constructions.

My native language is Dutch. In class I often meet German students. I have often asked them if they can name the prepositions that are followed by the dative case in German. I have never met a German student that could. I am much more likely to hear the right answer from Dutch students. Effortlessly they produce the dative-case prepositions: ‘mit, nach, bei, seit, von, zu, aus, ausser, gemäss, zuwieder, entgegen en gegenüber’. This difference also relates to tacit knowledge. Of course the German student speaks the language much better than the Dutch student. The German student's mastery of the language is so good that he is unaware of his intelligence. These prepositions are naturally followed by the dative case. Dutch students are much less confident with the German language and have to rely on learning the underlying grammar rules if they are to speak the language correctly. They have to learn the sequence by heart, and the fact that they can recite it doesn't indicate that their German is good. On the contrary. The Dutch student knows these prepositions because he lacks a certain skill. The German student lacks that knowledge because he has a certain skill.

We can apply this example to the relationship between a professional and a manager. In this case, the native speaker is the professional and the non-native speaker is the manager. When the non-native speaker (the manager) asks for the prepositions that are followed by the dative case, the native speaker (the professional) will not only be unable to provide the answer; he will also be completely uninterested by it. Making these prepositions explicit is difficult for the professional/native speaker. It is a hassle and it is pointless: it will not improve his language skills. To the manager/non-native speaker, on the other hand, this will appear to be a very useful activity. Many managers will conclude that everyone speaks German, but that there are no protocols that explain the underlying grammar, and that the use of the dative versus the accusative case is completely unclear to them. They will also conclude that no one can explain to them why, and that everyone seems to choose randomly between the two. Finally, they will determine that this results in an urgent need to spell out the underlying grammar, so the next generation of professionals will know what to do.

This example illustrates part of the tragedy of managers and professionals. Both lines of reasoning are powerful, and both can be convincing. Both the professional and the manager have their own intrinsically logical line of reasoning, each from their own perspective, while these lines of reasoning are like water and fire. Later in this book I will come back to this issue.

So there is something we call ‘tacit knowledge’. There are, of course, many types of tacit knowledge. The following four phenomena – which are not intended as an all-inclusive list – may be helpful to understand tacit knowledge.

PATTERNS: THE CHECKERS MASTER

There have been interesting studies on the question, what enables a checkers master to play a blindfold simultaneous game? A checkers master is crazy about playing checkers; he spends the majority of his time playing checkers, and his memory appears to contain an enormous variety of associations with other games. This is his tacit knowledge. During a blindfold simultaneous game, he continuously uses these associations. The checkers mas...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• 1 They can’t live with each other, can’t live without each other
• 2 Management as a problem
• 3 Management as a solution
• 4 Strategic management
• 5 Quality management
• 6 Coordination and cooperation
• 7 Knowledge management and innovation
• 8 Performance management
• 9 Change management
• 10 Beyond the one-handed organization
• Literature
• Index