Managers and Leaders • HBR C LASSIC
think a violin is better than a touchdown.
“After four months of practicing the violin,
the boy has had more than enough, Dad is
going out of his mind, and Mom is willing to
give in reluctantly to their wishes. Football season is now over, but a good third baseman will
take the field next spring.”
This story illustrates two themes that clarify
managerial attitudes toward human relations.
The first, as I have suggested, is to seek out activity with other people (that is, the football
team), and the second is to maintain a low
level of emotional involvement in those relationships. Low emotional involvement appears
in the writer’s use of conventional metaphors,
even clichés, and in the depiction of the ready
transformation of potential conflict into harmonious decisions. In this case, the boy, Mom,
and Dad agree to give up the violin for sports.
These two themes may seem paradoxical,
but their coexistence supports what a manager
does, including reconciling differences, seeking compromises, and establishing a balance of
power. The story further demonstrates that
managers may lack empathy, or the capacity
to sense intuitively the thoughts and feelings
of others. Consider another story written to
the same stimulus picture by someone thought
of as a leader by his peers:
“This little boy has the appearance of being
a sincere artist, one who is deeply affected by
the violin, and has an intense desire to master
the instrument.
“He seems to have just completed his normal practice session and appears to be somewhat crestfallen at his inability to produce the
sounds that he is sure lie within the violin.
“He appears to be in the process of making
a vow to himself to expend the necessary time
and effort to play this instrument until he satisfies himself that he is able to bring forth the
qualities of music that he feels within himself.
“With this type of determination and carry
through, this boy became one of the great violinists of his day.”
Empathy is not simply a matter of paying
attention to other people. It is also the capacity to take in emotional signals and make them
meaningful in a relationship. People who describe another person as “deeply affected,”
with “intense desire,” “crestfallen,” and as one
who can “vow to himself” would seem to have
an inner perceptiveness that they can use in
their relationships with others.
harvard business review • march–april 1992
Managers relate to people according to the
role they play in a sequence of events or in a
decision-making process, while leaders, who
are concerned with ideas, relate in more intuitive and empathetic ways. The distinction is
simply between a manager’s attention to how
things get done and a leader’s to what the
events and decisions mean to participants.
In recent years, managers have adopted
from game theory the notion that decisionmaking events can be one of two types: the
win-lose situation (or zero-sum game) or the
win-win situation in which everybody in the
action comes out ahead. Managers strive to
convert win-lose into win-win situations as
part of the process of reconciling differences
among people and maintaining balances of
power.
As an illustration, take the decision of how
to allocate capital resources among operating
divisions in a large, decentralized organization.
On the surface, the dollars available for distribution are limited at any given time. Presumably, therefore, the more one division gets, the
less is available for other divisions.
Managers tend to view this situation (as it
affects human relations) as a conversion issue:
how to make what seems like a win-lose problem into a win-win problem. From that perspective, several solutions come to mind. First,
the manager focuses others’ attention on procedure and not on substance. Here the players
become engrossed in the bigger problem of
how to make decisions, not what decisions to
make. Once committed to the bigger problem,
these people have to support the outcome
since they were involved in formulating the
decision-making rules. Because they believe in
the rules they formulated, they will accept
present losses, believing that next time they
will win.
Second, the manager communicates to subordinates indirectly, using “signals” instead of
“messages.” A signal holds a number of implicit positions, while a message clearly states a
position. Signals are inconclusive and subject
to reinterpretation should people become
upset and angry; messages involve the direct
consequence that some people will indeed not
like what they hear. The nature of messages
heightens emotional response and makes managers anxious. With signals, the question of
who wins and who loses often becomes obscured.
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