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Philip Augar |
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For over twenty years, Philip Augar has been one of the City's top brokers. After building NatWest's equities business into a leading position, he transformed Schroder Securities and most recently was a member of the team that negotiated the sale of Schroders' investment bank to Citigroup.
Are you one of the forgotten heroes of the modern workplace – combining being a star in you own field with working in a team? Philip Augar and Joy Palmer, respectively the former head of Schroders and consultant to blue-chip companies, found that high performing professionals – player managers – were taking on management responsibility with no let-up in their own production duties. By going out and talking to new and seasoned player managers in business, they show how real people, faced with what is often the greatest challenge to their working lives, can often raise their game. We asked the authors their advice on how to handle the pressures of player managing.
In your work you constantly refer to the role of the player manager, who and what are these player managers in the workplace?
A player manager is someone who combines specialist work with managing. Think of any profession or business today and the chances are that you will find player managers at the core. Group leaders in industry, client service heads in call centres, foremen across all trades, section heads in retail, sisters on the hospital ward, GP’s in a local practice, department heads in schools, are amongst the many men and women nowadays who have to manage while they work.
You say player managers are becoming increasingly common. Why is that?
Player managers have always existed alongside full time managers for two reasons, one cultural and the other economic.
The cultural factor manifests itself in a desire to be involved in management but also to carry on practicing as a professional. A combination of professional pride and suspicion of full time management can contribute to this. The second factor is the ever-present pressure for business efficiency and making profits. In the desire to avoid overhead many organizations get their senior players to do the managing.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century leaner management structures encouraged by the drive for shareholder value, a huge expansion in the professional services sector, and the growth of knowledge working in the information economy, were further factors in the player manager’s rise.
Very few people now foresee a return to the old days of steep hierarchies with lots of layers of full-time management with separate symbols of rank and office. Technical experts are increasingly being expected to incorporate managerial tasks into their daily work, as managing evolves rather than disappears. The player manager seems set to be at the core of 21st century work.
Why do you think playing and managing at the same time is so difficult?
It’s a bit like patting your head and rubbing your tummy. It’s counterintuitive to do both at the same time. Each activity requires separate concentration and focus. So, when you first try to pay attention to both at once suddenly everything can go wrong.
A lot of player managers discover that once they take on managing, as well as continuing to deliver results in their area of expertise, that their performance suffers and so do the people they have been asked to manage.
Why should a busy player manager read your book?
This is a hard one to answer because we didn’t get the scars of our player managing experience from reading books. We shied away from the traditional business book approach and style when writing the book. We chose instead to tell stories about player managers based on people and situations that we met in the field.
We tell the stories of eight main characters. Each story unfolds around a crisis they are facing as they come to terms with a player manager challenge. By telling these stories in combination with numerous anecdotes and cases, we hope our characters will resonate with readers of the book who may recognize and identify with the challenges described. In the end though we both feel that lessons learned from others experience can only take you so far. The person in the hot seat has to find a way to stay in it as there is no single recipe for success.
Is the book mainly aimed at people in big corporations or is it also relevant for small business owners too?
The book is aimed at player managers everywhere. One of the things we found out is that it doesn’t matter if you’re the head honcho of a large public institution, Managing Partner of a large professional practice or the owner of a corner store. The essential challenge of the role remains unchanged, which is to find a way of successfully juggling managing while you work.
We soon discovered there were several types of player manager and that when it came to their style it didn’t matter how big the job was or how large the organization was. People tend to have certain strengths and shortcomings and unless they stand back to think, they perpetuate these regardless of the specific situation or circumstances they find themselves in.
Whether you are in public service, big business, or small business, both getting feedback from others about how you are doing, and using some common sense levers to motivate others, are good ways to iron out the creases of your particular personal style.
You've both been player managers during your careers. What would you say were the most useful things you learned from that experience?
Two things really. First that trying to do everything on your own does not work. It might seem easier just to do it yourself rather than taking the time to explain a task to others, but in the long run this does not work. It leads to personal burn out and alienates the team. They do not feel involved and they get demotivated. They can even come to resent the leader and the organization.
Secondly, that 100% scores as a player manager are impossible. Even experienced player managers make mistakes and get things wrong. It’s an art not a science. As we say in the book, if you are juggling a lot of balls at once the trick is to keep enough in the air at once to keep the crowd happy and the juggler in a job.
Does playing and managing work better in football or in business?
It can work well or badly in either. We took the idea of player managers from English football, where Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool in the eighties and Gianluca Vialli at Chelsea in the nineties had spectacular success managing their teams while playing for them. For us they were good examples of how player managing could work. We were able to find equally successful player managers doing less glamorous work in business and the public and private sector professions.
One difference is that in sport player managing is often a transition for senior players at the end of their careers, whilst at work player managing can be a career in itself. In each case success as a player is no guarantee that success as a manager will follow, but there are definitely things that people and organizations can do to improve the chances of success. These things are common to work and to sport.
