The activity/project roles are especially often confused with the organizational units/occupied organizational positions when looking at bosses—because the ability of bosses to command resources is very important. Bosses in relation to roles should be seen as card “jokers” that can become any card the player wants. The boss tries to play personally those roles that he considers underrepresented in the project, or tries to figure out the situation in order to assign the solution of some issues to those organizational units that are in the team and that have enough skill in performing the practice needed to solve a difficult issue. To do this, he actively seeks out concerns and preferences not yet accounted for, and also engages in leadership (assigning the person-in-charge or even the whole organizational unit to step into the right organizational role so that the practice of that role can be done well).
The speech of bosses should be watched particularly closely: their role concerns are usually not defined, not presented, and they change them regularly in the course of the conversation (remember: “words-terms are both important, and not important”). You don’t need to look at job titles and ranks. You need to listen carefully to what is being said right now and/or read texts in chats and documents carefully, not paying much attention to references to positions that look like role titles. Position is not about job content! It’s about authority! Job content needs to be recovered from oneself from speeches, texts, and models.
First five minutes some “shop steward” will be in the role of operations manager (preferences: to reduce the work deadlines, to reduce the use of resources), then a couple of minutes as engineer (e.g. requirements engineer: preference to identify and coordinate additional requirements), then to the end of the conversation as CNC machine tool operator (preference for low complexity of part processing, so the intention to find out the specifics of part processing due to the changed requirements and new deadlines that have become known). During the conversation it is necessary to recognize the moment of switching from role to role in time and answer each time to the correct role, not to the “shop steward” (only if the question is about the authority to dispose of resources, then it is important that the question is about “head of the organizational unit/workshop”).
A theater director himself does not act in plays, and even if he does in situations of dire need (one of the actors is sick, or on vacation, or the budget does not allow to hire an actor), you cannot tell from the title of his position what role he plays, in what practice he is proficient. The director, like any boss, can intervene in the performance of any role, at any time, simply because he has the authority to do so (but not the skill in that role!). A theater director is not Prince Hamlet; it is simply a staff position, and not even an acting position.
Manager-CEO and operations manager/project manager in project management—they should not be confused, although the word used is the same, “manager”. A boss-manager is an indication of responsibility and authority (position) rather than an activity/professional role with some competencies. An operations manager is a person who performs the practice of operational management, increasing the rate at which work flows through the organization on a budget.
Positions are not roles; they are organizational places. People as performers of roles also occupy organizational places, thus becoming an “organizational unit”—and receiving the authority given by the place to dispose of labor and resources and the obligation to carry out the orders of their bosses from higher organizational units. If the performer of the role is also a boss, then he can arbitrarily choose his role—trying to replace the absent performer of the role (and, of course, he plays this role like any untrained and unprofessional performer of the role often badly—the performer of the role of engineer occupying the organizational place of the boss can be a very bad engineer. But he may think that he should be the one making the decisions, because he is the boss! It is bad to confuse people as occupying organizational places and thus being in a position and playing roles as masters in practicing something. For roles, the role-player discusses professionalism and skill/qualifications/competencies in role practice, while the incumbent has completely different characteristics (responsibility, loyalty, honesty).
The word “manager” just confuses everyone; it can be:
- the position of “manager” (understood as “just a boss”, although there are also “sales manager”, which, on the contrary, represents the bottom rung in the employee hierarchy and has nothing to do with management at all);
- the role of “manager” in the meaning of “manager-organizer” (the combined role of the enterprise architect, defining the role structure in the works of the enterprise and proposing the organizational structure of leadership/accountability, and the leader, helping people to take organizational positions and begin to perform the quality of the roles assigned to these positions—to become organizational links);
- the role of “manager” in the meaning of “operational manager”, which is engaged in activities to maximize the logistical productivity of the organizational system. Such a manager has a clear concern in the flow of materials, information, work through the workplaces of the organization, and the output of finished products, a preference to have a high speed of this flow (the intention to increase by various means the “flow/throughput”—the volume of flow per unit time). His discipline is “operations research” (mathematical calculations of productivity). The reasoning of this discipline enables him to optimize the workload of the available resources (literally, he makes sure that there are no “traffic jams”—congestion in the flow of semi-finished products through the enterprise);
- fancy all sorts of positions and roles that involve making at least some decisions, both administrative (positions) and content (roles). For example, product manager94, who makes decisions about the marketability of a product and the order in which new features are to be launched into development (and is often confused with project/program manager, product owner, product marketing). This is a somewhat complex role (involving many practices), but as usual, this role can be filled by one person executing, many people, and even many organizational units/departments. In each case, you’ll have to figure out exactly what you’re up against: and work forward always with the role, albeit with the authority coming from the position.
Our book will use a specific understanding of the term word “manager” as an operational manager, a qualified activity position/role of managing the work/resources of an enterprise in their passage through work processes (“flow/throughput” in the terminology of Goldratt’s theory of constraints), but not “managing people” in terms of authority to give orders. “Manager” in our course is not a supervisor/manager position, but the professional role of an operations manager!
*An excerpt from Systems Thinking course