Leadership and the ‘Inner Management Team’

Posted by John Smith on March 12th, 2020

Article Contributed by Chris Fenney, Co-founder and Director of Training Edge International. He has more than 30 years of experience in training and management development, gained in demanding yet sophisticated commercial organizations both in Europe and the U.S.A., where a high premium has always been placed on optimizing human resources and improving performance.

Managers operate in a complex role environment as different stakeholder groups often have conflicting expectations of them: customers, staff, colleagues, their own supervisors, etc. The ‘inner management team’ model (Fischer–Epe) offers an approach toward improved understanding of the different roles and managerial requirements. The model distinguishes between four aspects of the managerial role, which may indeed contradict one another in certain instances.

A manager must act as a corporate representative, remaining focused on the economic success and material interests of the company.  As an expert, guaranteeing technical quality and tailoring processes to the requirements of the tasks. As a team coach, ensuring that the team as a whole and each of its members individually are motivated and work together efficiently, resolving the inevitable conflicts that arise. Finally a manger has a role as a personally involved individual with own values, desires and interests, taking responsibility for their own actions and development.

The term “Managerial Leadership” blends the traditional roles of a manager such as planning, organizing, and controlling with the more holistic approaches needed to motivate influence and lead a modern workforce. The Inner Management Team complements this new development by representing the four roles visually as “inner people” inside the manager. The manager's task is to coordinate these various role aspects within himself and lead them like a team. The analogy of the inner management team illustrates that each of the team members is important and their views must be heard, and taken into account according to the situation. It is recognized that the inner management team play roles that may contradict each other in some cases. The interplay and balanced application of these four managerial roles enables effective and personally consistent management.

One of the key members of the inner management team is the corporate representative who  must keep in mind the company’s economic success and material interests, providing employees with direction on meaning, goals and strategy. This entails getting results from the organization, teams and individuals by understanding and managing performance within an agreed framework of planned goals, standards and competence standards. Thus setting goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) is the focus of the corporate representative. 

No less important is the role of the team coach for the manager has to create for his team and each team member an environment that enables them to cooperate successfully in respect to the task. But not everything that's useful for the individual is useful for the team –and vice versa. And the insights of the team coach can be in conflict with the corporate representative and the expert. Maybe the corporate representative wants to apply pressure and demand performance, while the team coach thinks the opposite is called for.

Finally as a concerned human being the manager always has to consider his/her personal values, health and capacities, private life and career aspirations. He/she is not only a carrier of functions, but at the same time a human being with individual preferences and characteristics, desires, values and emotions. He/she has to be prepared to take responsibility for their actions and to stand their ground. The concerned human being might have completely different ideas and goals than the corporate representative, the expert or the team-coach. Sometimes it might be necessary to confront an employee strongly, even though one is personally quite attached to this person and whom one doesn't like to annoy. At other times one might be forced to voice management resolutions, that one personally finds unreasonable or wrong and unfair and that one doesn't feel inclined to support.

The benefits of the model are that with the help of this system, in difficult situations you can check which of the four requirements you want to lend a greater or lesser weight to.  When you want to communicate decisions you have made in this way, you can directly use the considerations and arguments of the four team members. It is often helpful to express directly in the rationale the role aspect from which you are arguing e.g.: “From a business perspective, I think…“ (corporate representative). “From a technical point of view, I’d like to…“ (expert). “When I think about the team...“ (team coach) “My personal thoughts/feelings are...“ (concerned human being)

The inner management team allows the manager to recognize and understand the source of internal tensions that often arise in management decision making and to be in a position to use all four role aspect in order to take actions appropriate to the situation