Playing Well with Your Peers Is More Important than Leading Your Team

Have you looked at the requirements for a management job lately? You might be surprised by what you find. Gone are words like “supervise”, “direct”, and “control”. Instead, you will see “collaborate”, “teamwork”, and “influence”. The job of a manager has changed dramatically in the past few decades, as collaboration has replaced supervision as the key skill for managers in organizations.

Why has this shift occurred? And what does it mean for managers and workers?

A recent Harvard study that analyzed millions of job postings, resumes, and employee reviews from the past 80 years provides some answers. Three trends explain the shift from supervisory to collaborative managerial duties.

The modern economy is driven by innovation, which requires solving larger and more complex problems that require multiple areas of expertise. Collaboration across functions—like design, engineering, marketing, and customer service—results in superior outcomes because it improves idea generation, decision making, and innovation. As a result, managers are increasingly tasked with collaborating across the business, sometimes at the expense of dedicating time and resources to their direct reports. In fact, the more a firm values innovation, the more likely it prioritizes managerial collaboration over supervision.

Organizations have increasingly adopted a philosophy of worker empowerment and autonomy, which means that workers have more freedom and responsibility to make decisions and manage their own work. This also means that managers are no longer the “boss” who has the final say or the ultimate responsibility for their team’s performance. Instead, they are the facilitator or the coach who helps their team members achieve their goals and potential. As a result, these teams need less direct supervision and more support from their managers.

New technologies can delegate tasks, assess resources, monitor workers’ activities, and track workers’ outcomes, which reduces the need for direct managerial supervision and control. This allows managers to focus less on micromanaging daily activities and more on strategic planning and team collaboration.

The change from supervision to collaboration has significant implications for the role, the skills, and the challenges of a manager in today’s work environment.

Managers spend less time directing employees and more time working with others across units. As such, the role has become more like nonmanagerial roles in terms of status and power, and the duties resemble that of a liaison more than a top-down leader or decision-maker.

Now more than ever, managers need excellent social and teamwork skills, such as influence, listening, empathy, and conflict resolution. Managers need to earn trust and respect by using soft influence tactics, such as persuasion, impression management, and exchange, rather than hard influence tactics, such as assertiveness and information control, which are more suitable for command-and-control style supervision.

Due to the shift away from the role of a manager as “boss”, managers need to balance autonomy and alignment, ensuring that their team members have enough freedom to work independently, but also enough guidance and coordination to work effectively with others. They especially need to work well with their peers across functions.

The job of a manager has changed. This change is driven by cross-functional teams, worker autonomy, and technology, and has implications for the role, skills, and challenges that managers face in today’s work environment. If you are a manager or aspire to be one, embracing this change can help you develop your collaborative skill set.