What if you get stuck?

“You are Jack/Jacq Johnson, head of the computing department. Tony/Toni Long, one of your subordinates, has special computing skills and is at present deeply involved in a major project. Something urgent has come up, an exciting software development programme for a major customer, and you have asked Tony to come in and see you, to give Tony this extra work on top of his or her existing workload – it cannot be passed on to anyone else.”

I was presented with this situation in class this week. The exercise was supposed to make you think about what type of management style you would adopt or which style would be best suited to the situation. The four main styles of management being categorised as:

Directive – authoritarian/dictating

Selling – persuasively explaining the rationale and benefits

Participation – getting people involved/asking what shall we do?

And      Delegating – handing over the responsibility

But aside from highlighting these different styles and the different occasions for which they could be appropriate, the exercise mainly served to make me aware of just how constrained a manager can be and how hard it can be to find a solution to make everyone happy.

Ideally, for the situation above I’d like to be able to offer more pay or more staff to help accomplish the task, or push the deadlines to make it more manageable time-wise. But in reality I can imagine that I probably wouldn’t be able to do so cause the resources probably wouldn’t be there.

And then I’m brought back to the ethics questions again surrounding the manager’s position of responsibility and power over staff. ‘Cause I could always simply tell the employee that they had no choice but to take on the extra project – probably causing them considerable struggle and stress, and no doubt alienating them from me. But that is the way the power dynamic works in the boss-employee relationship. And I can see how easy it would be to exploit that, but ultimately that would probably be to everyone’s detriment.

And what if the management is under pressure to get the task done from other sources, like senior management, or funders, or board members? And they're left to try and work out an unfeasible situation, but don’t want to sacrifice morals and ethics.  

It's a sticky situation.....