Are you a Balcony or a Dance Floor Manager?
Management is all about balance. Balancing priorities, work and life demands, team issues and balancing the detail with the bigger picture. It’s this last point that we’re going to briefly explore in this workbook
We need know when we need to do the work and when we need to ensure that the work gets done.
According to Heifetz, Linksy and Grashow (Adaptive Leadership, 2009), we need to gain perspective in the midst of action. The perspective is the ‘balcony’ and the midst of action is the ‘dance floor’.
Because managers are in constant, often relentless change, we need to ensure we move intentionally between the balcony big picture and the more operational dance floor.
The Dance Floor
This involves performing lots of tasks, being operational, rolling your sleeves up and doing the work with your team, handling crisis situations (sometimes this is fire-fighting) and solving problems that others in your team could solve, if they had the skills and training.
Being in the action means meeting the immediate challenges. When you’re “on the dance floor,” you’re engaged, but your view is limited, you can only see what’s happening around you. Therefore your learning is limited also.
The Balcony
This refers to stepping out of the business, thinking about the future, looking at progress towards delivery of targets, reflecting, planning, delegate and re-prioritising. Also, networking, building connections and communicating your plans to your team and stakeholders.
Stepping back to gain perspective, seeing the patterns, relationships, and dynamics that aren’t visible from the dance floor.
From the balcony, leaders can observe the system as a whole, learn and understand what’s really happening, and then decide where to intervene.
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