May 26, 2025
6'
The manager in the face of paradoxes
Jean-Yves Mercier
The middle manager is constantly confronted with paradoxes. Those of his function, between a management that requires agility and collaborators who require stability. But also those of the choices to be made on a daily basis, in the face of antagonistic constraints. It is one of the factors behind the loneliness of the manager, who is constantly asked to be an example. How to deal with it?
Accept us as we are. There is also a lot to say. And to understand. Since childhood, we have learned to have to be logical. Coherent. That, of course, is the whole scientific basis of education. But it is also gradually this injunction that we have internalized to have to be in sync between what we do and what we say. As children, we first heard it in the form of “You must not lie.” While this part of life learning is entirely commendable when it is related to the past (not saying anything other than what happened), it is much more questionable when it is combined with the future. I will love you for life. This phrase, which we can feel in the emotion of the moment, is socialized at the time of the marriage commitment. We tend to feel obligated to look forward to the future with certainty. Are there so many liars who have been divorced?
By rigidifying the present as well as the future, we reject the paradoxes of life. Between our aspirations and our experiences for example. But also between the multiple feelings that can inhabit us. Why? Partly for the outside. For social simplicity, we need to be able to count on the balance of our relationships with others. Of mutual trust. The easiest way to do this in the short term is to give each other a relatively stable image. And gradually to become this image, this label. To deny our own complexity as well as that of others. For ourselves, it's also about not putting ourselves in a position of constant doubt. Constant doubt exhausts, eats up our energy. Having points of reference for others as well as for ourselves is necessary.
As Aesop taught, language is the best and the worst thing. The same is true for our landmarks. They are useful as well as possible obstacles to learning. Let's take an example. It is said that a line manager should be exemplary in order to be followed. By affirming this need for exemplarity in organizations, we oversimplify decision-making processes as well as the multiple responsibilities within the system. In this way, a role is anchored. We create a co-dependency between those who would be there to decide and those who would be there to follow. This simplification is fundamentally counterproductive, especially when the problem to be solved is complex. However, the existence of managers is necessary for the functioning of a hierarchy, The sacred order in Greek. With his imaginary world drawn from centuries of history, the chef no longer belongs to himself, he is first and foremost the role that is expected of him (or of course her). Since it is a role, it can and should be an example. It is internalized both by the managers in question and by their subordinates. The larger the organization, the more this operation is almost mandatory. At the level of a team, we can share the leadership function depending on the moment and the situation. In SMEs, we are seeing the emergence of new forms of organization, holacracy, liberated businesses, which systematize the distribution of responsibilities according to the problem to be treated. A large company is much too complex within itself not to simplify the assignment of roles. The hierarchical cascade of responsibilities remains the best known option. We find the same thing at the geopolitical level. A region can be autonomous. A country like Switzerland can function as a Confederation. France, Brazil or China remain very hierarchical, regardless of the counterpowers put in place. The function of President occupies a strong imagination and the call for exemplarity is omnipresent. With all the hazards associated with the impossibility for someone to be an example for an entire people.
Reduced to your simple level, the concept of exemplarity therefore has a good number of pitfalls. It involves a call to assume a responsibility, a role, and in that it is a commitment. Necessary. But because you are a human being, you cannot always be an example for everyone and in every situation. Worse, sometimes you will have to disjudge yourself. For example, you will have chosen an active social responsibility policy, but you will have to lay off workers following the rise in energy prices. You will have launched an inclusive policy, but the only valid candidate for the position you have opened is a man. You will have emphasized the service to offer to your customers, but in a moment of supply difficulty, you will have to disappoint a good part of them in terms of delivery times. You will always be criticized for the choice you made when you made your decision, whatever it may be. And if you don't decide, you'll be blamed for it too. Beyond the solitude of the role, which requires courage, the fundamental question arises of where you position your exemplarity.
If you place it on the fact that you are committed to upholding your choices—social responsibility, inclusive politics, or customer service to use the previous examples—you will regularly disjudge yourself. If, on the other hand, you position it on the fact of committing yourself to dialogue with your employees around this learning, both individual and collective, you have a chance to be an example. But be careful, this position has its own pitfalls. Since we will always have to learn, it can be tempting to focus only on evolution. Within our organizations, it is the call for agility and flexibility. It is the refusal of resistance to change. It is illusory. There is always cultural, technological, strategic and structural capital that serves as the basis for learning. And if we are honest with ourselves, we know that even if we are open to what might emerge from evolution, we have wishes, intuitions, limits.
Chris Argyris offers us an interesting way to understand the place of our bearings. According to him, we have two types of beliefs. What he calls our theories in action and our theories adopted.
Our adopted theories are the principles, the values in which we believe. Promoting inclusive businesses is a good thing, for example. It can be the result of our education, social influence, our own perception of things. It is a mixture of influences that we mix in our own way to make them our beliefs, our points of reference.
In contrast, our theories in action are the conclusions we draw from our daily practice of life. For some positions, there are only white forty-year-old males on the market. Learning is then comparing our adopted theories and our theories in action to change both our beliefs and our practices.
If we do not confront the two sides of the previous example, we will always recruit the same profile and no one will believe our positions on inclusive businesses. Which even for us will become an unattainable ideal and destined for future generations. On the other hand, if we agree to look at the dilemma between our adopted theories and in action, we can learn. Refine our theory adopted to advocate for equal opportunities more than positions. And find inclusive action strategies, for example launching internal mentoring actions or partnerships with vocational schools to anticipate future recruitments and promote different profiles.
Committing to learning is not living in a world without reference points, but learning to implement these guidelines step by step in accordance with changes in the environment. In this way, we take our place, giving life to our principles in the reality of our context and what it allows. We do not defend a value tooth and nail, we insert and translate it into the field of possibilities. In doing so, we are faced with a number of personal paradoxes, since everything is not perfect. Reality cannot correspond to our absolute ideal. It is then by accepting these paradoxes that we are able to develop strategies. In order not to lose our fundamentals, but on the contrary to thrive in exploring how to implement them in a necessarily restrictive environment. We then discover a more elaborate vision of our principles, of our ideals, we adapt them by enriching them. By crossing the mental limits set by our paradoxes, we increase our level of personal satisfaction and we bring more value to our professional context. We are taking up all our seats.
