Management styles: meet the pace-setting manager

Managerial styles is something you will not learn about on a project management course. So, this article focuses on one style - the pace setting style of manager.

Martin entered a graduate scheme with a 1st class degree in Marine Engineering. Four years on he manages a team responsible for developing safer off-shore oil rig platforms.

The job involves moving from station to station, learning to work quickly with new customers, and identifying and solving problems at a glance. It is demanding work. However, Martin is known for his 100% dedication, his disciplined team and his skill in resolving design flaws before they even arise.

Each morning, wherever the team is stationed, Martin pins a list of team goals and individual targets in a prominant position, inviting team members to tick off the tasks as they are completed, and to take an early lunchbreak if they finish on time.

Martin’s team knows, however, that they will never get an early lunchbreak. Martin has an uncanny knack for judging precisely the amount of work that will take them through to the end of the day, and most days everybody eats while poring over diagrams and revising plans.

Towards the end of last year, Matin’s team completed a series of high-pressured jobs and different locations around the world. Each time Martin set himself the private goal of finishing the project within a smaller budget and timeframe than the last.

By December the team were exhausted. One member of staff requested leave to spend a week with his ailing mother, and Martin told him that if he left then he would be replaced. The staff member bit his tongue and remained.

Just before Christmas, the team broke their record for the fastest completion of a project, but one week later a complaint was made: something had gone wrong with the new system, and the customer requested a replacement team.

Martin was reprimanded, and his boss told him to take things more lightly. The next day he returned to work the same as he had always been, and a week later several members of his team had come to him to apologise for asking for transfers.

Martin’s high-achieving, pace-setting management style enabled him to drive his team beyond ordinary expectations without risking accusations of hypocrisy.

Because he lead a talented and loyal team, he was able to achieve great success in the short term. However, over a longer period of time his obsessive target-setting and focus led to careless error and the demotivation and disintegration of his team.

Martin needed to borrow from the skill-set of the democratic manager, and to ask his experienced team for input into his decision-making.