Observers of the business environment often refer to the workplace as an ecosystem. This metaphor seems apt. Our working habitats have climates (from warm and embracing to frigid and formal), contain an abundance of species (ranging from the ruby-throated sales rep to the saber-toothed CFO), and respond to climatic change (such as rapid warming of the competitive landscape).

If we accept that most of us inhabit some kind of workplace ecology, then supervisors and first-line managers occupy what scientists call an ecotone. An ecotone is an area of transition between two communities, a boundary space that separates one environment from another.¹ The manager ecotone lies between the world of employees and the territory occupied by senior leaders.

Ecotones are not tranquil places. They experience constant instability caused by interaction between the boundary environments. In the manager ecotone, inhabitants face continuous pressure to mediate between the needs of employees and the demands of company executives. The flora and fauna in an ecotone may differ from what lives on either side, because properties of this intermediate zone are unique. Likewise, managers often find their interests dissimilar to those of the employee population from which they came, but not fully aligned with the perspectives of the executive population into which they are expected to evolve. Ecologists say ecotones are centers of evolutionary novelty, spaces where change is perpetual and sometimes dramatic.

Many managers we know would say they could stand a little less novelty. The pressures of living in an in-between world bring constant stress. On one side, the managers get criticism from employees for being inattentive, unresponsive, and distant. In our worldwide analysis of employee attitudes, less than half of the respondents said their managers:

• Have enough time to handle the people-related aspects of their jobs
• Effectively handle poor performers
• Help people get access to learning opportunities outside the organization
• Do a good job of explaining changes that happen inside the company

The prospect of moving to the adjacent organizational ecosystem—the higher-altitude one occupied by senior executives—engenders little inspiration among managers. Among the respondents to Towers Watson's 2010 global workforce study, less than 40 percent of managers define their career advancement as achieving a senior leadership position; 61 percent think of advancement simply as making a lot more money (but only 37 percent think that's achievable). A little more than half of the manager respondents say delivering results on the job is the most important determinant of advancement, but a cynical 29 percent say that whom you know in the organization is the most important factor in getting ahead. Almost 60 percent think executives are paid too much for the work they do. Only half of the managers in our global survey agree that senior leadership has a personal commitment to developing the talent most critical to the organization's future success.²

These data paint a picture of a corporate species under pressure, underinspired, and underappreciated. Too many executives see super­visors and managers as targets for downsizing or as acceptable casualties in the quest to flatten the organization. The Human Resources department (HR) often views them with skepticism, as an impediment to communication or a population of policy transgressors who need policing. We look at the picture differently, however. We view supervisors and managers as a center of power and influence, more latent than actual in many companies, but real nonetheless. We think organizations have simply lost sight of this potential. Managers know what it's like to be a worker and to do the work, because they all were once in those roles themselves. They know how things function around the company, because they often operated those systems in a prior life. They've probably spent enough time with and around executives to know where the enterprise is headed and what that means for people in the department. Think of the power they could unleash if they brought this accumulated knowledge and experience to bear for the benefit of employees and the organization.

Unleashing that power is our aim with this book.

We propose to do that by energizing organizations to rethink their perspectives on the manager's potential contribution to organizational success. We challenge executives and Human Resources to see managers in a different light, as more than just message amplifiers, system executors, future executives, or (heaven forbid) a necessary evil required mainly to keep employees in line. We urge companies to think of their managers instead as a potential source of competitive advantage, a marketplace edge that competitors can't easily replicate.

For many organizations, shifting the perspective from manager-as-inert-organization-layer to manager-as-competitive-advantage will require a philosophical leap. To help with that effort, we have provided a blueprint for the new manager role and a detailed performance model that complements it. To construct our model, we've selected from the best building material available. Some elements are novel (for example, the manager's influence on employee well-being), whereas others are classic (the emphasis on employee autonomy, for instance). We believe we have created a sound and practical structure that reflects both current workplace reality and archetypal human traits. We also believe we've described an important step forward, a way of thinking that is challenging but within the reach of most managers and most organizations.

Embedded in the architecture we have laid out is an important point: to perform successfully as a supervisor or manager in the twenty-first century means to create an environment that fosters employee success and then gives people all the freedom they need to make the most of their work. You might call it, as Stanford professor Robert Sutton does, “management by getting out of the way.”³ We take our inspiration from a quotation by Lao-tzu, Chinese philosopher and central figure in the development of Taoism. His description of an effective leader captures the concept we have in mind: “As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear, and the next the people hate. When the best leader's work is done, the people say, ‘We did it ourselves.'” Consistent with this notion, we will make the case that line managers and supervisors are critical to organizational success, but their influence is often indirect, nuanced, and light-handed. We will refer to this as “offstage management.” We will define what we mean by the term, why we think it's important, and how to make it successful.

We certainly don't mean to suggest that strong executive leadership isn't critical to organizational success. But we also know that, from day to day, executive influence is often remote and dispersed, an undeniable force but one with only intermittent presence in the work lives of employees. Supervisors and managers, in contrast, are around workers all the time, a constant and present factor. We agree with Jack Unroe, former chief executive of Accountants International (and one-time boss of one of the authors), who says, “At the extremes—really bad and really good—executive leadership probably makes some difference in the lives of individual employees. But for everything in between, the first-line manager has much more influence over whether people feel inspired or demoralized on the job.”

We vote for inspired.