Playing To Win

Parenting Styles, Management & Strategy

Striking an Authoritative Balance

Roger Martin

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Source: Roger L. Martin, 2024

I used a metaphor with a CEO client this week and it seemed to resonate with him and help his thinking about an important managerial issue. So, I decided to write a Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece on it. It is Parenting Styles, Management & Strategy: Striking an Authoritative Balance. All previous PTW/PI can be found here.

A Tricky Task

For CEOs — and every manager across organizations — deciding how directive to be on strategy is a tricky task. Being too directive can crush initiative — or worse, crush spirit. Not being sufficiently directive can produce chaos and entropy — often leading to catastrophe. I am often asked for help on how to think about directing the strategy development task.

Parenting Metaphor

When I give advice on the topic, I base it on parenting theory — even though most of the time I don’t do it explicitly because sometimes metaphors from another field entirely become a distraction, not a clarifier. With the client mentioned above, I did use the metaphor explicitly, and it seemed to work.

The dominant theme in parenting theory derives from the work of Diana Baumrind, published first in 1967. Lots of other scholars and practitioners have built on/expanded/modified her framework, but I find the original framework most helpful. Baumrind characterized three styles — permissive, authoritative, authoritarian — that she found exhibited by parents in her research. I don’t love the first two terms and typically use lackadaisical and principled for the first two. But in the spirit of honoring not disrespecting the giants on whose shoulders we stand, I will use her terms. Scholars have gone on to characterize two axes laying behind her styles as responsiveness and demandingness.

The permissive style features high responsiveness and low demandingness. The parents are highly responsive to the child’s desires and whims, to the point of indulgence. And they make minimal demands, setting few boundaries and rarely enforcing them. In her research, Baumrind found (and other researchers concurred) that the permissive style tended to produce children with low self-control and self-reliance.

The authoritarian style features low responsiveness and high demandingness. The communication tends to go in one direction from parents to child with little interest in or curiosity about what is on the child’s mind. Strict rules are imposed with rigid and unilateral enforcement of them. The authoritarian style has been shown to produce discontented and withdrawn children.

Finally, the authoritative style is characterized by both high responsiveness and high demandingness. The communication is two-way and focused on joint problem solving. There are clear rules and expectations, but they tend to be arrived at by dialogue, not fiat. Research shows that the authoritative style produced assertive, self-reliant children — clearly the superior outcome.

The adverse impact of an authoritarian style reminds me of the admonitions of the late Bob Brett, one of the finest tennis coaches of his era, who I had the pleasure of getting to know when I was a Board Member and he was High Performance Consultant at Tennis Canada. The bane of Brett’s existence was domineering parents and coaches, but mainly parents who enthusiastically hired domineering coaches. He always said that when players are down break point in the deciding set, they must make choices on how to construct the point, how aggressive to be, how to select each shot — not their parent or their coach. They must have a theory and confidence — which comes from practice, not from a parent or coach yelling at them. They must hold themselves accountable for practicing hard, learning from their coach and delivering on the court — themselves.

Implications for Management

The permissive and authoritarian parenting styles as applied to management are extremely dangerous. A permissive style is the abdication of management. Like most kids, most subordinates will like it and think that it terrific. They will feel ‘empowered, which would be fine if they had the skills and experience of their boss. But if they did, they would be the boss. They are in the positions they are in because they don’t yet have that level of skills. They need rules, expectations, and direction.

Without it, they will eventually bring about failure. And guess who they will hold 100% responsible? They will blame their boss for not giving them adequate direction. Until the point of failure, they will adore you for being the best boss. Then it is all bad — and it is really hard to pull back from a permissive style once subordinates are used to it. The boss typically needs to be sacked.

It reminds me of my dorm at college. Each had a ‘House Master’ — typically a senior faculty member or administrator — who was responsible for student life in the dorm. We loved Master Dunn because he was kindly and had weekly sherry tasting party for the students. He showed little concern for rules and guidelines. It was awesome.

That was until a handful of students in the dorm started using their rooms as drug retailing establishments bringing unsavory drug criminals in and out of the dorm. When university administration found out about the practice, it sacked the Master and replaced him with a super-strict disciplinarian — and Master Dunn was no longer a beloved figure.

At the other end of the spectrum, an authoritarian management style infantilizes managers — just as Brett found that it infantilizes tennis players. Managers will say that the boss made the rules, I play by the rules, I don’t push back because I will be slapped down, I just do what I am told. If I see something that doesn’t make sense — I keep my mouth shut because I don’t want to suffer the consequences. And if things don’t work, it is certainly not my fault: it is the boss’s fault.

I had to deal with this when I became Dean of the Rotman School of Management which was a mediocre school that didn’t have the resources to transform into a top-notch destination. It needed to quintuple the top line, and I came up with a plan to quintuple the endowment, quadruple executive education earnings, quadruple tuition level, and double student enrollment to provide the necessary revenues to invest. I asked my Chief Administrative Office to model the scenario for me. She modeled the costs — and I told her that was great and now do the revenues. She kept coming back with the cost model only, and eventually I got a bit impatient and asked her why she refused to model the revenues.

She finally admitted that she had no way of doing so because revenues are an allocated number by the provost on an annual basis. So, we could do the 5–4–4–2 plan, but the revenue may or may not show up on our income statement — depending on the whims of the provost.

I went to the provost and argued that this approach infantilized all the deans. When they get their revenue allocation, the best they can do is channel Oliver Twist: ‘please sir, I want some more.’ I didn’t want to be part of an infantilized cadre of deans.

Both permissive and authoritarian management styles are recipes for producing failure that will be blamed on you. In the former, your subordinates will do their own things and blame you for every failure, while in the latter, they will act like infants and also blame you for every failure. In both cases, you will be alone, and they will feel abandoned.

Authoritative management provides clear rules and expectations — but they come about with high two-way communication. The more the rules and expectations make sense to subordinates, the more it protects against infantilization. The more you engage in mutual problem-solving, the more they will respond positively to higher expectations. Encourage them to come with their best thinking and that you are willing to contribute to them solving their problems. But make sure they understand that your expectation is that the next time, they will be in a better position to solve the problem themselves. That is the responsiveness they need to be their best. They won’t feel alone — and you won’t either

Back to Rotman, the provost was a great guy and got the point. It took four years to bring about the change, but the Rotman School was put on a system he called resource-center management by which we were responsible for both revenues and costs and wouldn’t be bailed out by the university if we ran a deficit. The system worked so well that when the next president was installed, he applied our system to the entire university — and in doing so, university budgeting went from authoritarian to authoritative.

Implications for Strategy

Strategy is about making choices where the opposite is not stupid on its face and doing so under competition, constraints and uncertainty. It can’t simply extrapolate the past but must create the future. That is tricky and intimidating for many.

That is why permissive or authoritarian management styles are deadly for strategy. The former sounds like a free-wheeling entrepreneur where anything goes. Since entrepreneurs can do whatever they want, they are inclined to treat their managers similarly and impose few rules or structures. This is why so many need to be replaced as their companies scale. Under the latter, managers just won’t make bold strategy choices. Because they need to make bets on the future, they will be too fearful that they will be slammed if their choices don’t pan out well. They fear being asked why they didn’t copy everybody else.

Authoritative style strategists are comfortable with the idea that they make some choices and don’t need to ask whether their subordinates approve of or ‘buy into’ their choices. Authoritative strategists will seek input on the way to making their choices, but they understand it is their job to make a certain set of choices — not their subordinates’ job. Their choices provide the structure for the choices that their subordinates need to make — choices that must fit with and reinforce their leader’s choices.

Authoritative style strategists will offer to help subordinates with their strategic choice making if asked. They won’t pester, but by the same token they won’t leave subordinates alone to flounder — because after enough floundering, subordinates will give up. They will however insist that the subordinate learns something from the help to be better positioned to choose independently the next time. If a subordinate keeps asking for the same help and it keeps getting supplied by the supervisor, the subordinate will be infantilized.

In strategy, the authoritative style is both demanding and responsive and features skill in Strategic Choice Chartering, which I have written about previously in this series.

Practitioner Insights

Parenting is very hard and so is managing the development of strategy. The permissive and authoritarian styles are deadly traps on either side of the narrow authoritative path. There are cults in both sides, from Silicon Valley letting them play foosball and work when and where they want on one side to ex-military, Alexander Haig/I’m in control here types on the other.

Challenging as it may be, employing the authoritative style is as important for management and strategy as it is for parenting. It requires a high dose of two things.

The first is confidence. You need to be confident in yourself to be able to establish and enforce a set of rules — or you will be permissive. And you need to be confident in the ability of your colleagues to do the work you assign to them — or you will become authoritarian over time.

The second is patience. You need to be patient with your colleagues in being demanding but not so much so that you become discouraged with the progress of your colleagues. They need their practice to be able to rise to the challenge. If you aren’t demanding at all, you will become permissive. If you are too demanding, you will become authoritarian.

The combination of confidence and patience will make you an authoritative leader of strategy.

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Roger Martin
Roger Martin

Written by Roger Martin

Professor Roger Martin is a writer, strategy advisor and in 2017 was named the #1 management thinker in world. He is also former Dean of the Rotman School.