Quid Pro Quo
For more context in management.
The recent and abundantly documented Great Resignation gave credit to the idea that the job market is not driven by economic parameters only. Other perception-driven factors come into play, such as the need for a compelling sense of purpose or the recognition of the importance of underrated roles in collective enterprises.
Despite their efforts to reframe profit-driven missions into ‘quests’ to improve societies, and to convince their employees that they are change agents, organisations struggle to aggregate, or rather subsume, individual preferences into a single mission statement.
Individual frustrations with inappropriate management practices might be part of the reason why. As a strong lever of happiness and performance for teams, management practices are essentially relational and, as such, are subject to quid pro quos, despite governance models and organisation designs.
Indeed, words used interchangeably in management interactions have different meanings and carry different expectations. Examples are not scarce, but three may account for management challenges in delivery, team leadership, and strategy design:
Quid pro quo #1: importance vs. priority. The former begs the question “why?”, and the latter “to whom?”. Try it the other way round.
Quid pro quo #2: roles vs. responsibilities. The former relates to processes and the latter to decisions. Try it the other way round.
Quid pro quo #3: uncertainty vs. risks. The former relates to something unknown, and the latter to something accounted for. Try it the other way round.
“How can managers work around those quid pro quos?”, asked the Mouse.
In English, most of the time, quid pro quo focuses on the value of what is being traded. It’s the “give and take” and “tit for tat”. Latin languages give the same expression more flavour by focusing on the misunderstandings or awkwardness stemming from trading two things holding different values.
English-speaking managers might be well inspired to follow their Latin colleagues. It may help them consider, along with aptly named anthropologist Marcel Mauss, that there are no such thing as purely transactional exchanges. Exchanges hold more than economic value, as they contribute to building relationships and social peace, or asserting power.
The symbolic and political value of an exchange is defined by its context. When looking at our three quid pro quos, the first words describe something objective as it is defined by exogenous parameters (e.g., governance, organisation structures or processes), while the second reflect an appreciation of the first in context. When uncertainty is a given, risks represent our appreciation of its impact on our plans.
Hence, managers would benefit from providing appropriate context and up-to-date information to their teams to inform their judgement. Beyond avoiding misunderstandings, improving efficiency, and increasing resilience, context is a necessary ingredient to feed one’s sense of purpose. By trusting their teams in their judgement (which may require training), managers can devolve responsibility and strike the golden balance of articulating a collective mission, meaningful in different ways to different team members.
At that, cathedral builders excelled, maintaining a consistent sense of purpose for decades and across generations of builders. As they seemed to have harnessed the challenges of quid pro quos, cathedral builders wrestled with a much deeper consideration: quid aliquid potius nihil.
Why something instead of nothing?
Baptiste Raymond - 03/2022.