Double hats (one boss is not enough)

There is nothing better than seeing the world through more than one pair of glasses. Usually organisations only give us one single pair. And definitely only one hat: your role, your function, your place in the organisation chart. And probably one silo. Dividing brain power over different responsibilities is incredibly effective and disruptively healthy in organisational life.

You are the manager of A or the director of B. Full stop. Here is the job description, here is the budget, here is the staff and off you go. This is your hat. We are supposed to wear our hat and our glasses all the time. The hat decides lots of things: which management team you belong to, which meetings you attend, which division you are part of and perhaps how much money you get every month. The better you wear that one hat, the more successful you are supposed to become. Small detail, this applies not only to you, but also to another 200 or 3000 people. So the organisation definitely has plenty of single hats.

In your life outside of work, chances are you wear more than one hat. For example: father, sport coach, husband, secretary of club X or governor at a school board. Perhaps you’re also a language student in the evenings. You are used to seeing things from different perspectives and to changing hats during the day, sometimes several times in one single afternoon! But when you go back to work the next day, you only have one hat from 9. 00 am onwards!

The business equivalent of you wearing several hats in your life outside of work would be to be simultaneously responsible for multiple functions or activities or projects. And my rule is, the more the different hats compete with each other, the better for you and for the organisation. Let’s focus on senior management for a moment, because they are an easy example. Somebody may be in charge of country X as country manager. As such, in the context of his pan-European, multinational company, he is focused on the profit and loss (P&L) of country X. This is what he is paid for. This is his hat (and you may argue that wearing this hat is more than enough!). Now imagine that there is a pan-European Marketing function that takes care of brands across Europe: all brands, all countries. What is good for country X may or may not be good for country Y, at least in the implementation of brand strategy. Each country manager is only concerned about his market. The centralised Marketing structure is supposed to take care of all and accommodate for all.

There is nothing better in these dynamics than making country manager X responsible not only for the P&L of country X, but also, at the same time, for brand A in all European countries, whether directly or as sponsor of a centralised marketing team. You can already see the dynamics starting to work. Country manager X now de facto has 2 hats. With one, he must take care of what is good for his country. With the other hat, he must take into consideration what is good for all the countries. Both interests may or may not coincide.

Imagine that this pattern of competitive hats is a widespread norm. You will have an organisation where many people will have a very holistic view of things, because these double-hat people (and the more the better) will need to see things from different perspectives all the time. They need to (learn to) understand the contradictions and competitions and manage the conflicts between different interests.

These are some examples of ‘pairs’ that have worked for me in the past in my client work:

• Country head and pan-European brand manager
• Local finance controller also responsible for a small cost centre
• Head of IT and chair of a Sales-related committee
• Head of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in country X and CRM manager leading the pan-European implementation of a new system
• Head of HR and sponsor of competitor intelligence task force

How can you implement double hats? Assign competing or parallel responsibilities. This is not a simple division of the cake or a justification for doing two jobs for the price of one. At senior level, make double hats a requirement. Watching a key competitor and having broader managerial responsibilities at the same time works very well for them! The examples above are ones of ‘big roles’. The same applies to smaller roles within the firm, at middle management level or below. With junior people start with small but real role rotations first and then assign true double hats.

It is not uncommon in large corporations to see people who have several reporting lines. Reporting to both the country manager and the head of the global function (Finance, for example) is a typical example. The main reason for this is control. The command and control philosophy requires that everybody has a clear idea of who the boss is. The invention of the different kinds of reporting lines (‘solid’, ‘dotted’, etc.) was a way to weight those reporting ‘loyalties’. You may know some people who have these double reporting lines. And you may also know that many of them see it as a real pain. I would like you to view double reporting lines as an opportunity to have multiple points of influence, of knowledge about what’s going on, of corporate connections. If you ignore the command and control mode, the double reporting line is actually a true contrarian blessing. A double reporting line and double hats may or may not go together. People with double hats may in fact report to a single boss. But the principle is similar: divide loyalties, wear different pairs of spectacles, feel the tensions and contradictions and navigate through them. The disruptive idea is to thrive on those tensions and contradictions, not to avoid them. The accelerated learning you go through will pay off. Not just for you, but also for the organisation (which will benefit enormously).

Wear several hats inside the organisation, just like you probably do outside the firm.

Never accept one role only.

Seek to manage two competitive angles of the firm simultaneously.

Two reporting lines is bad. Three is much better. The more bosses, the better for almost everything, including speed of learning and experience.

Make your people feel the tension of ‘divided loyalties’: collective whinging time will decrease dramatically.

Copyright ©- Leandro Herrero - 2008