>> Check out the slideshow + video on slideshare : http://bit.ly/13iWW0X

Here is the case of a manager perceived by his team as very authoritarian. And a team, perceived by its manager as incompetent and bad-tempered.

The economic context

We are in a consulting company, subsidiary of an international company, which operates in a fairly competitive market. The very sustained commercial activity is developed by successful salespeople. The company is growing rapidly and would need to be restructured

The situation of this manager in the company
The manager in question in this case comes under the financial management;

he is in charge of invoicing and reports to an N+1 responsible for contract management. He is responsible for a team of collaborators. An organization under pressure
The foreign parent company exerts enormous pressure by demanding monthly reports which are drawn up by this financial department.
Each month, for the monthly closing of the accounts, the invoicing department is under the triple pressure of reporting requirements, those of the sales representatives, who come to check and urge the sending to customers of the invoices for their orders on which their results depend and their remuneration, and the very tense climate between the manager and his billing team.

An overprotected manager…
In this climate of high tension, the invoicing manager is highly dependent on his N+1 who overprotects him. Faced with a “difficult” team, the manager no longer exercises his authority directly; it is his line manager who does it for him. On this dimension, he no longer has to manage his own difficulties, he is taken care of - with the secondary benefit of "relying" on his hierarchy - Moreover, he feels strong thanks to the attitude of his hierarchy . He even says: “I have no problem with my hierarchy”. Overprotected, he is in fact weakened and de facto gives up progress. We are faced with a personality full of ambivalence: competent, dedicated, having a sense of the collective, but not fulfilling its function of managerial supervision.

A manager who does in the place of his collaborators
(attempt to find a solution)
In this period of change and tension, lacking authority in the face of a team that does not hesitate to challenge him - disproportionate break times, absenteeism, lateness of production - he does the work instead of his collaborators considering that they are doing it badly, in a rather sacrificial way.
Like Atlas, he takes the world on himself. He will constantly play the role of a firefighter. Relations in this department are in fact very complicated;

when we do things instead, we create ungrateful people, when we have selfish and somewhat manipulative people in front of us. It is easy for his collaborators to say of him that he does not know how to delegate, does not know how to explain, with, for them, a secondary benefit of not working... The trap
By dint of doing things instead, our manager is at the edge of exhaustion.
He then becomes “really” authoritarian and is legitimately perceived as such, with moments of crisis which arise like bombs at the slightest overflow and lead to excessive sanctions either directly on his part or emanating from the hierarchy. But the hidden face of his problem of authoritarianism is his sacrificial, hyper-protective side, which leads him to take it upon himself, until saturation; a sacrificial/authoritarian dynamic that makes you paranoid.

Strategic orientation: slowing down
One solution will consist in getting this manager to take less on himself, to set limits, and therefore to assume the risk of a slight temporary drop in performance of his department (we are in a phase of significant change, and his hierarchy supports it).