Managers Can’t Do It All: an award-winning HBR article

Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour at London Business School (LBS) and Diane Gherson, a senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School, have been awarded the 2023 Warren Bennis Prize for an article they wrote about management, which was first published in the March-April 2022 edition of the Harvard Business Review magazine.

The award, administered jointly by HBR and the USC Marshall School of Business, was created in Warren's memory to celebrate the year's best HBR article on the topic of leadership. HBR editors selected a short list for consideration, and a team of professors at Marshall picked the winner.

The article, which is also available to view online, discusses how reengineering, digitisation and agile initiatives, as well as the move to remote working, have dramatically transformed the job of managers. In it, Lynda and Diane consider what this means in terms of power, skills and structure, with managers now needing to think about how to coach their teams to success rather than simply overseeing tasks and being served by them. The article looks at three organisations – Standard Chartered, IBM and Telstra – which have ‘helped managers develop new skills, rewired systems and processes to support their work better, and even radically redefined managerial responsibilities to meet the new priorities of the era’.

Commenting on the award, Professor Gratton said:

“I counted Warren as a dear friend and have enormous respect for his wisdom, insights and energy. It is a real honour for Diane and I to receive this award named after his lifetime of achievements.”