What is a manager?
In simplest terms, a manager is someone who organizes a group of people to accomplish a goal. It is a job as old as the human race. But as society has become more complex, the job of the manager has become ever more essential.
Indeed itās impossible to imagine what life would be like without managers. Individual genius may be at the source of many of humanityās great innovations. But turning those innovations into products and services that can widely benefit mankind is the function of management. Without it, we would still be living in the Stone Age.
As an academic discipline, management is much younger. Frederick Winslow Taylor is often cited as the founder of management studies. His 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management, portrays managers as organizers: they arranged the cogs in the great industrial machine. Their job was all about increasing efficiency and productivity, in order to get workers the one thing they most wantedāhigh wagesāwhile also delivering to owners the thing they most neededālow labor costs. For Taylor, management āstudiesā meant standing in a workplace with a stopwatch, measuring each action taken by the workers, and devising ways to eliminate āall false movements, slow movements and useless movements.ā For several generations of managers who followed him, the goal remained the same: organizing factories and workplaces so that the same group of people working the same hours could produce ever more products.
But in the years since World War II, the nature of work has changed. Peter Drucker was the first to clearly capture the difference. A native of Vienna, Austria, Drucker had worked as a journalist and studied economics as a young man. At some point in his studies, he had an epiphany. Economists, he realized, āwere interested in the behavior of commodities, while I was interested in the behavior of people.ā And people behaved very differently than commodities. Any theory, whether of economics or of management, that posited human beings as uniform and replaceable inputs in a great industrial machine was fundamentally flawed.
That epiphany became the foundation of modern management.
In 1959, Drucker became the first to use the phrase āknowledge workerāāa term that referred to people whose work primarily involves the manipulation of information and knowledge, rather than manual labor. The knowledge workerās contribution to an enterprise couldnāt be measured with a stopwatch or a punch card. It couldnāt be forced or controlled by any amount of oversight. And it couldnāt be encouraged by simple pay schemes tied to hourly output.
In Taylorās world, management was about four things: planning, organizing, directing, monitoring. In Druckerās world, however, motivating talented knowledge workers to give their most became a broader challenge. He broke down being a manager into five pieces. A manager, he wrote:
Sets objectivesāHe or she is responsible for determining what the overall objective of the group is, sets goals for each member of the group, and decides what needs to be done to reach those goals and objectives.
OrganizesāHe or she divides the work into achievable chunks and decides who must do what.
Motivates and communicatesā The manager creates a team out of the workers, so that they can work together smoothly toward a common goal.
MeasuresāThe manager creates yardsticks and targets and determines whether they are achieved.
Finally, a manager develops people. In Druckerās world, people arenāt interchangeable cogs; they are individuals who must be trained and developed in order to achieve the full power of the organization.
Druckerās insights into motivating workers are the foundation of modern management studies and lead to a central thesis of this book: to be a good manager in todayās world, you must also be a good leader of people.
āOne does not āmanageā people,ā Drucker concluded from his observations. āThe task is to lead them.ā The manager of people has to be a motivator of people. It is not enough to give employees directions. Managers must give their employees moreāthey must give them purpose.
What exactly does that mean? In his 1989 book, On Becoming a Leader, Warren Bennis compiled a long list of the differences between managers and leaders. Among them:
- The manager administers; the leader innovates.
- The manager focuses on systems and structure; the leader focuses on people.
- The manager relies on control; the leader inspires trust.
- The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective.
- The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why.
- The manager has his or her eye always on the bottom line; the leaderās eye is on the horizon.
- The manager imitates; the leader originates.
- The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.
- The manager is the classic good soldier; the leader is his or her own person.
- The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing.
The challenge for the modern managerāand the reason why being a modern manager has become such a challengeāis that you must do all of the above. In the best managed organizations, you will be expected to administer and innovate; to focus on systems, structure, and people; to exercise control as well as extend trust; to watch both the short-term and the long-term. To be successful as a manager in todayās world, youāll have to be prepared to ask all four questionsāhow, when, what, and why. Youāll have to keep one eye on the bottom line and one eye on the horizon. Youāll be expected not only to take orders, but also to challenge the status quo when necessary. It will be your responsibility not only to do things right, but also to make sure you and your organization are doing the right things. Itās an awesome task. But as this book will show, itās essential. Managing without leading is a recipe for failure.
And by the way, attempting to lead without actually managing is disastrous as well. Many managers have met their downfall by setting an ambitious vision for their organization, and then assuming someone else would execute that vision.
āIām all for dreaming,ā writes Stanford professor Robert Sutton in a blog post on this subject. āAnd some of the most unlikely and impressive things have been done by dreamers. But one characteristic of the successful dreamers I think ofāFrancis Ford Coppola, Steve Jobsāis that they also have a remarkably deep understanding of the industry they work in and the people they lead, and they often are willing to get very deep in the weeds. This ability to go back and forth between the little details and the big picture is also evident in the behavior of some of the leaders I admire most,ā he says, mentioning Anne Mulcahy, former CEO of Xerox, Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, and Mark Hurd, CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
Allan Cohen, dean of Babson Collegeās School of Business, makes a similar point. āLeaders who donāt understand how the organization works canāt lead very well. Managers who donāt have any notion of where they might be headed donāt last very long anymore.ā
These fundamental truths donāt apply to just big-name, big-company CEOs like Jobs or Mulcahy or Hurd. They also apply to the millions of so-called middle managers who make up the core of any large organization.
The U.S. Census classifies about 8 percent of the workforceāor twelve million peopleāas āmanagers.ā Other studies have found nearly one-fifth of todayās U.S. workforceāor closer to thirty million peopleāsupervise others as a major part of their job. These people are the heart of todayās organizations. In many ways, the middle manager is the great organizational success story of the last century. As organizations have become more complex, as information technology has improved, and as the speed of change has accelerated, old hierarchies have broken down. By necessity, decision making can no longer be concentrated at the top of the pyramid. It has been pushed down into the organizationāto the middle managers.
Middle managers, of course, are not masters of their own fate. Unlike a Mulcahy or a Hurd or a Jobs, they must carry out an agenda that someone else has set for them. They may bear a heavy load of responsibility, but they have limited room for freedom of action. Their jobs can often be grueling and frustrating.
A decade ago, the Journalās Jonathan Kaufman captured the challenges of modern middle management by shadowing the manager of an Au Bon Pain bakery cafĆ© named Richard Thibeault. The forty-six-year-old Mr. Thibeault, a former factory worker, had always thought becoming a āmanagerā would mean he had arr...
