Figure 3.2 A MODEL OF MANAGING

An Overview of the Model

Figure 3.2 puts the manager in the center, between the unit for which he or she has formal responsibility (by definition) and its surroundings, of two kinds: the rest of the organization (unless the manager is chief executive, responsible for the entire organization), and the outside world relevant to the unit (customers, partners, etc.).

The overriding purpose of managing is to ensure that the unit serves its basic purpose, whether that be to sell products in a retail chain or care for the elderly in a nursing home. This, of course, requires the taking of effective actions. Mostly other people in the unit do that, each a specialist in his or her own right. But sometimes a manager gets close to this action, as when Jacques Benz, Director-General of GSI, joined the meeting of a project team that was developing a new system for a customer.

More commonly, however, the manager takes one or two steps back from the action. One step back, he or she encourages other people to take action—the manager gets things done through other people by coaching, motivating, building teams, strengthening culture, and so forth. Two steps back, the manager gets things done by using information to drive other people to take action. He or she imposes a target on a sales team, or carries a comment from a government official to a staff specialist. So as shown in the figure, managing takes place on three planes, from the conceptual to the concrete: with information, through people, and to action directly.⁶

Two roles are shown as being performed on each plane. On the information plane, managers communicate (all around) and control (inside). On the people plane, they lead (inside) and link (to the outside). And on the action plane, they do (inside) and deal (outside). Also shown, within their own heads, managers frame (conceive strategies, establish priorities, etc.) and schedule (their own time). Each aspect of the model is discussed in turn before all of them are discussed together in conclusion.

Framing the Job

Framing defines how a manager approaches his or her particular job. Managers frame their work by making particular decisions, focusing on particular issues, developing particular strategies, and so forth, to establish the context for everyone else working in the unit.⁷ Alain Noël (1989) has called these the managers’ preoccupations, as compared with their occupations (what they actually do)—which can sometimes amount to a single “magnificent obsession.”

One of the new managers studied by Linda Hill quickly found out about the importance of framing: “I expected to come out of the starting gate with the knowledge … now I find I’m out here inventing the wheel” (2003:51). We return to framing in our discussion of managerial styles in Chapter 4 and strategy formation in Chapter 5.

Scheduling the Work

Scheduling is of great concern to all managers: the agenda inevitably gets a lot of attention. A half century ago, Sune Carlson noted how managers “become slaves to their appointment diaries—they get a kind of ‘diary complex’” (1951:71). Scheduling is important because it brings the frame to life, determines much of what the manager seeks to do, and enables him or her to use whatever degrees of freedom are available (Stewart 1979).

Needless to say, scheduling was evident in all twenty-nine days of observation. It has to be done in all managerial jobs, but as a means to other ends—namely, the performance of the other roles. Thus, the diaries were often out, and much juggling of schedules took place.⁸

The manager’s schedule can have enormous influence over everyone else in the unit: whatever gets in the agenda is taken as a signal of what matters in the unit. In fact, when managers schedule, they are often allocating not only their own time but also that of the people who report to them.⁹

Scheduling amounts to what Peters and Waterman (1982) have called “chunking”—slicing up managerial concerns into distinct tasks, to be carried out in specific slots of time. The problem, of course (which we shall discuss under the Labyrinth of Decomposition in Chapter 5), is how to put back together that which has been taken apart. And this is where the frame comes in: if clear enough, it can function as a magnet to draw the distinct chunks into a coherent whole. As Whitley put it, managing is “not so much focused on ‘solving’ discreet, well bounded individual problems as in dealing with a continuing series of internally related and fluid tasks” (1989:216).

Despite the attention that has long been given to decision making, managerial agendas seem to be built around ongoing issues more than specific decisions—in the words of Farson (1996:43), “predicaments” more than “problems” (see also Pondy and Huff 1985). Just look at the agendas of a typical management meeting, or else ask a manager what is on his or her “plate.”¹⁰

Communicating All Around

Watch any manager and one thing readily becomes apparent: the amount of time that is spent simply communicating—namely, collecting and disseminating information for its own sake, without necessarily processing it. Barnard, himself a chief executive (of New Jersey Telephone), identified the “first executive function” as “to develop and maintain a system of communication” (1938:226).

In my 1973 study, I estimated that the five chief executives spent about 40 percent of their time simply communicating in one way or another. In his study of Swedish corporate chief executives, Tengblad (2000) put 23 percent of their time at “getting information”—“the single most frequently recorded activity”—plus another 16 percent “informing and advising” (p. 15).

I did not tabulate the time spent on various activities by the twenty-nine managers of my later study, but communicating was no less evident: Norm Inkster, head of the RCMP, going over press clippings of the past twenty-four hours; someone dropping in on RCMP Division Commander Burchill “to tell you what’s going on”; John Cleghorn briefing institutional investors on happenings at the bank; Stephen Omollo in the refugee camp inspecting the reconstruction of a fence that had been blown over in a recent storm; and much more.

The communicating role exists in the model as a kind of membrane all around the manager, through which all managerial activity passes. “Communicating is not simply what managers spend a great deal of time doing but the medium through which managerial work is constituted” (Hales 1986:101). Managers take in information through what Sayles (1964) has called monitoring activities, which enable them to be the nerve centers of their units, and they send their information out through what can be called disseminating activities inside the unit and spokesperson activities outside it.

Monitoring As monitors, managers reach out for every scrap of useful information they can get—about internal operations and external events, trends and analyses, everything imaginable. They are also bombarded with such information, significantly as a consequence of the networks they build up for themselves. Thus, Morris et al. wrote about high school principals spending “a good deal of time ‘on the go’”: touring the halls, visiting the cafeteria, quick checks in the classrooms and libraries, etc.—a “constant bobbing” in and out, in order to “gauge the school climate” and “anticipate and quell potential trouble” (1981:74).¹¹

Nerve Center Everyone reporting to a manager is a specialist, relatively speaking, charged with some particular aspect of the unit’s work. The manager, in contrast, is the relative generalist among them, overseeing it all. He or she may not know as much about any particular specialty as the person charged with it, but usually more than any of them about the whole set of specialties together. And so the manager develops the broadest base of information within the unit. As a consequence of the monitoring activities, the manager becomes the nerve center of the unit—its best-informed member, at least if he or she is doing the job well (Barnard 1938:218).

This can apply to the president of the United States compared with the cabinet secretaries and the CEO of a company compared with the vice presidents no less than to a first-line manager compared with the workers. As Morris et al. put it about those school principals: “Inside the building, the principal is the key exchange point, the information switchboard through which all important messages pass” (1982:690).

The same holds true for external information. By virtue of his or her status, the manager has access to outside managers who are themselves nerve centers of their own units. The president of the United States can call the prime minister of Great Britain, much as one factory foreman can call another factory foreman. Consider the following descriptions, the first about leaders of street gangs in America, the second about a president of the United States of America:

Since interaction flowed toward [the leaders], they were better informed about the problems and desires of group members than were any of the followers and therefore better able to decide on an appropriate course of action. Since they were in close touch with other gang leaders, they were also better informed than their followers about conditions in [the town] at large. (Homans 1950:187).

The essence of Roosevelt’s technique for information-gathering was competition. “He would call you in,” one of his aides once told me, “and he’d ask you to get the story on some complicated business, and you’d come back after a couple of days of hard labor and present the juicy morsel you’d uncovered under a stone somewhere, and then you’d find out he knew all about it, along with something else you didn’t know. Where he got his information from he wouldn’t mention, usually, but after he had done this to you once or twice you got damn careful about your information.” (Neustadt 1960:157)

Disseminating What do managers do with their extensive and privileged information? A great deal, as we shall see in the other roles. But still on this one, they simply disseminate much of it to other people in their unit: they share it. Like bees, managers cross-pollinate. As Commanding Officer Allen Burchill of the RCMP reported on his way to a management meeting with his reports: “I’m informed. But this is a go-around to make sure they’re informed.”

Spokesperson The manager also passes information externally, from people in the unit to outsiders, or from one outsider to another—for example, between customers, suppliers, and government officials. More formally, as spokesperson for the unit, the manager represents it to the outside world, speaking to various publics on its behalf, lobbying for its causes, representing its expertise in public forums, and keeping outside stakeholders up-to-date on its progress.

The Verbal, the Visual, and the Visceral It should be evident from our discussion of Chapter 2 that the manager’s advantage lies not in documented information, which can be made available to anyone, but in the current, not (yet) documented information transmitted largely by word of mouth—for example, the gossip, hearsay, and opinion discussed in that chapter. Indeed, much of an informed manager’s information is not even verbal so much as visual and visceral—in other words, seen and felt more than heard, representing the art and craft of managing more than its science. Effective managers pick up tone of voice, facial expression, body language, mood, atmosphere.

To conclude this discussion of the role of communicating, the job of managing is significantly one of information processing, especially through a great deal of listening, seeing, and feeling, as well as a good deal of talking. But that can damn a manager to a job of overwork or one of frustration. On one side of the managerial coin, there is the temptation to get in there and find out personally what is going on—to “avoid the sterility so often found in those who isolate themselves from operations” (Wrapp 1967:92). The danger, of course, is that this can encourage micromanaging: meddling in the work of others. But on the other side of that coin is “macroleading”: simply not knowing what is going on. We shall return to this under our conundrums of Chapter 5.

Controlling Inside the Unit

One direct use of the managers’ information is to “control”—that is, to direct the behavior of their “subordinates.” As noted earlier, for the better part of the last century, managing was considered almost synonymous with controlling. This view began with Henri Fayol’s book of 1916, based on his experience of managing French mines in the previous century, but it really flourished in the conventional manufacturing of products, such as automobiles, and then in government, as expressed in Gulick and Urwick’s (1937) popular acronym POSDCORB: planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. Four of these words are clearly about controlling, while the other three—staffing, coordinating, and reporting—reflect important aspects of controlling. Hence, this long-dominant description of managerial work has not so much been wrong as narrow, focusing on one restricted aspect of the job: control of the unit through the exercise of formal authority.

Controlling may have lost its preeminent status after 1960, as the people plane of managing rose to prominence. But thanks to the recent surge in “bottom line” and “shareholder value” thinking, controlling is back—with a vengeance.

I chose to leave controlling out of the ten roles of managing I described in my earlier book (although I did include one labeled “resource allocator”—an aspect of controlling). Perhaps this was my overreaction to the excessive attention it had received earlier. In any event, I include it here, but in a tangible way: in terms of how managers exercise control.

Administration, in some ways seen as synonymous with controlling, has for some time been put down in managerial work, as routine, boring, “bureaucratic.” Indeed, in the 1950s, Peter Drucker (1954) distinguished “managers” from “administrators” much as leaders are now distinguished from managers. Instead of rushing to glorify leadership, however—“cast[ing] off the dowdy feathers of administration for the rich plumage of leadership” (Hales 2001:53)—and thus reducing management to administration, we should be recognizing controlling as an inevitable component of all effective management and leadership.

Linda Hill found that the new managers she studied had negative connotations of “administration,” which they nevertheless reluctantly accepted as part of their job (2003:22).¹² Presumably this is because, first, if the manager of the unit does not take responsibility for getting it organized and instituting the necessary controls, who will; and second, because the manager is the person in the unit held accountable for its performance. The trick is not to avoid the controlling role but to avoid being captured by it—which is true for all the roles of managing.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word manage to the French—specifically, the word main, meaning “hand,” in reference to “the training, handling, and directing of a horse in its paces.”¹³ This is essentially the role of controlling, which is about handling and directing “subordinates” to ensure that they get their work done. But how do managers do this? To help answer this, we can turn to decision making.

Controlling through Decision Making Decision making is generally considered to be a thinking process in the head of the decider—in organizations, usually taken to be the manager. This may be true of many actual choices, but there is more to decision making than that. In fact, decision making can be seen as encompassing the various aspects of controlling.¹⁴

Consider the model of decision making shown in Figure 3.3 in three stages: (1) defining (and diagnosing) the issue, (2) developing possible courses of action to deal with it, and (3) deciding on the final outcome. Around these stages are shown five aspects of controlling, described next: designing, delegating, designating, distributing, and deeming.

Figure 3.3 CONTROLLING THROUGH DECISION MAKING

Designing The field of management’s most eminent thinker, Herbert Simon, considered designing to be the essential function of management: intervention to create or change something (1969).¹⁵ Managers sometimes engage in the design of tangible things, as when they head up a task force to develop a new product (which we shall discus on the action plane). Of concern here is designing the infrastructure of the unit, through strategies, structures, and systems to control the behaviors of its people.¹⁶

Designing Strategies A favored metaphor for the manager is “architect” of organizational purpose (Andrews 1987): the person who designs on paper so that everyone else can build—in the language of strategic management, formulates strategies for others to implement. This assumes that strategy making is a process of deliberate design, in order to control behavior. (In Chapter 5, we shall contrast this with strategy making as a process of emergent learning.)

Designing Structures Managers also design organizational structures: they divide up the work in their unit; allocate responsibilities for it to individual members; and then organize this around a hierarchy of authority, as depicted in those “organizational charts.” Such structures help to set people’s agendas, and so control their actions (see Watson 1994:32–33).

Designing Systems More directly, managers can take charge of designing, and sometimes even running, various systems of control in their units—concerning plans, objectives, schedules, budgets, performance, and so on. In fact, Robert Simons (1995) found in his research that corporate chief executives tend to select one such system (e.g., profit planning) and make it key to their exercise of control. In a similar vein, Morris et al. noted that the principals they studied “created and established a system for administering discipline in the school”—for example, using index cards so that “students learned there was a written record of their misbehavior” (1981:104). Note the “hands-off” nature of this form of controlling: the manager sets it up, and then the system does the controlling (much as deliberately designed strategies do the guiding).

Delegating In delegating, the manager assigns a task to someone else on an ad hoc basis: a specific individual is directed to carry out a specific activity. This is thus shown in Figure 3.3 as emanating from the first stage of decision making. In delegating, the manager identifies the need to get something done but leaves the deciding and the doing to someone else (perhaps reserving the right to authorize that person’s final choice).

The tricky thing about delegating is the dilemma noted in the last chapter (and discussed at length in Chapter 5): how to delegate when the manager, as nerve center, is better informed but lacks the time to do the task or even to pass on the information needed by someone else to do it.

Designating If delegating focuses on the first stage of decision making, then designating, including authorizing, focuses on the last stage—the making of specific choices. Sometimes these concern issues that just arise and can quickly be resolved, as when a manager authorizes or refuses a decision proposed by someone else in the unit. Of course, it is not necessarily that simple.

This designating can happen formally or informally, with the latter probably a lot more common and highly varied. Consider the comment by Andy Grove of Intel:

To be sure, once in a while we managers in fact make a decision. But for every time that happens, we participate in the making of many, many others, and we do that in a variety of ways. We provide factual inputs or just offer opinions, we debate the pros and cons of alternatives and thereby force a better decision to emerge, we review decisions made or about to be made by others, encourage or discourage them, ratify or veto them. (1983:50–51)

Distributing Distributing—namely, allocating resources as a result of other decisions—is a form of designating, too. But it merits separate attention because of its importance in managerial work.

Managers spend a good deal of time using their budgeting systems to allocate resources—money, materials, and equipment, as well as the efforts of other people. But they allocate resources in many other ways too—for example in how they schedule their own time and design the organization structures that determine how other people allocate their time.

Note that to treat something as a “resource” is to consider it as information—often numerical—for the purpose of control. So to “allocate resources” is to function on the information plane of managing, in the role of controlling. Indeed, treating employees as “human resources” means to deal with them as if they are information, not people: they get reduced to a narrow dimension of their whole selves. Later we shall discuss how much that today is considered interpersonal management on the people plane in fact reduces to the impersonal control of people on the information plane.

Deeming Finally we come to deeming, which has become an increasingly popular form of controlling these days, but hardly under that label. (“Management by objectives” is a better-known one.) By deeming, I mean imposing targets on people and expecting them to perform accordingly: “Increase sales by 10 percent,” or “Reduce costs by 20 percent”—and “Do it in my first hundred days.” The manager pronounces and then steps back. Indeed, such targets are often distant even from strategies themselves, since deeming is often favored when a manager lacks a clear frame. All too often, when managers don’t know what to do, they drive their subordinates to “perform.”

For much the same reason, a good deal of so-called strategic planning these days amounts to deeming. Treated as a formulaic process rooted in analysis rather than synthesis, strategic planning often discourages the creation of strategies, as managing gets reduced to “number crunching”—the setting of performance targets to drive behaviors (see my 1994 book The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning). “Increase sales by 10 percent” is not a strategy.

During the twenty-nine days, I observed several planning meetings that had little to do with strategy, more with organizing or budgeting, even scheduling, as discussed in the accompanying box.

I do not wish here to dismiss the setting of targets, which is often necessary, but rather to make the point that deeming cannot stand alone. Managers have to get beyond the targets—inside them, and past them, into the workings of their units. So-called stretch goals are fine so long as the manager puts some personal walk behind the general talk. Put differently, some deeming is fine; management by deeming is not.

Deeming is easy—too easy for managers who are out of touch. Targets are fine when combined with ideas. When not, they can demean organizations, which have to be managed as integrated wholes, not collections of disconnected parts.

To conclude, controlling, on the information plane, is important, but not when it is removed from the people and action planes or, worse, used as a replacement for other roles on these planes.

Leading People Inside the Unit

When a specialist becomes a manager, the biggest change often is (or should be) the shift from “I” to “we.” Having become responsible for the performance of others, the first instinct, as Hill found out, is to think, “Good, now I can make the decisions and issue the orders.” Soon, however, comes the realization that “formal authority is a very limited source of power,” that to become a manager is to become “more dependent … on others to get things done” (2003:262). Enter the role of leading.

More has been written about leadership than probably all other aspects of managing combined. The United States, in particular, is obsessed with it, now more than ever. (When I went on the Harvard MBA website in 2007, I counted the words leader and leadership more than fifty times.) As Hill noted:

From their first days on the job, [the new managers] sprinkled the word “leadership” throughout their conversations, announcing, for example, that they intended to lead the organization. Leadership seemed to be a catch-all phrase. They were not [however] able to articulate with much confidence what they meant by it. (2003:105)

Find an organization with a problem and you will find all kinds of people proposing leadership as the solution. And if a new leader comes in and things improve, no matter what the cause (a stronger economy, a bankrupt competitor), they will have been proven right. This is part of our “Romance of Leadership” (Meindl et al. 1985).

Leadership can certainly make a difference. But it is no more the be-all and end-all than is controlling or strategizing. Leadership has to work alongside such other factors, plus especially “communityship,” to make an organization effective. In fact, many organizations these days could use less leadership (see Raelin 2000; Mintzberg 2004a).

The word leadership tends to be used in two different senses. The first is with regard to position and the led: the leader is in charge, motivates and inspires, elicits shock and awe, turns around ailing companies. This is where that distinction between leaders and managers comes in. It is also where those courses on “leadership” come in: spend a few days in a classroom or a couple of years in an MBA program, and (if you believe the hype) out you pop, all ready to exercise leadership. Try to do so, however, and you discover, as did the new managers Hill (2003:92) studied, that leadership is earned as well as learned, not granted.

In the second sense, leadership is seen more broadly, often beyond formal authority: a leader is anyone who breaks new ground, sets direction that shows others the way. A great inventor is a leader (even if he or she is a recluse); so is anyone who takes the lead in an organization, regardless of position, as in those stories about “skunkworks” that have changed companies.

I appreciate both views—we need all the creative direction setting we can get. But in this book and especially this chapter, I wish to describe leadership as a necessary component of management—specifically about helping to engage people in the unit to function more effectively. In this spirit, Lombardo and McCall have written about managers “who do not speak of themselves as leaders” so much as “taking leadership” in specific situations (1981:23); in the next chapter, in a section called “Managing beyond the Manager,” we shall discuss the second view of leadership.

Managers exercise such leadership with individuals, one-on-one, as the saying goes; with teams; and with the whole unit or organization, in terms of its culture. We shall begin with the individual, in two aspects: energizing people and developing them (see Raelin 2000:155).¹⁷

Energizing Individuals Call it what you like, managers spend a good deal of time helping to bring about more effective behavior on the part of their reports: they motivate them, persuade them, support them, convince them, empower them, encourage them, engage them. But perhaps all of this is better put another way: in the leading role, managers help to bring out the energy that exists naturally within people. To quote the words of a prominent CEO: “It’s not [the manager’s] job to supervise or to motivate, but to liberate and enable” (Max DePree of Herman Miller, 1990).

Developing Individuals Also on the individual level, managers coach, train, mentor, teach, counsel, nurture: in general, they help develop the individuals in their units. Again, the vast array of labels indicates just how much attention this aspect of leading has received. But again, the job of development is perhaps best seen as managers helping people to develop themselves. (For our own efforts in this regard, see www.CoachingOurselves.com.) And not only managers: consider these lovely words of two schoolteachers in Calgary: “We lose patience with the idea that the teacher is there mainly to ‘facilitate’ children’s development…. We are there for something more subtle and profound than that: we help mediate the knowledge, problems and questions the children already possess” (Clifford and Friesen 1993:19).

Sometimes as part of this developmental work, managers “do” in order to develop—in other words, they take action, not to get something done so much as to set an example for the taking of action by others. Andy Grove of Intel claimed that “nothing leads as well as example,” adding that “values and behavioral norms are simply not transmitted easily by talk or memo, but are conveyed very effectively by doing and doing visibly” (1983:52).

Building and Maintaining Teams On the group level, managers build and maintain teams inside their own units. This involves not only bonding people into cooperative groups but also resolving conflicts within and between these groups so that they can get on with their work. “The leader … is one who can organize the experience of the group—whether it be the small group of the foreman, the larger group of the department, or the whole plant … and thus get the full power of the group. The leader makes the team” (Follett 1949:12).

A great deal has been written about this, which, again, need not be repeated here. But one observation by Hill is worth mentioning. The new managers she studied initially conceived of their “people-management role as building the most effective relationships they [could] with each individual subordinate,” and so they “fail[ed] to recognize, much less address, their team-building responsibilities.” But over time, after mistakes, they realized the importance of this (2003:284).

Perhaps this occurs because “new managers get fooled” by organizational structure: “they assume that if all workers do their jobs according to some master plan or direction, there will be no need for contact or human intervention” (Sayles 1979:22). In other words, the controlling role will take care of the necessary coordination. Not so, wrote Sayles, and this was evident to me as Fabienne Lavoie worked to knit her nurses into a smoothly functioning team and Abbas Gullet brought the delegates and counterparts to work together in the refugee camps.

Hill (2003:289) cited Peter Drucker (1992) on the difference between managing people who play on a team (as in baseball) versus those who play as a team (as in football or an orchestra). Kraut et al. likewise commented on successful athletics teams that have an “almost uncanny ability to perform as a single unit, with the efforts of individual members blending seamlessly together.” Management as “a team sport … makes similar demands on its players” (2005:122).

Establishing and Strengthening Culture Finally, in the full unit, and more commonly for the chief executive of an entire organization, managers play a key role in establishing and strengthening the culture.

Culture is intended to do collectively what other aspects of the leading role do for individuals and small groups: encourage the best efforts of people, by aligning their interests with the needs of the organization. In contrast to decision making as a form of controlling, culture is decision shaping as a form of leading. “One principal roams the school reminding teachers and students of their duties and exhorting all participants in the learning process to strive for good work and exemplary performance” (Morris et al. 1982:691). John Cleghorn did much the same in the time he spent in the Royal Bank branches in Montreal, promoting the bank’s values to everyone who came his way.

Earlier the manager was described as the nerve center of information in the unit. Here the manager can be described as the energy center of the unit’s culture. As William F. Whyte put it in his classic study of street gangs:

The leader is the focal point for the organization of his group. In his absence, the members of the gang are divided into a number of small groups. There is no common activity or general conversation. When the leader appears, the situation changes strikingly. The small units form into one large group. The conversation becomes general, and unified action frequently follows. (1955:258)

In the 1980s, with the great success of the Japanese enterprises came a great deal of attention to what was seen as key to that success: corporate culture (e.g., Pascale and Athos 1981). But as Japan subsequently encountered economic difficulties, that message got lost; indeed, it was swamped by the rise of the bottom-line mentality (i.e., controlling). This was a mistake: the great enterprises remain those with the great cultures, in Japan and elsewhere. Just consider the enormous success of Toyota, a company that has remained largely faithful to the Japanese view of corporate culture.

Perhaps no one has written more eloquently about the manager’s role in building culture than sociologist Phillip Selznick, in a little book published in 1957 called Leadership in Administration. He used other labels, but his focus was clear: the leader shapes the “character of the organization”; he or she builds “policy” (now called strategy) “into the organization’s social structure” through the “institutional embodiment of purpose” and the infusion of the system “with value.” That is how an “expendable” organization becomes a responsive “institution.”¹⁹

Others have referred to this as the “management of meaning,” which obviously goes beyond the processing of information and even the development of strategy, to a sense of vision as the driving force of the organization as a community. Bolman and Deal have written that “the task of leaders is to interpret experience”: the lessons of history, what is happening in the world, and so forth, to “give meaning and purpose … with beauty and passion” (1991:43).²⁰

In Mary Parker Follett’s words, leadership can transform “experience into power…. The ablest administrators do not merely draw logical conclusions from the array of facts of the past…. They have a vision of the future” (1949:52, 53), which helps “interpret our experience to us,” leading “us to wise decisions” instead of the leaders imposing “wise decisions upon us. We need leaders, not masters or drivers…. This is the power which creates community” (1920:229, 230).

Consider in this regard the queen bee in the hive: “She issues no orders; she obeys, as meekly as the humblest of her subjects, the naked power … we will term the ‘spirit of the hive’” (Maeterlinck 1901). But by her very presence, manifested in the emitting of a chemical substance, she unites the members of the hive and galvanizes them into action. In human organizations, we call this substance culture; it is the spirit of the human hive.

The culture of an organization may be rather difficult to establish, and to change—that can take years, if ever—but it can be rather easy to destroy, given a neglectful management. That is why the sustaining of culture was front and center on several of the days I spent with managers of long-established organizations:

To conclude this discussion of the role of leading, we can return to the metaphor of the leader as conductor, on the platform, fully in control. Does that actually constitute the exercise of leadership? Read the accompanying box.

Linking to People Outside the Unit

“Nothing legitimates and substantiates the position of leaders more than their ability to handle external relations. Above all else, leaders control a boundary, or interface” (Sayles 1979:38). Still on the people plane, linking looks out the way leading looks in: it focuses on the web of relationships that managers maintain with numerous individuals and groups outside their units, whether in other units of the same organization or outside of it entirely.

“When compared to non-managers, managers show wider organizational membership networks—they belong to more clubs, societies, and the like” (Carroll and Teo 1996:437). Homans (1958) referred to these as “exchange” relationships and Kaplan as “reciprocating” ones (1984)—see also his excellent description of what he called the managers’ “trade routes”—because the manager gives something in order to get something else in return, immediately, or as an investment in a sort of interpersonal bank.

It is surprising how little attention linking has received in the writings on management, despite the evidence from study after study, over several decades, that managers are external linkers as much as they are internal leaders (e.g., Sayles 1964; Mintzberg 1973; Kotter 1982a, 1982b). “The most important products of [the effective executives’] approach were agendas and networks, not formal plans and organizational charts” (Kotter 1982a:127). This lack of attention is even more surprising now given the extent to which contemporary organizations engage in alliances, joint ventures, and other collaborative relationships.²³

Figure 3.4 MANAGING ON THE EDGES (in the Canadian parks)

Many of these linking relationships develop on a peer level; in other words, “social equals tend to interact with one another at high frequency” (Homans 1950:186). But they extend well beyond that, to include links with more senior people (including the managers’ own managers) and other staff and line people in the same organization, and a great many outsiders in the workflow (customers, suppliers, partners, union officials, etc.), as well as trade association and government officials, experts, community representatives, and a host of others.²⁴ Morris et al., for example, found a school principal who “cultivate[d] … grandmothers”—neighborhood residents who knew the community well and so could act as “spotters” for the school, “warn[ing] him of unusual developments” (1982:689).

A model of the manager’s linking role is shown in Figure 3.5. It comprises the activities of networking, representing, conveying and convincing, transmitting, and buffering, each discussed in turn.

Figure 3.5 A MODEL OF LINKING

Networking One thing is clear. Networking is pervasive: almost all managers spend a good deal of time building up networks of outside contacts and establishing coalitions of external supporters. Kotter noted that the general managers he studied “all allocated significant time and effort early in their jobs [as well as later] to developing a network of cooperative relationships,” and that “the excellent performers … approached network building more aggressively and built stronger networks” (1982a:67, 117).

Once again, it is enlightening to read two descriptions of this networking activity that are so remarkably similar even though one is about a president of the United States of America and the other about the leader of an American street gang.

[President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s] personal sources were the product of a sociability and curiosity that reached back to the other Roosevelt’s time. He had an enormous acquaintance in various phases of national life and at various levels of government; he also had his wife and her variety of contacts…. Roosevelt quite deliberately exploited these relationships and mixed them up to widen his own range of information. He changed his sources as his interests changed, but no one who had ever interested him was quite forgotten or immune to sudden use. (Neustadt 1960:156–157)

The leader [of the street gang] is better known and more respected outside his group than are any of his followers. His capacity for social movement is greater. One of the most important functions he performs is that of relating his group to other groups in the district. Whether the relationship is one of conflict, competition, or cooperation, he is expected to represent the interests of his fellows. The politician and the racketeer must deal with the leader in order to win the support of his followers. The leader’s reputation outside the group tends to support his standing within the group, and his position in the group supports his reputation among outsiders. (Whyte 1955:259–260)

Representing On the external front, managers play a figurehead role, representing their unit officially to the outside world, whether it be a company CEO presiding at some formal dinner, a university dean signing diplomas for graduating students, or a factory foreman greeting visiting customers. (Someone once said, only half in jest, that the manager is the person who meets the visitors so that everyone else can get their work done.) “[T]he President of the United States, besides being a leader of the political party in power, is ‘head of the Nation in the ceremonial sense of the term, the symbol of the American national solidarity’” (U.S. Committee Report, cited in Carlson 1951:24).²⁵

Conveying and Convincing Managers use their networks to gain support for their unit. This may simply entail, on the information plane, conveying nerve center information to appropriate outsiders—for example, telling those grandmothers in the vicinity of the school to watch out for drug dealers. Or, on the people plane, managers seek to convince outsiders about what is important for their unit—for example, encouraging accounting to increase its budget, or using pageants to “orchestrat[e] community involvement” at school (Morris et al. 1981:78). In the popular vocabulary, managers champion the needs of their unit, lobby for its causes, promote its products, advocate on behalf of its values—and just plain peddle influence for it.²⁶

Transmitting Linking is a two-way street: managers who peddle influence out are the targets of influence coming in, a good deal of which has to be transmitted to others in the unit.

These activities of conveying, convincing, and transmitting can require a rather intricate blending of information and influence, values and visions. Years ago, the Greek economist (and later prime minister) Andreas Papandreou described the corporate chief executive as a “peak coordinator,” who consciously and unconsciously brings “the influences which are exerted on the firm” into some sort of “preference function” (1952:211). What form this might take is difficult to specify, but years earlier, Mary Parker Follett expressed the same idea more practically, and rather eloquently, in the case of a community leader:

He must be able to interpret a neighborhood not only to itself but to others…. He must know the great movements of the present and their meaning, and he must know how the smallest needs and the humblest powers of his neighborhood can be fitted into the progressive movements of our time…. He must be always alert and ever ready to gather up the many threads into one strand of united endeavor. He is the patient watcher, the active spokesman, the sincere and ardent exponent of a community consciousness. (1920:230–231)

Buffering It is in this combination of all these linking activities that we can especially appreciate the delicate balancing act that has to be built into the art and craft of managing. Managers are not just channels through which pass information and influence; they are also valves in these channels, which control what gets passed on, and how. To use two other popular words, managers are gatekeepers and buffers in the flow of influence. To appreciate the importance of this, consider five ways by which managers can get it wrong:

• Some managers are sieves who let influence flow too easily into their unit. This can drive their reports crazy, forcing them to respond to every pressure. We see this commonly these days when the demands of stock market analysts cause the chief executives of publicly traded companies to force everyone to manage for short-term performance. 
• Other managers are dams who block out too much of the external influence—for example, from customers asking for product changes. This may protect the people inside the unit, but in so doing detaches them from the outside world—and external support. 
• Then there are the sponges—managers who absorb most of the pressures themselves. This may be appreciated by others, but it is only a matter of time before these managers burn themselves out. I have seen this in some chiefs of hospital departments who are overprotective of the physicians. 
• Managers acting as hoses instead put great pressure on the people outside, who may as a consequence become angry and less inclined to cooperate. This is common when a company squeezes its suppliers excessively. 
• Finally, there are the drips, who exert too little pressure on the people outside, so that the needs of the unit are not well represented. Examples are those managers who ask too little of their suppliers and so get taken advantage of. 

The effective manager may act in each of these ways some of the time but does not allow any of them to dominate all of the time. In other words, managing on the edges—the boundaries between the unit and its context—is a tricky business: every unit has to be protected, responsive, and aggressive, depending on the circumstances.

Doing on the Inside

What does it mean for a manager to be a doer? Many managers, after all, hardly “do” anything. Some don’t even place their own phone calls. Watch a manager at work and what you see is a lot of talking and listening, not doing.

Doing in the context of managing usually means almost doing—that is, getting close to the taking of action: managing it directly, rather than indirectly by encouraging people or processing information. So the manager as “doer” is really the person who “gets it done,” as in the French expression faire faire (literally, “to make something get made”).

What is it that managers actually do? This has to relate to what the unit gets done, the actions that it takes—whether to produce a product in a company, deliver a baby in a hospital, or head up a study in a consulting firm—but in the sense of changing directly the way these things get done. Key here is that the manager’s involvement is not passive. This is not about sitting in an office and giving orders, (“Joe, ship twenty of those to Acme”) or making judgment on those actions. Deeming is not doing. Nor is it about designing strategies, structures, and systems to drive other people. All of that is controlling. In the doing role, the manager gets personally involved in those actions, “hands-on”: he or she becomes part of the designing of actions that change the unit’s output.

When the time came some years ago to redesign Pampers, Proctor & Gamble’s most important product, the chief executive of the whole company headed up the task force. When Johnson & Johnson faced a crisis after someone tampered with a few of its Tylenol packages, it was the CEO who headed up the response effort (Bennis 1989). These examples suggest that there are two aspects of the doing role: managing projects proactively and handling disturbances reactively.

Managing Projects Managers choose to head up projects themselves, or to join others on them, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is to learn: to inform themselves about something they need to know. Other times it is to demonstrate—that is, manage actions to encourage others to take action, or show them how to do so. And most commonly, perhaps, managers involve themselves in projects because they are concerned about the outcomes. Thus, in the Pampers example, the CEO may have acted personally to find out more about the product and its customers, to demonstrate project management skills, or else—likely in this case—because the project was so important that the CEO simply felt he had to lead it.

Of course, few managers can take personal charge of all their unit’s projects, even all the key ones. But the suggestion in some of the literature that managers should “do” nothing—doing being dismissed as micromanaging—stems from a sterile view of the job: the manager on a pedestal, out of literal “touch,” simply pronouncing strategies for everyone else to implement. As reported by an executive in the motorcycle business: “The Chief Executive of a world famous group of management consultants tried hard to convince me that it is ideal that top level management executives should have as little knowledge as possible relative to the product. This great man really believed that this qualification enabled them to deal efficiently with all business matters in a detached and uninhibited way” (Hopwood 1981:173).

This might work fine in a simple world. Ours, unfortunately (actually, fortunately), is a messy one. So managers have to get out and find out what’s going on, and one sensible way to do this is to get involved in specific projects. The projects benefit from the managers’ nerve center information, while the managers learn their way to new strategies. Strategies are not immaculately conceived in detached offices so much as learned through tangible experiences (more on this in Chapter 5). Put differently, projects don’t just execute strategies; they help to establish them in the first place, as in the example of Jacques Benz just cited. Managers off the ground often don’t learn—and thus turn out to be dreadful strategists.

The last chapter described managers as “jugglers” who get involved in many projects. For one chief executive of my earlier study, during the week of observation I noted several, concerning public relations, possible acquisitions, setup of a new overseas manufacturing facility, resolution of a problem with an advertising agency, and so on.

With all sorts of responsibilities, most managers cannot allow themselves to focus on one project—that “magnificent obsession” noted earlier from Noel’s study (1989). But there can be important exceptions—for example when the unit is in crisis or is facing a magnificent opportunity. And then there are the project managers, such as Brian Adams at Bombardier, whose job focuses on one project.

For most managers, however, a variety of projects demand attention. Since these tend to proceed in fits and starts anyway, with many delays, the manager can work on each intermittently, occasionally giving it a boost and then turning to other concerns until another boost later becomes necessary. Marples described this with an apt metaphor:

The manager’s job can usefully be pictured as a stranded rope made of fibers of different lengths—where length represents time—each fiber coming to the surface one or more times in observable “episodes” and representing a single issue…. A prime managerial skill may be the capacity to keep a number of “issues” in play over a large number of episodes, and long periods of time. (1967:287)

Handling Disturbances If managing projects is largely about initiating and designing proactive change in the unit—essentially exploiting opportunities—then handling disturbances is about reacting to changes forced on the unit. An unforeseen event, a problem long ignored, the appearance of a new competitor may precipitate a disturbance, and a correction becomes necessary. “Management is a contingency activity; managers act when routines break down, when unexpected snags appear” (Sayles 1979:17).

As noted earlier, in the words of Farson, as managers advance to senior positions, they “deal increasingly with predicaments, not problems.” These “require interpretative thinking … [because of] paradoxical courses and consequences. Alas, predicaments cannot be handled smoothly” (1996:43), as we discuss in Chapter 5 under the labels of conundrums.

Why must the manager be the one to respond? Aren’t others in the unit there to do that? Sure, and they often do. But some disturbances require the manager’s formal authority, or his or her nerve center information. And others link to concerns that no one else in the unit can appreciate—the reaction of a key stakeholder, for example. Moreover, problems often degenerate into disturbances precisely because they have fallen between the cracks: no one in the unit has taken responsibility. So the manager has to do so. Hence, research has indicated that “leaders have more influence during periods of crisis than during non-crises periods” (Hamblin 1958:322). Returning to the Johnson & Johnson story, in the words of the company’s chief executive, who “took charge immediately” after poison was found in some of those Tylenol capsules:

I knew I had to and I knew I could…. I knew the media. I was a news freak, and I’d dealt with the networks several times. I knew the heads of news, who to call, how to talk with them…. I was in this room twelve hours a day. I solicited advice from everyone, because no one had ever dealt with this kind of issue before. It was brand-new…. We put together the new packaging overnight practically, when it would have normally taken two years. (in Bennis 1989:152–154)

There is no shortage of reported stories about disturbances that arose because of incompetent or at least neglectful management. Fair enough, much of this time. Less discussed, but equally worth noting, is the other side of this coin: that disturbances occur naturally in every organization (as in this example). In fact, the effective organizations may be not only those that avoid many disturbances but also the ones whose managers deal effectively with the unexpected disturbances that do arise. Indeed, the more innovative the organization, the more likely are disturbances to occur unexpectedly. The organization that doesn’t take risks may avoid all disturbances, until the one that sinks it in the end. So judge the manager by the response and not just by the event.

One other aspect of disturbance handling merits mention here. Sometimes a manager substitutes for someone in the unit who is ill, has quit unexpectedly, or otherwise cannot do the job. Here the manager engages in the regular work of the unit. But since he or she is disturbance handling—filling in by exception—this should be considered part of the job of managing.

There are times, of course, when managers simply choose to do some of the regular operating work of their organization: the pope leads prayers; a hospital chief does clinical work on Fridays; Catherine Joint-Dieterle organized museum exhibitions herself. Perhaps they simply enjoy this work and would otherwise miss it, in which case it is no more managing than is a weekly game of tennis (at least without a client). But there may be managerial reasons behind these activities, too: the pope may be acting as figurehead, and the hospital head may be keeping in touch.

To conclude this discussion of the doing role, Chester Barnard has written: “Executive work is not that of the organization, but the specialized work of maintaining the organization in operation” (1938:215). It sounds right; the tricky part is distinguishing one from the other.²⁷

Dealing on the Outside

Dealing is the other side of doing, its external manifestation. Sometimes it is called “doing the deal” or “wheeling and dealing” (although these suggest the too-common disconnection of the dealing from the doing, as in the CEO who does the deal—negotiates the acquisition—and then dumps its ill considered consequences into the laps of others). Managers do deals with outsiders, such as suppliers, but also with other managers inside their own organization.

There are two main components of the dealing role: building coalitions around specific issues—sometimes called mobilizing support—and then using these coalitions together with established networks to conduct negotiations. I shall discuss them together.

Much doing requires dealing: to get projects going usually requires considerable negotiating—with suppliers, customers, partners, government officials, and many others. But there are also deals that are primarily external, as when a corporate CEO works out a stock issue with investment bankers, or is called in to close the negotiations on a union contract. Sayles has written that “sophisticated [middle] managers place great stress on negotiations as a way of life” (1964:131). But so, of course, do senior managers:

Managing partners of consulting firms as well as chief executives of some high-technology firms, such as a Boeing and Airbus, often act as salespeople to secure contracts with customers. Here they are carrying out what is considered to be operating work in most other industries, but, as noted at the outset of this chapter, sometimes only they have the status and authority to close the deal. Put differently (now that we have introduced some new labels), as figureheads, managers add credibility to the negotiations; as nerve centers, they can bring comprehensive information to bear on them; as distributors, they are able to commit the necessary resources in real time. A key to understanding managerial work, therefore, is to appreciate not only what managers do, but also why they do it.

Too Much Micromanaging? We can conclude this discussion of the action plane by returning to that micromanaging versus macroleading discussed earlier. Managers who don’t do and deal, and so don’t know what is going on, can become incapable of coming up with sensible decisions and robust strategies. We no more need managers who never do and deal than we need managers who only do and deal. All around every manager, the world of action has to connect to the world of people, which has to connect to the world of information.

Table 3.1 ROLES OF MANAGING

Table 3.2 COMPETENCIES OF MANAGING

Source: Compiled from various sources; adapted from Mintzberg (2004:280)

Managing across the Roles

When a pill decomposes, its different layers blend into each other. So, too, is it for this model: when managers manage, the distinctions between their roles blur at the margins. In other words, it may be easy to separate these roles conceptually, but that does not mean they can always be distinguished behaviorally.

Does this negate the model? No, not any more than the blending of the layers of a pill negate the need for its different ingredients. To understand the practice of managing, we need to understand each of its component parts, even if they cannot always be executed distinctly. This blurring can happen in three ways.

Activities in Multiple Roles Earlier were examples of managing that happen at the interfaces of the different roles—for example, a manager who gives a boost to a project may be leading as well as doing. Andy Grove of Intel has described “nudging” at the interfaces of leading, controlling, communicating, and doing:

You often do things at the office designed to influence events slightly, maybe making a phone call to an associate suggesting that a decision be made in a certain way…. In such instances you may be advocating a preferred course of action, but you are not issuing an instruction or a command. Yet you’re doing something stronger than merely conveying information. Let’s call it “nudging” because through it you nudge an individual or a meeting in the direction you would like. This is an immensely important managerial activity in which we engage all the time, and it should be carefully distinguished from decision-making that results in firm, clear directives. In reality, for every unambiguous decision we make, we probably nudge things a dozen times. (1983:51–52)

Roles Crossing Over into Others Second, the roles can cross over the neat lines in the model. For example, I described managers as being able to control insiders but having to convince outsiders. Employees, after all, are paid to accept managerial authority. But insiders who are highly skilled, such as physicians in a hospital or researchers in a laboratory, often need to be convinced more than controlled by their managers, while captive suppliers of a company can sometimes be controlled like subordinates. As a consequence, managers sometimes have to deal on the inside, while they can sometimes do on the outside.

As a consequence, in recent years the vertical lines from “superiors” to “subordinates” have been weakening in many organizations, while the horizontal lines to partners and colleagues have been strengthening (see Figure 3.6). This means that the roles of controlling and leading, long so dominant in the literature of managing, have been giving way to those of linking and dealing.

All this, to my mind, does not undermine our basic model—there are still plenty of outsiders to convince and insiders to control—but rather illustrates how it can be used to comprehend changes that are taking place in the practice of managing.

This crossing over of roles can also happen inadvertently, when managerial messages get misinterpreted. Burns noted in his study that “half the time, what the manager thought he was giving as instructions or decisions [controlling] was being treated as information or advice [communicating]” (1954:95). Carlson in his study noted exactly the opposite: “I observed that a conversation between a chief executive and a subordinate, which from the former’s point of view merely means the getting of information, may very well be regarded by the latter as decision taking or even as the receiving of orders” (1951:117–118).

Figure 3.6 VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL RELATIONSHIPS IN MANAGING

Roles Infusing Each Other Third, we have one role flowing into others and infusing them. Leading is most obvious in this regard: everything a manager does is likely to be screened by reports for clues about his or her leadership (Hill 2003:31). But this can be true for other roles, too; for example, how a manager leads can be screened as an indicator of how he or she wishes to control. “Feel free to criticize,” claimed the CEO of one company I know, while he fired someone who did. No ambiguity there.

In his review of my 1973 book, Karl Weick called the leading role the “least convincing,” even questioning its inclusion: “concern with motivation can be legitimately attached to other roles” (1974:117). Sure it can. But there are also activities distinct to the leading role (such as mentoring and training), just as there are activities distinct to the controlling one (such as delegating and deeming).²⁹

Weick’s point would seem to be strongest with regard to thinking—what is called framing in this model. After all, when does any of us stop thinking? Yet Weick, in another publication (1983), distinguished disengaged thinking—which can be called “reflection”—from “thinking that [is] inseparably woven into and occurs simultaneously with action” (p. 222). Accordingly, “managerial acts of any kind can be done more or less thinkingly” (p. 223). We shall return to this intriguing idea in the final chapter.

Tilting toward a Posture

To insist that all managers have to perform all the roles in the model—swallow the whole pill—is not to suggest that managers do not favor some roles over others. Every manager has specific needs to which he or she has to respond, and that gives rise to that person’s particular “posture” of managing, as we shall discuss in the next chapter. Moreover, all managers have their own predispositions: each exhibits his or her own style, as we shall also discuss in the next chapter. Many opportunities arise in managing to substitute, combine, and nuance the various roles. Accordingly, effective managers do not exhibit perfect balance among the roles; they tilt toward certain ones, even if they cannot neglect the others (Quinn et al. 1990:316).

Consider some obvious examples (to which we shall return in the next chapter). Managers of professionals, as in hospitals and universities, may favor linking over leading, let alone controlling, since these professionals tend to act more like colleagues, or even suppliers, than subordinates. They need little encouragement or supervision from their managers, but they can require considerable support. In contrast, entrepreneurs who run their own businesses often emphasize doing and dealing, while senior executives of large corporations often give greater attention to controlling, particularly through their systems of performance control. The latter can be true of other managers as well:

The Dynamic Balance

I have observed in this closing section, first, that managing has to be well rounded, to avoid imbalance, and then that it inevitably tilts one way or another. But I do not see these as contradictory. Over time managing has to function in a dynamic balance. Managing that is well rounded can tilt back and forth according to the pressures of the moment. “Managerial work … [is] not a discrete, static, one-decision-at-a-time process, rather there is a timed ‘ebb and flow’ of meetings, requests, pressures, and negotiations” (Weick 1983:26).

It is this dynamic balance that renders futile the teaching of management in a classroom, especially one role or competency at a time. Even mastering all the competencies do not a competent manager make, because the key to this work is the blending of all of its aspects into this dynamic balance. And that can only happen on the job, because no simulation I have ever seen in a classroom—case, game, in-basket exercise—comes remotely close to replicating the job itself. (Just read the descriptions of the management days in the appendix.)

Practicing managers can certainly benefit from coming into a classroom that encourages them to reflect, alone and together, on the experience they have already acquired in the job (as we shall discuss in Chapter 6; see also Mintzberg 2004b). But that experience can be so varied, as we shall discuss next, that the focus of such a classroom has to be more on the managers’ learning than on the professors’ teaching.