What Does It Mean to Be a Manager?

Original from 10/10/2010: Gestão 2.0

As incredible as it sounds, there is no good, simple, clear, short definition for what it means to be a “manager.” Manager isn’t a profession. You can’t “learn” to be a manager in a school or a course. The only way to learn is by trying, erring, and improving, continuously and indefinitely.

One of the best definitions I’ve found is from no one less than Professor Henry Mintzberg, in his recent book “Managing,” published in 2009. A mature and light read.

I recommend the read. If you’re a beginner manager, or want to be one, maybe the book gives you some sense of what’s coming. If you’re already a manager, you’ll be surprised. So many theory books paint scenarios you’ve never seen in practice, and they leave you second-guessing whether you’re on the right track. This one does a better job of naming the real problems you deal with day to day.

I want to bring a few excerpts from the first half of the book.

Management Isn’t a Profession

After years of seeking Holy Grails, it is time to recognize that managing is neither a science nor a profession; it is a practice, learned primarily through experience, and rooted in context.

It is certainly not a Science. Science has to do with developing systematic knowledge through research. That’s nowhere near the purpose of management, which has to do with helping get things done in organizations. Management isn’t even an applied science, because that’s still science. Management certainly applies science: managers need to use all the knowledge they can. And they certainly use analysis, rooted in the scientific method (which means here more scientific proof than scientific discovery).

But effective management is more dependent on art and is especially rooted in craft. Art produces “insight” and “vision,” based on intuition (Peter Drucker wrote in 1954 that “the days of the ‘intuitive’ manager are numbered.” Half a century later, we’re still counting.) And craft has to do with learning from experience — working things out as the manager moves forward.

So it’s worth repeating what Mintzberg often says: it’s impossible to form managers in school. That much is a certainty. In school you learn accounting techniques, marketing, repeatable technical knowledge. None of that makes a manager, much less a leader.

When a school or an MBA course slaps “We Form Leaders” on the brochure, it’s lying. Those schools form technicians. Those technicians go work in technical activities until they grow, take on responsibilities, and maybe, one day, actually manage something.

Management Is a Practice

Put together a good portion of craft with the right touch of art along with some use of science and you end up with a job that is, above all, a practice. There is no “one best way” to manage; everything depends on the situation.

It isn’t even a Profession. It has been pointed out that engineering also isn’t a science or an applied science so much as a practice in its own right. But engineering applies a good portion of science, codified and certified as to its efficiency. And therefore it can be called a profession, meaning it can be taught before practice, out of context. In a way, a bridge is a bridge, or at least iron is iron, even if its use has to be adapted to the situation at hand. The same can be said of medicine. But not of management:

Many medical diagnostic, inference, and treatment skills … assume that a disease can be decomposed into separate problems that don’t differ much between patients and can be treated by reasonably standard remedies … In contrast, much of management work involves dealing with problems that are highly interdependent with other parts of the organization, are specific to this particular firm, market and industry and not easily reducible to a standard general syndrome that can be treated by specific techniques.

Managing is a work of negotiation, of trades, of yielding, of conquering. There’s no procedure, no methodology, no rigid body of knowledge that defines this role. You can’t know “what level” a manager is at because there’s no “standard” for comparison. There are good managers and bad managers, just that. “Bad managers,” in reality, couldn’t even be called “managers” because they’re actually not managing.

Real Management

It has been said that an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until finally he or she knows everything about nothing. The manager’s problem is the opposite: to know less and less about more and more until finally he or she knows nothing about everything.

Many people think that taking a pile of courses, postgrad, MBAs, and the like will necessarily turn them into good managers. That correlation doesn’t exist. Yes, there are excellent managers with good training, but what really formed them was practice. Correlation isn’t causation. In the general case, this person is just postponing the thing that would actually give them a shot at becoming a good manager: practice.

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.

There’s also the idea that managers shouldn’t get their hands dirty, since it’s either they manage or they execute. That doesn’t mean the manager can be ignorant about the area where they work. Quite the opposite: a manager with excellent technical knowledge of their area has a better shot at understanding the context.

Thinking is heavy — thinking too much can exhaust a manager — while acting is light — acting too much can make the manager unable to stop.

Similarly, too much leadership can result in a job without context — without aim, without focus, without action — while too much relationship can produce a job disconnected from its internal roots — public relations instead of tangible connections. The manager who only communicates never finishes anything, while the manager who only “does” ends up doing everything alone. And the manager who only controls risks ends up controlling an empty shell of yes-men and yes-women. We don’t need people-oriented, information-oriented, or action-oriented managers; we need managers who operate on these three planes. Only together, across all three planes, do these roles provide the balance that is essential to the practice of management.

Mintzberg points out something obvious: if you want to be a renowned management author, writing books and giving talks, you have to focus on a single aspect and exalt it as the “missing piece.” But in reality, a manager who focuses on only one aspect of the practice is certainly doing the wrong thing. A good manager balances the different roles as the situation demands, and uses all of them whenever needed.

Anyway, as you can see, the role of the Manager is much broader than it seems. Just studying procedures doesn’t make you a manager, just as studying a color table doesn’t make you a painter, or knowing how to read a score doesn’t make you a composer.

Art, Craft, Technique, and Practice. This is the definition of Management. A manager who doesn’t understand that will always be a terrible manager.

As an addendum, one word of caution. Sometimes we see very active professionals, and not only managers, who seem to do a lot because they talk to a lot of people, act a lot, and are always running hot. That’s usually the symptom of the “hero-professional.” In my definition, it’s precisely the person who is doing the job the wrong way. They look productive, but in practice they’re just being inefficient and, worse, cleaning up the mistakes they generate along the way. It looks like they’re solving plenty when, in fact, they’re just chasing their own tail.