What Does It Mean to Be a Manager?

Original from 10/10/2010: Gestão 2.0

As incredible as it may seem, there is no good, simple, clear, and short definition that can define what being a “manager” is. Manager isn’t a profession. You can’t “learn” to be a manager in a school or course. The only way to learn is by trying, erring, 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 reading this book. If you’re a beginner manager or want to be one, maybe this book will give you some vision of what you’ll face ahead. If you’re already a manager, you’ll be surprised because many theoretical books paint scenarios you’ve never seen in practice — making you question whether you’re doing the right thing or not — and this book may better define the real problems you face.

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

Management Isn’t a Profession

After years of searching for Holy Grails, it’s time to recognize that managing isn’t a science nor a profession; it’s 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. It isn’t a “maybe,” it’s a certainty. In school you can learn accounting techniques, marketing, repeatable technical knowledge. None of that generates a manager, much less a leader. If a school, an MBA course, says “We Form Leaders,” that’s a lie. Those schools form technicians; technicians who will work in technical activities until they grow to begin accumulating responsibilities and, perhaps, 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 think that by taking several courses, postgrad, MBAs, etc., they’ll necessarily become a good manager. And there’s no such correlation. Yes, there are excellent managers who had good training, but it wasn’t the training that made them good managers. Don’t confuse correlation with causation. In the general case, this person is simply postponing what would actually give them a chance to become a good manager: practice.

Managers who don’t do and handle, and therefore don’t know what’s happening, may become incapable of coming up with sensitive decisions and robust strategies.

There’s also the idea that managers shouldn’t get their hands dirty. Of course, because either they manage or they execute. Which doesn’t mean the manager should be ignorant about the area where they act. Quite the opposite, a manager with excellent technical knowledge of their area has more chances of 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 all these roles in all three planes provide the balance that is essential to the practice of management.

What Mintzberg places, and which is obvious, is that if you want to be a renowned management author, writing books, giving talks, you must focus on one and only one aspect and exalt it as the “missing piece.” But the reality is that a manager who focuses on only one aspect of management practice is certainly doing the wrong thing. A good manager knows how to balance the different roles in different situations, but 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, watch out — sometimes we see — not only managers — but very active professionals, who seem to do a lot because they talk to many people, act a lot, are always accelerated. But this always seems to be the symptom of the “hero-professional.” And in my definition it means precisely the individual who is doing their job the wrong way: seeming to be doing a lot but actually just being inefficient and, worse, correcting their own mistakes generated along the way, seeming to resolve a lot, but actually just running after their own tail.