What
do successful managers - those who have been promoted
relatively quickly - have in common with effective managers - those who have
satisfied, committed subordinates and high performing units? Surprisingly, the
answer seems to be that they have little in common. Successful managers in what
we define as "real organizations" large and small mainstream
organizations, mostly in the mushrooming service industry in Middle America -
are not engaged in the same day-to-day activities as effective managers in these
organizations. This is probably the most important, and certainly the most intriguing,
finding of a comprehensive four-year observational study of managerial work .The
startling finding that there is a difference between successful and effective
managers may merely confirm for many cynics and "passed over"
managers something they have suspected for years. They believe that although
managers who are successful (that is, rapidly promoted) may be astute
politicians, they are not necessarily effective. Indeed, the so-called
successful managers may be the ones who do not in fact take care of people and
get high performance from their units. Could this finding explain some of the
performance problems facing organizations today? Could it be that the successful
managers, the politically savvy ones who are being rapidly promoted into
responsible positions, may not be the effective managers, the ones with satisfied,
committed subordinates turning out quantity and quality performance in their
units? This article explores the heretofore assumed equivalence of
"successful managers" and "effective managers." Instead of
looking for sophisticated technical or governmental approaches to the
performance problems facing today's organizations, the solution may be as
simple as promoting effective managers and learning how they carry out their
jobs. Maybe it is time to turn to the real managers themselves for some
answers. And who are these managers? They are found at all levels and in all
types of organizations with titles such as department head, general manager,
store manager, marketing manager, office manager, agency chief, or district
manager. In other words, maybe the answers to the performance problems facing
organizations today can be found in their own backyards, in the managers
themselves in their day-to- day activities.
The
Current View of Managerial Work
Through the years
management has been defined as the famous French administrator and writer Henri
Fayol said, by the functions of planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating,
and controlling. Only recently has this classical view of managers been challenged.
Starting with the land- mark work of Henry Mintzberg, observational studies of
managerial work have found that the normative functions do not hold up. Mintzberg
charged that Fayol and others' classical view of what managers do was merely
"folklore."` On the basis of his observations of five CEO's and their
mail, Mintzberg concluded that the manager's job consisted of many brief and
disjointed episodes with people inside and outside the organization. He
discounted notions such as reflective planning. Instead of the five Henry
Fayol’s functions of management, Mintzberg portrayed managers in terms of a
typology of roles. He formulated three interpersonal roles (figurehead, leader,
and liaison); three informational roles (monitor or nerve centre, disseminator and spokesman), and four decision-making roles (entrepreneur, disturbance
handler, resource allocator, and negotiator). Although Mintzberg based this
view of managers on only the five managers he observed and his search of the
literature, he did ask, and at least gave the beginning of an answer to, the
question of what managers really do. The best known other modern view of
managerial work is provided by John Kotter. His description of managers is
based on his study of 15 successful general managers. Like Mintzberg, Kotter
challenged the traditional view by con- clouding that managers do not so simply
perform the Fayolian functions, but rather spend most of their time interacting
with others. In particular, he found his general managers spent considerable
time in meetings getting and giving information. Kotter refers to these
get together as "network building." Networking accomplishes what
Kotter calls a manager's "agenda" - the loosely connected goals and
plans addressing the manager's responsibilities. By obtaining relevant and
needed information from his or her networks, the effective general manager is
able to implement his or her agenda. Like Mintzberg, Kotter's conclusions are
based on managerial work from a small sample of elite managers. Nevertheless,
his work represents a progressive step in answering the question of what
managers do.
Determining
What Real Managers Do
The next step in
discovering the true nature of managerial work called for a larger sample that
would allow more meaningful generalizations. With a grant from the Office of
Naval Research, we embarked on such an effort. We used trained observers to
freely observe and record in detail the behaviours and activities of 44
"real" managers. Unlike Mintzberg and Kotter's managers, these
managers came from all levels and many types of organizations (mostly in the
service sector - such as retail stores, hospitals, corporate headquarters, a
railroad, government agencies, insurance companies, a newspaper office,
financial institutions, and a few manufacturing companies).
We reduced the voluminous
data gathered from the free observation logs into managerial activity
categories using the Delphi technique. Delphi was developed and used during the
heyday of Rand Corporation's "Think Tank." A panel offers independent
input and then the panel members are given composite feedback. After several
iterations of this process, the data were reduced into the 12 descriptive behavioral
categories shown in Exhibit 1. These empirically derived behavioral
descriptors were then conceptually col- lapsed into the four managerial
activities of real managers:
Exhibit 1
The Activities of Real
Managers
Descriptive Categories
Real Managers' Derived from Free Observation Activities:
Exchanging Information,
Communication, Paperwork, Planning, Decision Making Traditional Management,
Controlling, Interacting with Outsiders, Networking, Socializing/Politicking,
Motivating/Reinforcing, Disciplining/Punishing, Managing Conflict Human
Resource, Management, Staffing, Training/Developing.
Successful
vs. Effective Real Managers
1. Communication. This activity consists of exchanging routine
information and processing paperwork. Its observed behaviours include answering
procedural questions, receiving and disseminating requested information,
conveying the results of meetings, giving or receiving routine information over
the phone, processing mail, reading reports, writing reports/memos/letters,
routine financial reporting and bookkeeping, and general desk work.
2. Traditional Management. This activity consists of planning,
decision making, and controlling. Its observed behaviours include setting goals
and objectives, defining tasks needed to accomplish goals, scheduling
employees, assigning tasks, providing routine instructions, defining problems,
handling day-to-day operational crises, deciding what to do, developing new
procedures, inspecting work, walking around inspecting the work, monitoring
performance data, and doing preventive maintenance.
3. Human Resource Management. This activity contains the most behavioural
categories: motivating/reinforcing, disciplining/punishing, managing conflict,
staffing, and training/developing. The disciplining/punishing category was
subsequently dropped from the analysis because it was not generally permitted
to be observed. The observed behaviours for this activity include allocating
formal rewards, asking for input, conveying appreciation, giving credit where
due, listening to suggestions, giving positive feed- back, group support, resolving
conflict between subordinates, appealing to higher authorities or third parties
to resolve a dispute, developing job descriptions, reviewing applications,
interviewing applicants, filling in where needed, orienting employees,
arranging for training, clarifying roles, coaching, mentoring, and walking
subordinates through a task.
4. Networking. This activity consists of socializing/ politicking and
interacting with outsiders. The observed behaviours associated with this
activity include non-work- related "chit chat"; informal joking
around; discussing rumours, hearsay and the grapevine; complaining, griping,
and putting others down; politicking and gamesmanship; dealing with customers,
suppliers, and vendors; attending external meetings; and doing/attending
community service events. These four activities are what real managers do. They
include some of the classic notions of Fayol (the traditional management
activities) as well as the more recent views of Mintzberg (the communication
activities) and Kotter (the networking activities). As a whole, however,
especially with the inclusion of human resource management activities, this
view of real managers' activities is more comprehensive than previous sets of
managerial work.
After the nature of
managerial activity was deter- mined through the free observation of the 44
managers, the next phase of the study was to document the relative frequency of
these activities. Data on another set of 248 real managers (not the 44 used in
the initial portion of this study) were gathered. Trained participation
observers filled out a checklist based on the managerial activities at a random
time once every hour over a two-week period. We found that the real managers
spend not quite a third of their time and effort in communication activities,
about a third in traditional management activities, a fifth in human resource
management activities, and about a fifth in networking activities. This
relative frequency analysis based on observational data of a large sample
provides a more definitive answer to the question of what real managers do than
the normative classical functions and the limited sample of elite managers used
by Mintzberg and Kotter.
How
the Difference between Successful and Effective Real Managers Was Determined
Discovering the true
nature of managerial work by exploding some of the myths of the past and
extending the work of Mintzberg and Kotter undoubtedly contributes to our
knowledge of management. However, of more critical importance in trying to
understand and find solutions to our current performance problems is singling
out successful and effective managers to see what they really do in their
day-to- day activities. The successful-versus-effective phase of our real manager’s
study consisted of analysing the existing data based on the frequencies of the
observed activities of the real managers. We did not start off with any
preconceived notions or hypotheses concerning the relationships between
successful and effective managers. In fact, making such a distinction seemed
like "splitting hairs" because the two words are so often used
interchangeably. Nevertheless, we decided to define success operationally in
terms of the speed of promotion within an organization. We determined a success
index on a sample of the real managers in our study. It was calculated by
dividing a manager's level in his or her organization by his or her tenure
(length of service) there.6 Thus, a manager at the fourth level of management,
who has been with his or her organization for five years, would be rated more
successful than a manager at the third level who has been there for 25 years.
Obviously, there are some potential problems with such a measure of success,
but for our large sample of managers this was an objective measure that could
be obtained. The definition and measurement of effectiveness is even more
elusive. The vast literature on managerial effectiveness offered little
agreement on criteria or measures. To overcome as many of the obstacles and
disagreements as possible, we used a combined effectiveness index for a sample
of the real managers in our study that represented the two major - and
generally agreed upon - criteria of both management theory/research and
practice: (1) getting the job done through high quantity and quality standards
of performance, and (2) getting the job done through people, which requires
their satisfaction and commitment.
We obviously would have
liked to use "hard measures" of effectiveness such as profits and
quantity/quality of output or service, but again, because we were working with
large samples of real managers from widely diverse jobs and organizations, this
was not possible.
What
Do Successful Real Managers Do?
To answer the question of
what successful real managers do, we conducted several types of analyses -
statistical (using multiple regression techniques), simple descriptive
comparisons (for example, top third of managers as measured by the success
index vs. bottom third), and relative strength of correlational relationships.8
In all of these analyses, the importance that networking played in real manager
success was very apparent. Of the four real manager activities, only networking
had a statistically significant relation- ship with success. In the comparative
analysis we found that the most successful (top third) real managers were doing
considerably more networking and slightly more routine communication than their
least successful (bottom third) counterparts. From the relative strength of
relationship analysis we found that networking makes the biggest relative
contribution to manager success and, importantly, human resource management
activities makes the least relative contribution. What does this mean? It means
that in this study of real managers, using speed of promotion as the measure of
success, it was found that successful real managers spent relatively more time
and effort socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders than did
their less successful counterparts. Perhaps equally important, the successful
real managers did not give much time or attention to the traditional management
activities of planning, decision making, and controlling or to the human
resource management activities of motivating/reinforcing, staffing,
training/developing, and managing conflict.
In other words, for this
manager and for a significant number of those real managers we studied,
networking seems to be the key to success.
What
Do Effective Real Managers Do?
Once we answered the
question of what successful managers do, we turned to the even more important
question of what effective managers do. It should be emphasized once again
that, in gathering our observational data for the study, we made no assumptions
that the successful real managers were (or were not) the effective managers.
Our participant observers were blind to the research questions and we had no
hypothesis concerning the relationship between successful and effective
managers. We used the relative strength of correlational relationship between
the real managers' effectiveness index and their directly observed day-to-day
activities and found that communication and human resource management
activities made by far the largest relative contribution to real managers'
effectiveness and that traditional management and - especially - networking
made by far the least relative contribution.9 These results mean that if
effectiveness is defined as the perceived quantity and quality of the
performance of a manager's unit and his or her subordinates' satisfaction and
commitment, then the biggest relative contribution to real manager
effectiveness comes from the human oriented activities - communication and
human resource management. A representative example of this effectiveness
profile is found in the following manager's comments:
"Both how much and
how well things get done around here, as well as keeping my people loyal and
happy, has to do with keeping them in- formed and involved. If I make a change
in procedure or the guys upstairs give us a new process or piece of equipment
to work with, I get my people's input and give them the full story before I lay
it on them. Then I make sure they have the proper training and give them
feedback on how they are doing. When they screw up, I let them know it, but
when they do a good job, I let them know about that too."
This manager, like our
study of real managers in general, found that the biggest contribution to
effectiveness came from communicating and human resource management activities.
Successful
vs. Effective Real Managers
Equally important,
however, was the finding that the least relative contribution to real managers'
effectiveness came from the networking activity. This, of course, is in stark
contrast to our results of the successful real manager analysis. Networking
activity had by far the strongest relative relation- ship to success, but the
weakest with effectiveness. On the other hand, human resource management
activity had a strong relationship to effectiveness (second only to communication
activity), but had the weakest relative relation- ship to success. In other
words, the successful real managers do not do the same activities as the
effective real managers (in fact, they do almost the opposite). These
contrasting profiles may have significant implications for understanding the
current performance problems facing American organizations. However, before we
look at these implications and suggest some solutions, let's take a look at
those real managers who are both successful and effective.
What
Do Managers Who Are Both Successful and Effective Do?
The most obvious
concluding question is what those who were found to be both successful and
effective really do. This "combination" real manager, of course, is
the ideal - and has been assumed to exist in American management over the
years. Since there was such a difference between successful and effective managers
in our study, we naturally found relatively few (less than 10% of our sample)
that were both among the top third of successful managers and the top third of
effective managers. Not surprisingly, upon examining this special group, we
found that their activities were very similar to real managers as a whole. They
were not like either the successful or effective real managers. Rather, it
seems that real managers who are both successful and effective use a fairly
balanced approach in terms of their activities. In other words, real managers
who can strike the delicate balance between all four managerial activities may
be able to get ahead as well as get the job done. Important is the fact that we
found so few real managers that were both successful and effective. This
supports our findings on the difference between successful and effective real
managers, but limits any generalizations that can be made about successful and
effective managers. It seems that more important in explaining our
organizations' present performance problems, and what to do about them, are the
implications of the wide disparity between successful and effective real
managers.
Implications
of the Successful versus Effective Real Managers Findings
If, as our study
indicates, there is indeed a difference between successful and effective real
managers, what does it mean and what should we do about it? First of all, we
need to pay more attention to formal reward systems to ensure that effective
managers are promoted. Second, we must learn how effective managers do their
day-to-day jobs. The traditional assumption holds that promotions are based on
performance. This is what the formal personnel policies say, this is what new
management trainees are told and this is what every management textbook states
should happen. On the other hand, more "hardened" (or perhaps more
realistic) members and observers of real organizations (not textbook
organizations or those featured in the latest best sellers or videotapes) have
long suspected that social and political skills are the real key to getting
ahead, to being successful. Our study lends support to the latter view. The
solution is obvious, but may be virtually impossible to implement, at least in
the short run. Tying formal rewards - and especially promotions - to
performance is a must if organizations are going to move ahead and become more
productive. At a minimum, and most pragmatically in the short run,
organizations must move to a performance- based appraisal system. Managers that
are effective should be promoted. In the long run organizations must develop
cultural values that support and reward effective performance, not just
successful socializing and politicking. This goes hand-in-hand with the current
attention given to corporate culture and how to change it.
An appropriate goal for cultural change in today's organizations might simply be to make effective managers successful. Besides the implications for performance-based appraisals and organizational culture that came out of the findings of our study is a lesson that we can learn from the effective real managers themselves. This lesson is the importance they give and effort they devote to the human- oriented activities of communicating and human resource management. How human resources are managed - keeping them informed, communicating with them, paying attention to them, reinforcing them, resolving their conflicts, training/developing them - all contribute directly to managerial effectiveness. The disparity our study found between successful and effective real managers has important implications for the performance problems facing today's organizations. While we must move ahead on all fronts in our search for solutions to these problems, we believe the activities basic to the effective real managers in our study - communication and human resource management - deserve special attention.
By : Deepika
No comments:
Post a Comment