Mintzberg

S0, what do managers do?

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Why will managers always be flawed?

Is there a good book about what managers do?

What are the most common misconceptions about managing?

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What are the key dilemmas in managing?

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Why will managers always be flawed?

What are the most common myths about managing?

What are the dilemmas of managing?

Is there a good book about simply managing?

Let's here it straight from Henry Mintzberg

PLANE: Information UNIT: Inside TASK: Controlling

Find out more about controlling through decision making

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Digging into controlling

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PLANE: Information UNIT: In & out TASK: Communicating

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PLANE: People UNIT: Inside TASK: Leading

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PLANE: People UNIT: Outside TASK: Linking

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PLANE: Action UNIT: Inside TASK: Doing

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PLANE: Action UNIT: Outside TASK: Dealing

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Establishing & Strengthening Culture

This is about you encouraging the best efforts of your people by aligning their interests with the organisation's needs. A good metaphor for this aspect of your role is the queen bee in the hive: she issues no orders, obeys as modestly as the humblest of her subjects, and is the ‘spirit of the hive’. This is about you being the ‘spirit of a human hive’.

Delegating

As a delegator, you assign a task to someone else on an ad hoc basis: a specific individual is directed to carry out a particular activity. You identify the need to get something done but leave the deciding and the doing to someone else.

Developing

As a developer, you develop the infrastructure of your unit through strategies, structures, and systems to control the behaviours of its people. Developing Strategies: You act as an “architect” of organizational purpose in your unit: the person who designs on paper so everyone else can build. Developing Structures: You design organizational structures: divide up the work in your unit, allocate responsibilities, and then organize this around a hierarchy of authority. Such structures help set people’s agendas and control their actions. Developing Systems: You take charge of designing and sometimes even running various control systems in your unit. Note this control's “hands-off” nature: you set it up, and then the system does the controlling.

Managing Projects

As a manager, you may choose to head up projects yourself for a variety of reasons:

• To learn: to inform yourself about something you need to know
• To demonstrate: to take action so that you encourage others to take action or show them how to do so.
• To ensure outcomes, involve yourself in projects because you are concerned about the products.

Of course, few managers can take personal charge of all their unit’s projects, even all the key ones. But the suggestion that you, as a manager, should “do” nothing, “doing” being dismissed as micromanaging is relatively narrow and even dangerous.

On Networking

“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 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 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.”

Buffering

As a manager, you are not just a channel through which information and influence are passed. You are also a valve in this channel, which controls what gets passed on and how. This is a very tricky role: 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 quickly into their unit. This can drive their reports crazy, forcing them to respond to every pressure. Other managers are dams that block out too much external influence. This may protect the people inside the unit but detaches them from the outside world - and external support. Then there are the sponges -managers who absorb most of the pressures. This may be appreciated, but it is only a matter of time before these managers burn themselves out.

Managers acting as hoses instead put tremendous pressure on the people outside, who may, as a consequence, become angry and less inclined to cooperate. Finally, there are the drips, who exert too little pressure on the
people outside so that the unit's needs are not well represented. Examples are managers who ask too little of their suppliers and are taken advantage of.

Nerve Centre

Everyone reporting to a manager is a specialist, relatively speaking, charged with some particular aspect of the unit’s tasks. As a manager, in contrast, you are the relative generalist among them, overseeing it all. You may not know as much about any particular speciality, but usually more than your direct reports about the whole set of things together. As a consequence of the monitoring activities, you become the nerve centre of the unit, its best-informed member. This can apply to the president of a country compared with the cabinet secretaries and to a first-line manager compared with the workers. The same holds for external information. You can access outside managers who are also nerve centres of their units by your status.

Conveying & convincing

As a manager, you use your network to gain support for your unit. This may entail, on the information plane, conveying information to appropriate outsiders. Or, on the people plane, convincing outsiders about what is vital for your unit. In the popular vocabulary, you champion the needs of your team, lobby for its causes, promote its products, advocate on behalf of its values - and plain peddle influence for it.

Handling Disturbances

If managing projects is primarily about initiating proactive change in your unit, then handling disturbances is about reacting to changes forced on your team. An unforeseen event, a problem ignored, or the appearance of a new competitor may result in a disturbance, and a correction becomes necessary. When routines break down, when unexpected problems appear, you are expected to act. Such disturbances are common and occur naturally in every organization. Effective organizations are those that avoid troubles and the ones whose managers deal effectively with disruptions that do arise. This includes the simple case when you may have to substitute for someone in the unit who is ill, has quit unexpectedly, or otherwise cannot do the job.

Designating

As a designator, you make specific choices. Sometimes these concerns arise and can quickly be resolved, as when you authorize or refuse a decision someone else proposes. Designating can happen formally or informally, with the latter being much more common and highly varied.

Spokesperson

As a manager, you also pass information externally, from unit members to outsiders. More formally, as a spokesperson for the unit, you represent it to the outside world, speaking to various publics on its behalf, lobbying for its causes, representing its expertise in public forums, and keeping external stakeholders up-to-date on its progress. As a manager, your advantage is not about documented information, which can be made available to anyone, but about current information primarily transmitted by word of mouth—gossip, rumour, and opinion. Indeed, much of your data is not verbal but visual and intuitive—in other words, seen and felt more than heard.

On Networking

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sources were the product of sociability and curiosity. He had an enormous acquaintance in various phases of national life and at multiple 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 range of information. He changed his sources as his interests changed, but no one who had ever interested him was entirely forgotten or immune to use sudden.”

Dealing

Dealing is the other side of doing, its external manifestation. The dealing role has two main components: building coalitions around specific issues -sometimes called mobilizing support - and then using these coalitions with established networks to conduct negotiations. Much doing requires dealing: Getting projects going usually requires considerable negotiating- with suppliers, customers, partners, government officials, and many others. Many managers place significant stress on negotiations as a way of life!

THE THREE PLANES OF MANAGING 1. The purpose of managing is to ensure that your unit serves its essential purpose. This requires that you take practical actions. 2. Most commonly, however, you take one or two steps back from the action. One step back, you encourage other people to take action - you get things done through other people by coaching, motivating, building teams, strengthening culture, and so forth. 3. Two steps back, you get things done by using the information to drive others to take action. For example, you may impose a target on a production team or carry a comment from a government official to a staff specialist.

For most of the last century, managing was almost synonymous with controlling. This began with Henri Fayol's book of 1916, based on his experience managing French mines. Still, it thrived in the conventional manufacturing of products, such as automobiles, as expressed by the popular acronym POSDCORB: planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting.

Distributing

As a distributor, you allocate resources as a result of other decisions. You spend a good deal of time using your budgeting system to give resources—money, materials, and equipment, as well as the efforts of other people. But you allocate resources in many different ways — for example, scheduling your time and designing the organizational structures that determine how others give their time. Note that to treat something as a “resource” is to consider it information for control: treating employees as “human resources” means dealing with them as if they are information, not people, being reduced to a narrow dimension of their whole selves.

Deeming

Deeming has become an increasingly popular form of controlling but under different labels, such as management by objectives. By deeming, you impose targets on people and expect them to perform accordingly: “increase sales by 15%” or “reduce costs by 10%”. You pronounce and then step back. But deeming cannot stand on its own: as a manager, you have to get beyond the target and into the workings of your unit. So-called stretch goals are fine if you put some personal walk behind the general talk.

Monitoring

As a monitor, you reach out for every helpful information you can get - about internal operations and external events, everything imaginable. You are probably already bombarded with such information, mainly due to the networks you build up for yourself.