Welcome to the Momentum Business Coaching Newsletter for
December 2007

Where have all the Good Managers gone?

"No job is more vital to our society than that of the manager. It is the manager who determines whether our social institutions serve us well or whether they squander our talents and resources." - Henry Mintzberg

Nobody aspires to be a good manager these days. Much attention and resources are devoted to leadership development as everyone wants to be a great leader, yet all leaders have to manage people. The separation of management from leadership is dangerous. Leading without good management results in a failure to execute. Let's get back to good, strong managing.

According to traditional management theory, managers are supposed to plan, organise, coordinate, and control. The truth is, pressures of reacting to urgent matters supplant most reflection and planning. Managers respond to the urgencies of each day, take on too much work, operate with continual interruptions, and make instant decisions. There is no time to step back and consider bigger issues. This leads to acting with superficial and fragmented information.

Management skills as they are taught in business schools today bear little resemblance to what goes on in the trenches. Management theory is based on the studies of Taylor, Follet and Fayol that date back to the beginning of the 20th century. Each decade has brought more research and authors who have contributed to the understanding of how to manage organisations effectively. Gurus come and go. Managers still strive to get work done through others. The way they do this, however, has been changing.

Organisations, as they become less hierarchical in structure, are evolving to more democratic styles of managing people. As organisations and businesses become more technologically adept, more global and more consumer oriented, managers must have high levels of interpersonal and communication skills, emotional intelligence and strong collaborative abilities.

Measuring the Activities of Managers

Effective management requires reflective systematic planning. Research shows that managers work at an unrelenting pace and their activities are short, varied, and discontinuous. They are biased towards action, and spend little time reflecting.

In one study, half the activities engaged in by executives lasted less than nine minutes. A study of 56 foremen in the U.S. found they averaged 583 activities per 8-hour shift, an average of 1 every 48 seconds. Executives meet a steady stream of callers and mail all day long. Many managers leave their doors open to encourage the free flow of information, but also thereby encourage interruptions. There is little time for reflection or planning.

Managers are constantly being told to delegate more, but most managers end up doing work alongside others. Many times managers engage in routine duties to fill staff vacancies. Other times they deal with important or difficult customers to avoid losing an account.

The Managerial Mind-Sets

Mintzberg proposes five mind-sets to overcome the managerial obstacles. By focusing more on how they think rather than on what they should do, successful managers think their way through their jobs. This allows them to deal more adeptly with both the internal demands of the company and its people and with the world around them.

• A reflective mind-set allows you to be thoughtful, to see familiar experiences in a new light, and to set the stage for innovative products and services.

• An analytical mind-set ensures that you make decisions based on in-depth data, both quantitative and qualitative.

• A worldly mind-set is necessary to operate in diverse regions with cultural and social insights to serve varied customers.

• A collaborative mind-set means that you orchestrate relationships among individuals and teams to produce your products and services.

• An action mind-set energises you to create and expedite the best plans for achieving your strategic goals.

Regularly accessing all five mind-sets will ensure better management. A manager's effectiveness is significantly influenced by the amount of insight he or she has into his or her work. Performance depends on how well a manager understands and responds to the pressures and dilemmas of the job. You can't do this without some degree of introspection and reflection.

From Empowerment to Self-Managing Teams

A truly collaborative mind-set does not involve managing people so much as managing the relationships among people, teams and projects across divisions and alliances. Getting into a truly collaborative mind-set means moving beyond empowerment. In fact, the word empowerment implies that the people who know the work best must somehow receive power from their managers to do it.

A collaborative mind-set means getting away from the heroic style of managing and moving into a more engaging style. It provides a way for people to manage themselves.

Engaging managers listen more than they talk; they get out of their offices to see and feel more than they remain in them to sit and figure. They foster collaboration among others. They do less controlling, allowing other people to be in greater control of their own work.

Great managers don't make things get done. Rather, they help establish the structures, conditions, and attitudes by which things get done. This requires active collaboration. To be collaborative means to be inside, be involved, and to distribute management beyond managers, so that responsibility flows to whomever can take initiative and pull things together. This new style of managing is really about creating self-managing teams.

Nurturing Success

Why do many managers understand so much about employees and organisational performance, and work so hard, yet do so much that ends up undermining performance? Knowing what to do isn't enough. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton studied this phenomena for their book, The Knowing-Doing Gap. Managers spend time fighting internal battles and end up with little time for external competitors. Worse, they spend their energies competing for internal recognition instead of getting results with customers and products.

Technology, marketplace and social changes have trained and developed today's managers with ever more sophisticated resources. Most managers know more about how to collaborate, how to communicate, how to make decisions and how to get stuff done than their predecessors ever did. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the tools, structures, and support they get are still designed to ensure success of the corporation - not necessarily theirs.

Companies that wish to retain top managers with the crucial skills and extraordinary talents so necessary to sustaining business results will have to look upon their managers as important resources - and nurture them accordingly.

Because the manager is looked upon as the single biggest factor for retaining employees (Gallup Organisation), nurturing good managers is even more crucial for building great companies.

One of the best ways to nurture good people is to provide them with development opportunities through professional coaching. Having a coach is a good way to develop stronger managerial skills and build resilience in a manager. Those companies that provide coaching to their managers see results in performance, not only in the manager but also in the manager's people.

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Resources

Bossidy, L.. & Charan, R. (2004). Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right. Crown Business Books.

Bruch, H. & Ghoshal, S. (2004). A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results, and Stop Wasting Time. Harvard Business School Press.

Buckingham, M. & Coffman, C. (1999). First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently. Simon & Schuster.

Collins, J. (2002). Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don't. Harper Collins.

Collins, J. & Porras, J. (2002). Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. Harper Business Essentials.

Gardner, H. (2004). Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Mind. Harvard Business School Press.

Gosling, J. & Mintzberg, H. (November 2003). "The Five Minds of a Manager." Harvard Business Review.

Kouzes, J. & Posner, B. (2002). The Leadership Challenge. Jossey-Bass Wiley.

Mintzberg, H. (March-April 1990). "The Manager's Job: Folklore and Fact." Harvard Business Review.

Moss Kanter, R. (2003). Best Practice: Ideas and Insights from the World's Foremost Business Thinkers. Perseus Publishing.

Pfeffer, J. & Sutton, R.I. (2000). The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action. Harvard Business School Press.