Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet” — Henry Mintzberg

MANAGEMENT has been receiving a bad rap. Many shiny-eyed interviewees for even a junior management position must now be able to tell the difference between a leader and a manager, and then be able to convince the interviewer that they are the quintessential leaders. Woe to the candidate who is merely a manager!

Consistent with that view, it is now difficult to find a course in management principles in MBA programmes — rather, you will find courses on leadership, all carrying varying labels. Subsumed in these courses you may find some coverage of management principles. And so the leader is revered and extolled, while the manager has become the ugly stepsister.

The leader is described as the visionary, who looks beyond the challenging mountain, to where we can be, and should strive to be. While the manager is said to merely seek to maintain the status quo, thus causing the term to be viewed in a negative light.

Henry Mintzberg, currently said to be one of the greatest management thinkers around, declared, “The idea that leaders are separate from managers means that if you are leading without managing, you don’t know what is going on. And if you are managing without leading, you’re pretty uninspiring.”

Another cold reality is that it is well known to those who read management literature that many times (about 35 per cent of the time) workers leave an organisation because they are unhappy with management. That and other fundamental facts demonstrate the critical importance of management.

The current controversy revolving around leadership versus management need not be an issue. According to Gary Yukl in his textbook on leadership, research has shown generally that to be a successful manager, one has to be able to demonstrate good leadership! Actually, it can be said that leading should be a critical role that should be performed by managers.

What is management?

According to Robbins and Coulter in their textbook on management, “A manager is someone who coordinates and oversees the work of other people so that organisational goals can be accomplished.” Management therefore in its pure sense is being able to get others to do the work.

However, the role of the manager has evolved into a complex, psychological process and is totally different from when management theory was in its embryonic stages in the early 1900s. Today, the manager has to be able to manage in a world of complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty, while having to contend with an exponential increase in the pace of change. Also, you are managing people who have options, and less commitment to their workplace. Not to mention having to deal with the new generation of young people dubbed the “millennials”.

I remember speaking to a teller supervisor who needs to have tellers in place prior to the 8:30 am bank opening time. She lamented how the young tellers would sometimes casually saunter in at 8:45 and looked quite surprised when she made a fuss about the lateness!

History of management theory

The primary roles of a manager were defined by Henri Fayol back in the early 1900s, around the same time when Frederick Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management. The roles identified by Fayol included planning, organising, coordinating and controlling. Mintzberg has commented cynically that the field of management is supposed to be so progressive, yet this classic view of management has persisted for over half a century! He indicated that the prevailing notion that a manager calmly sits in his/her office and plans, organises, and controls, is far from the truth! He then carried out his own research and in 1975 published the article The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact. In this article he indicated that managers typically carried out 10 managerial roles categorised into three areas.

Interpersonal roles

According to Mintzberg, the interpersonal roles carried out by a manager are: figurehead, leading and liaison. These are the roles that involve people and include performing ceremonial and other roles simply because you are the manager. Of note is the role of leading, where Mintzberg demonstrates that this is a key interpersonal role.

In the second and third publications of the MBA Forum, I reviewed the area of leadership, and demonstrated the importance of this role. The liaison role is also very important, as the manager is the connector or bridge to external parties in other departments if you are a department head, or outside the organisation if you are higher on the organisation chart. Failure to carry out this role adequately may leave your employees feeling isolated, or actually being left out, or forgotten by the external parties.

Informational roles

The informational roles are: monitor, disseminator and spokesperson. Since the manager is the key person that will receive information from the external parties, they need to complete the loop by disseminating the information to staff. Not only should the manager pass information to members of the group, but should also represent the group, whether in their presence, or (especially) away from their presence. The manager should be a buffer between members of the group and external parties.

Decisional roles

The roles include: entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator and negotiator. Here we see an example of the variety of roles a manager is called upon to perform. As the entrepreneur, the manager must be the initiator of change to processes and other aspects of the jobs performed by his/her staff and the work environment. And if there is a sudden crisis of whatever nature, the manager just by reason of having that position, is expected to handle the situation as the disturbance handler.

By default, all resources coming to the manager’s unit do so via the manager, who then must allocate those resources to staff. Finally, as indicated before, the manager must represent his/her unit. This also involves negotiating to obtain the aforementioned resources.

In the next publication of the MBA Forum, we will rely on Gary Yukl’s text, Leadership in Organizations, to look at some guidelines to assist us to be better managers.

Dr Kenroy Wedderburn, JP, is a part-time lecturer on the MBA programme at the University of Technology, Jamaica. Send your e-mails to drkwedderburn@gmail.com.