Art of Managing E-Book

John Hendry

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 412

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

This focused, practical guide to key management principles will help managers at all levels to function successfully. Based on the idea that managing is more about common sense and the ability to treat employees with humanity rather than the need to have specialist knowledge and expertise, this book is a 'must read'. In Part One, the author analyses the role of the manager; in Part Two, he sets out fifty guidelines based on easy-to-remember maxims or principles; and in Part Three, he provides an introduction to the essential techniques and tools required. Written by an experienced author with a strong track record of successfully teaching management at business school and university, this book is an invaluable self-help guide that will help all managers, whether new to the role or more seasoned, to hone and improve their skills.

Leseprobe

ROBERT HALE

First published in 2016 by Robert Hale,

an imprint of The Crowood Press Ltd,

Ramsbury, Marlborough Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

www.halebooks.com

This e-book first published in 2016

© John Hendry 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 71982 054 0

The right of John Hendry to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction

1    The Manager’s Job

2    Aspects of Managing

3    Fifty Guidelines for Effective Managing

4    Budgets, Costs and Financial Viability

5    Performance

6    Planning

7    People

Glossary: Essential Jargon

Index

Preface and Acknowledgements

Much of my career has been back to front, and when I first taught management, at the London Business School in the mid-1980s, I had neither studied it myself nor acquired much in the way of management experience. I have since rectified both failings, but meanwhile I had the great good fortune to be allocated an office next-door to Charles Handy. Charles had both practised and studied managing, and after a brief interlude in academe was to become, arguably, our best writer on the challenges it poses. With characteristic kindness he took me under his wing and taught me several important lessons. First, that we all manage, all the time, whether or not we are called ‘managers’. Second, that the best way to learn is by doing, and the best aid to learning is responsibility. Third, that contrary to the teaching of many of our colleagues, the key to good management lay less in specialist knowledge and expertise, and more in common sense, thoughtfulness, imagination and the simple ability to treat people as people, and to treat them well.

I was also lucky in that one of the first managers whose work I seriously studied was Sir Peter Parker, best known for his enlightened chairmanship of British Railways in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who followed very much the same principles. Both he and Charles were great enthusiasts, as indeed am I, for management theory, and both were pioneers in the advancement of management education. But both were, first and foremost, deeply caring and thoughtful human beings, who believed passionately in people’s innate ability and creativity. They thought that management should be taken much more seriously than it then was in Britain, and that formal management education was a way of exciting people to take it seriously. But they saw such an education as helping people to ask questions – not as giving them answers. Coming from relatively privileged backgrounds, they also saw particular importance in the advancement of elite management education, at places like the London Business School, as a way of getting management taken seriously in the upper reaches of society, where it had traditionally been despised and neglected. But they were not at all elitist themselves. Both believed firmly, on the basis of their own management experience, not only that people from all backgrounds should be valued and respected as equals, but also that they were typically much more talented and capable than they were given credit for.

In the years that followed I discovered that the Handy–Parker model was the exception rather than the rule. As management education expanded, it came to be seen as a substitute for real managing, not as an aid. And as people sang the praises of leadership and entrepreneurship, the art of managing continued to be neglected. I also found, however, that when the model was adopted, in whatever kind or size of organization and at whatever level, the outcome was almost always positive. Moreover, people didn’t have to be that brilliant at managing to make it work. With some effort and attention, a bit of thought, a bit of common sense and a bit of compassion, almost anybody could manage pretty well. I could even do it myself!

This book is dedicated to all those people, wherever they may be, in whatever circumstances and whatever walk of life, who try their honest best to manage. It’s not always easy, and it’s rarely appreciated as much as it should be, but managing matters. It matters a lot.

I am particularly conscious of the teachers, colleagues and bosses, friends and relations, who have had the unenviable task of trying to manage me. Some have been superb, and I have learnt a lot from them, as well as from the many, many managers I’ve taught, advised or observed in action. A very few of the colleagues and bosses have been quite awful, and I’ve learnt a lot from them too, about how managing badly or without good intentions can literally ruin people’s lives. Again, managing really matters.

I’m also very grateful to the people who have found themselves subject, in one way or another, to my own efforts at managing. It goes without saying that I have not always managed to manage in accordance with my own advice, and reading back over the book I still wince slightly when particular guidelines bring to mind the things I could and should have done better. But I smile, too, at the kindness and understanding people have shown in such cases.

For making this book possible, I should like especially to thank Dee, my wife, for her usual tolerance of a writer’s antisocial habits, and Robert Hale Ltd, who approached me out of the blue just when I was formulating the idea and have courageously stuck by the outcome. Finally, I should also like to pay my respects to one of the great managers of the twentieth century, Adrian Cadbury, who died just as this manuscript was being submitted. Chairman of the well-known chocolate company, managing director and chairman of Cadbury Schweppes, and pioneer of corporate governance and ethical business, Adrian combined firm management and a hardheaded approach to business with true humility and exemplary humanity. He was a lesson to us all.

London, October 2015

Introduction

This is a book for anyone whose job includes some element of management, which I shall define in practical terms as exercising responsibility for the work of other people. You may or may not be called a manager. The task of managing goes under a variety of names; job titles can be misleading or uninformative, and management may be just a small part of what you do. Even if it is only a small part, however, it is likely to be an important one, and the challenges it poses are quite different from those posed by other kinds of work.

People come to managing from a wide variety of backgrounds and with a wide variety of experience, training, ambition and expectations. For many self-employed tradespeople and professionals, for the owners of small firms and even for people promoted to head up specialist teams or departments, the task of managing assistants or administrators may be an unwanted hassle. Chefs, for example, love to cook, but with the freedom to cook their own way comes the responsibility of managing a kitchen, and many find that irksome.

Even where a management role is much more welcome, as a recognition of achievement and promotion up the corporate ladder, it can be very daunting. People appointed to their first management position can often feel lost or confused, with no clear job description, no fixed hours and, in many cases, little or no training or guidance. They want to succeed, but they don’t know how to go about it, or what’s expected of them. A management role can also tear you away from your colleagues: even though your values and motives remain unchanged, you suddenly become part of ‘them’ (‘the management’) rather than ‘us’.

In larger organizations, many people appointed to management roles will have received some training, either through attending a business school or through some equivalent in-house courses. This is at best a mixed blessing, however, for while business schools can teach you all sorts of fascinating facts and theories, that won’t necessarily help you to manage any better. Indeed, it can easily do more harm than good. Management theories start out from assumptions about human behaviour and motivation. They then derive prescriptions for how to manage, based on those assumptions. This would be all very well if the assumptions were anything like realistic, but they’re not. They’re very simplistic and in many contexts quite inappropriate – and so are the prescriptions based upon them.

This is not to say that the study of management theories is worthless. So long as we keep in mind their limitations, they can give us all sorts of valuable insights, both to the challenges of management and to the way those challenges are addressed, especially in large organizations. The procedures and practices of many large organizations are based on management theories developed by academics and consultants and taught in business schools, and we can only understand those procedures and practices if we know something about the theories behind them. Whatever the business schools might claim, however, management is much more of an art than a science.

In an earlier book, Management: A Very Short Introduction, I tried to survey the literature on management theory in such a way as to make it useful and interesting to practising managers, as well as to business school students. But you don’t need to know about management theory to be a good manager, and in this book the focus is entirely on the practice or art of managing. The guidance offered is informed by theory and makes use of the many lessons learned by management consultants and academics over the years. But it is mainly based on common sense, experience and the kinds of principles that will reap rewards, if carefully applied, in any context in which we have to make a success out of living and working together.

Good management brings with it all sorts of benefits. It benefits the managers themselves, by making their work more rewarding, advancing their careers and giving them a platform for growth and development. It benefits the people being managed, by making their work more rewarding and more enjoyable. We all work most effectively when we enjoy what we are doing, when going into the workplace lifts up our spirits rather than dampening them. And, of course, it benefits the organization, through improved productivity all round. My main focus in this book is on you, the manager, but everything here applies equally to any managers who report to you, and to any of your staff who may be managers in the future. Many of the skills that make up the art of managing can only be applied through managing. But many others can be developed in any job, and the attitudes and values that underpin them can be developed in any context whatsoever, at any time.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first part (Chapters 1 and 2), I explore the manager’s job: what is managing and what does it entail? A central theme of the book is that management is as much about coping as controlling – like when we say, in the midst of domestic chaos, ‘I’m managing’. It’s also as much about leadership as about administration – and as much about administration as about leadership. Both are important parts of the job. Two other important elements are trouble-shooting, or sorting things out when they go wrong, and coaching, or helping the people who work under you to work more effectively, and perhaps to become managers themselves.

In the second part (Chapter 3), I set out fifty guidelines for effective managing, each in the form of a simple principle or maxim and a short account of how and why it matters. Some of these principles can be traced back hundreds or thousands of years. Some reflect the wisdom built up in more recent years, as management jobs have proliferated and the challenges posed have been systematically analysed and explored. Some are drawn from my own experience of managing, helping others to manage and mining the experience of successful managers for the benefit of my students. These guidelines are not always easy to apply, and you shouldn’t be put off if you find some of them too ambitious or too idealistic. They are things to work at rather than things to be achieved, and if you can only work at them a little bit at a time, that’s fine. Start with what comes most easily and set yourself tougher challenges when you’re ready.

In the third part (Chapters 4–7), I give a very short introduction to the essential tools and techniques of managing. This comes closer to the kind of content you will find in a management textbook, but with the important difference that the sole criterion for inclusion is practical utility. You can find many more complete guides, along the lines of ‘100 essential tools for managers’, but the fact is that many tools and techniques sold as essential are not really very useful at all, or are much more useful to specialist analysts than to practising managers. And some of the most useful are passed over, either because they’re too basic or because they don’t have a catchy label and nobody has tried to ‘sell’ them.

This part of the book is the most technically demanding, and if you’ve had no exposure to management tools and techniques before, you may find parts of it hard to follow. Again, don’t worry. Everything covered is potentially useful, but none of it is strictly necessary. You may find some things here that you want to learn more about, and if that’s the case, you can go to Wikipedia and other internet sources, or to standard management textbooks, for fuller explanations. In other cases you might just lodge in the back of your mind that there’s something there that might come in useful someday, but not worry about it too much for the time being.

Alongside the main text of Chapters 1–3, I have included a series of boxed examples of managing drawn from the experiences of ordinary managers. I have also drawn on these same examples to explain and illustrate some of the tools covered in Chapters 4–7. Managers are often unsung heroes, and to take examples from the management experiences of those who are known for their entrepreneurial prowess, or for their financial or political success, would be misleading. The managers I have used here are fictional composites, made up from some of those I have worked with as teacher, consultant or colleague. In that sense they are not ‘real’ but their situations and experiences are very real and they help to put some flesh on the issues raised.

CHAPTER 1

The Manager’s Job

ARE YOU A MANAGER?

Some managers are called managers. You may be a shop manager, a floor manager or an office manager; a marketing manager, a sales manager or a production manager; a general manager, a managing partner or a managing director; or just a plain manager. In all these cases it’s pretty evident that you are a manager.

Most managers, however, are not formally labelled as such. Supervisors of manual and clerical staff are conventionally denied managerial status, just as in the armed forces, corporals, sergeants and other non-commissioned officers are denied full officer status. But both supervisors and sergeants are clearly responsible for managing the people under their supervision. Hospital matrons occupy a similar position. Also, sitting below the formal management of an organization but very much involved in managing are many people who combine limited managerial responsibilities with their regular, non-management jobs. The current fashion is to call these people ‘leaders’, as in team leaders, project leaders or, in education, subject-group leaders, all of which is nicely ironic considering that many writers on leadership place it above ‘mere’ management.

A common catch-all job title is ‘executive’ or, in the civil service, ‘executive officer’. This is sometimes used as a term to distinguish professional or graduate jobs from those requiring lower level qualifications, so that junior executives may have less managerial responsibilities than senior clerical or semi-skilled staff. But most executives are managers for at least part of their jobs, and ‘executive programmes’ in business schools are generally programmes for practising managers.

Higher up the organizational hierarchy, managers may be called ‘directors’ or ‘vice-presidents’, or hold one of the many officer ranks in the armed forces, police and other services. We also find ‘heads’ and ‘chiefs’ of one kind or another: section head, head of department, head teacher, chief accountant, chef and so on. And we also find deputy directors and deputy heads, many of whom share in the managerial responsibilities of their principals.

Finally, there are the many self-employed tradesmen, professionals and owners of small businesses who employ assistants of one kind or another: secretaries, receptionists, apprentices, accountants, employees in their own trades and professions, and so on. As we noted in the Introduction, management is not always a welcome part of a person’s responsibilities, but it is a necessary and important one. No business or professional practice will flourish if it is not well-managed.

What all managerial roles have in common is some responsibility for the work of other people. This may just be a kind of overseeing but, even at a junior level, it usually involves some scheduling and allocation of duties. It typically involves helping people to learn their jobs and to do them better, monitoring and feedback, appraisal, and some contribution to hiring and firing and promotion decisions. It also involves some element of planning and of dealing with things when something happens to prevent them from working as planned: responding to illness and absence, to unexpected events, and to mistakes, and stepping in when someone is unable to deal with a situation – with a difficult or abusive customer, say.

This is just a beginning, of course. Managing can involve much more and, when done well, it does involve much more. But it is enough to start us off. If your job entails any of these things, to any extent at all – you are a manager.

ARE YOU MANAGING?

You are a manager, but are you managing? This question can be taken in two ways. In the context of a book on management, the most obvious meaning is, ‘Are you engaging in managerial activities?’; but in any other context the meaning would be more like, ‘Are you coping?’. It’s a question we might ask someone with a leg in plaster, or an elderly person living alone, or a young mother with twin toddlers. Similarly, if we ask someone, in the usual way, how they are, and we get the response, ‘Oh, I’m managing’, we don’t imagine that they’ve got a new job or taken some kind of managerial approach to the housework and shopping. We take it that they’re finding things difficult but are ‘managing to cope’, one way or another.

Again, if we ask someone, ‘How are you managing?’ or ‘How do you manage?’, we don’t normally expect to hear about the tools and techniques of management. A typical response would be, ‘I get by’, ‘I cope’ or some other vague reassurance, but if we do elicit anything more specific, it will probably be about the aids that help them get from one day to the next: ‘People are very helpful’ or ‘Lucy gives me a hand in the mornings.’

This everyday meaning of managing is not something you’ll find mentioned in most management courses or textbooks. Management there is all about planning and control. In practice, however, coping and control are just two ends of a spectrum. And just as managing in everyday life always entails a bit of both, so does managerial work. To assume that it could never get beyond coping would be defeatist. But to imagine that it was all about controlling would be to enter a world of fantasy. You must always keep both ends of the spectrum in mind.

We can get a further insight into this by thinking about how we use the word ‘control’. To control things is to make sure they happen in the way you planned and intended, and this is certainly something that managers seek to do, even if they rarely achieve it. But as well as controlling, in an active sense, we also talk more passively about ‘being in control’ or ‘staying in control’, and this often carries with it a hint – or more than a hint – that things might easily slip out of control. It is somewhere between swimming strongly and just staying afloat, between walking the dog and being walked by it, and it is where managers often find themselves. In such a situation, the first priority is to master the current or secure your footing. Only then can you think about getting anywhere.

If controlling represents the glamorous, macho side of managing, administration represents its more mundane and supposedly boring side. Many writers have distinguished management, seen as routine administration, from leadership, seen as something far grander, far more glamorous and far harder to achieve. It is leaders we turn to for direction and inspiration, they suggest; managers just keep the wheels turning.

When we think of leaders, we tend to think of people in particular roles, for which this distinction makes sense. In politics, for example, there is a clear demarcation between the roles of elected politicians, who frame policies and sell those policies to the public, and salaried civil servants, who execute those policies. The politicians are, by necessity, in the public eye, and those who become known for their leadership do so on the basis of ‘leadership’ qualities that are evident to everyone. The civil servants, in contrast, are anonymous. In other contexts too, leadership is generally associated with some kind of popular appeal. The label comes with glamour attached – so much so, indeed, that we almost never talk of a failed leader. You can be a manager and fail, but if you fail in an attempt to lead, you just don’t merit being called a leader at all.

It is easy to see, then, how the distinction between leadership and management might be made, but in most contexts it is deeply misleading. If we define leadership as a role or activity, rather than as an achievement, all managers have to lead. It is an essential part of the job. And anyone whose job includes an element of leadership is almost certainly a manager. Routine administration, meanwhile, is also an essential part of any manager’s – or leader’s – job, and in no way an inferior part. Some managers do find it boring; others find it very rewarding. But if it is not done both effectively (so that what needs to be done is done) and efficiently (so that other things can get done too), then things are likely to fall apart.

Somewhere between leadership and administration, and entailing elements of both, lie two other facets of managing that are worth noting explicitly. One is trouble-shooting. However effective your administration, things will go wrong. The people who work for you will make mistakes, or fall out, or be incapacitated by illness or personal problems. You will make mistakes. Your bosses will make mistakes. Customers will make unexpected demands, suppliers will fail to deliver and so on. As a manager, you will sometimes have to take charge and sort things out.

The other facet, often neglected, is coaching. An important part of any manager’s job is helping the people who work for you to do their jobs better and to gain the skills and understanding they will need to progress their own careers. To some extent this should be part of your routine. If people are trying to improve and learn, they will need someone to share their issues and problems with, on a regular basis. If they are not trying to improve and learn, they will need someone to keep encouraging them to do so. You should also make use of particular situations, however, such as minor problems or one-off projects, to find ways of stretching people’s capabilities and supporting them in the process.

A final facet of management to be covered in this part of the book is accountability. As a manager you will generally be held accountable, at least in part, for the work of the people you manage. Sometimes you will be held to account. You will have to give an account to your superiors of why something went wrong or why a performance target was missed, including why it happened on your watch and what you will do to improve things in the future. Even when you are not called to account, however, you will remain accountable and this will necessarily impact on other aspects of your job.

This applies most obviously to professionals, like doctors, accountants or solicitors, who are very strictly accountable, both legally and professionally, for anything done under their nominal supervision, and who have to take care appropriately. It evidently applies also to the owners of small businesses. In other contexts the accountability may be much less explicit, but good managers always assume it’s there. They act, in this respect, as if they were professionals.

WHAT ARE YOU MANAGING?

The words ‘managing’ and ‘management’ derive from a Latin term for the art of handling a horse: getting it to go where you want to, at the speed you want it to – to walk, trot, canter, gallop, jump, turn or stand still – and to execute the kind of movements you see in dressage events. This was extended over time to handling weapons, boats and eventually people, and it is the origin of the connotation of control. An expert rider seeks to control a horse, not just to stay seated.

Managing a horse is not easy, but it has at least one advantage when compared with the kind of activity we’re talking about here: you know what you are managing. It’s a horse and, in particular, the physical movements of the horse. Managing an office, or a department, or a business or a project is evidently more complicated. There are likely to be many end-products of various different kinds: physical, financial and psychological. To achieve them you will need to manage, in some sense, people’s thoughts, feelings and perceptions, as well as their actions, the interactions between different people, and the interactions between people and physical and IT processes.

We can get a handle on this complexity by dividing what is to be managed into two categories on each of two dimensions. In the first place, we can distinguish between managing what goes on inside the unit for which you are responsible and managing what happens across its boundaries, whether with other units in the organization or with customers, suppliers and other external stakeholders. In the second place we can distinguish between the task of managing people and that of managing information.

Neither of these distinctions is clear-cut, but making them helps us to focus clearly on particular aspects of what is being managed that might otherwise be neglected. For example, some managers turn their units into tightly bonded teams with strong cultures and high levels of loyalty and ownership. This can be great for building performance within the unit, but it can make things very difficult for the other units with which it has to interact. And it is all too easy to attribute blame for these difficulties, quite unfairly, to the other units. So a manager building a strong team has to attend very carefully to how that team interacts with others. Similarly, in reverse, managers who focus strongly on how their units can serve others, whether inside or outside the organization, and on what they can pull in from others – both valid and valuable objectives – can easily lose sight of the dynamics of the units themselves.

In the case of the other distinction, the tasks of managing people and managing information obviously overlap, but the skills required can be very different. So if you need to give people information – about the organization, its environment or their own performance – you need to be very careful how you give it. All facts are prone to interpretation and what you present as an opportunity may be received as a nuisance or a threat. If the personal side isn’t managed carefully, the simplest of facts can become the basis for wild and unhelpful speculation. On the other hand, managers who focus strongly on interpersonal relationships risk holding back information that is actually needed, when they think it might be troubling.

When it comes to managing across organizational boundaries, again, both people and information skills matter. Some managers take the view that so long as they do a technically good job, it doesn’t matter how well or how badly they get on with their colleagues and superiors. They are wrong! Quite apart from the impacts on their own careers, poor interpersonal skills on the part of one manager are costly for everyone else, and so for the organization as a whole.

Some managers focus all their effort, when managing upwards or outwards, on the interpersonal side, and neglect the core task, which is to act as an information gateway. A unit relies on its manager to monitor, sort, filter and pass on information about the world outside it, in particular about where the organization is headed, what the priorities are and what is expected of it. The rest of the organization relies on the manager for information about the unit, about the challenges it is facing, the support it might need from elsewhere and the contributions it might make. Again this has to be filtered, sorted and presented in a concise and useful way. All this entails people skills, as well as information skills. A lot of information is conveyed informally and, to keep abreast, managers need to be good networkers. But they need to network for a purpose, not to let it dominate their working lives.

HOW ARE YOU MANAGING?

The problem of how to manage is also much simpler in the case of a horse than in the case of an organization. You manage a horse through physical contact and pressure, systematically applied. This is not to be recommended for managing people, and won’t get you very far in managing information either. To a very large extent, managers manage through the much more complex medium of language. They speak and listen, write and read. They also think. And they sometimes act.

To a business school student, management is largely a question of thinking. Management students are presented with problems and instructed in the frameworks and techniques with which to analyse them. The challenge is to think through the problem and come up with a solution, at which point the exercise comes to an end, as it must, because they are learning in a classroom and not in the real world. Real managers don’t have the luxury of stopping at that point. They have to implement their solutions. Indeed they often have to start implementing before they’ve had much chance of working out what the solution will be. But they still have to think. Indeed good managers think rather a lot. This is not easily done.

It is almost impossible to find serious thinking time during the regular working day, which is filled with meetings, phone calls, texts, emails and routine tasks. So if thinking is to be done at all, it has to be in time specially set aside for it, which is rare, or away from work: in cars, trains or planes, in bed or in the bath. When managers do try to think, moreover, it’s often not very productive, partly because they are too tired or their minds are too cluttered, and partly because, while they may have picked up some tools and techniques from business school, they’ve never learnt how to use them. We shall turn to tools and techniques in Chapters 4–7. Until then, the key message is simply that thinking matters. Even if they can’t make the time for systematic analysis, or have to delegate that to someone else, good managers are always thinking about what they are doing, why they are doing it and what the consequences are.

A common caricature of managers is that they don’t do anything themselves, but just tell other people what to do. If telling doesn’t count as doing, then there’s some truth in that. For what managers mainly do (having thought about it first) is ‘tell’ in one way or another, by speaking or writing. They tell people what the situation is, what needs to be done and why. They pass information to their staff, to their bosses and between themselves. They are, very largely, communicators. We must remember, however, that communication is as much about listening as it is about speaking, as much about reading as it is about writing. So the manager as speaker needs to be conscious of what the listener is hearing, which might be quite different from what was intended. And you can only tell people how to address a situation if you have first listened carefully while they tell you what the situation is, and how they are predisposed to act.

Managers don’t only think, speak and listen; they also do things. But they do relatively little as managers, and when they do, the action itself is often less important than the messages it conveys. When managers act, their staff notice. Sometimes this is the whole point of the action. Managers demonstrate, through taking action themselves, how things should be done. Sometimes, however, managers act without properly thinking and undermine their own instructions and advice. Actions speak louder than words; so, however well-chosen your words, you need to make sure that your actions conform.

In summary, managers manage both what goes on inside their units and what happens at the boundaries. They manage both people and information, and they do it by thinking, speaking, listening and acting. With this basic structure in place, we can now look more closely at the different aspects of managing already identified: coping, controlling, administration, trouble-shooting, coaching, leading and accountability.

Example 1: Managing What and How

Now that we have a basic idea of what managers manage and how, it’s time to meet some managers.

George is a branch manager of Growlers, a regional garage and car dealership business with ten branches. He directly manages a small team comprising the branch sales and service managers, a workshop supervisor and an office manager, and he has overall responsibility for the performance of the branch.

George’s job is typical of lower level managerial jobs in that it combines managing with more hands-on activity. It is also quite varied. He covers for his bottom level managers when they are sick or on holiday, and likewise for two of the other branch managers. He authorizes the buying in of used cars and demonstrators, and sometimes negotiates sales’ deals. He is the point of contact both for his own head office and for the marketing representatives of the car manufacturer represented by his branch, and is often off-site. His core role, though, is to manage the customer experience in the branch, as measured through post-sale and post-service surveys, and here he uses the information available, both formally and informally, to manage the people.

Melanie has built her career in nursing and is now a matron, working on the maternity wards of the Mid-County General Hospital. She manages a team of a dozen nurses in the delivery suites and the post-natal ward, being responsible both for their day-to-day work and for their professional development. This entails managing them directly but, since hospitals operate 24/7, and she can’t be there all the time, she also has to manage through her lead nurses. Moreover, Melanie is also responsible for her ward area more generally: for ensuring cleanliness, infection control and so on. Since this relies on cleaners, maintenance staff, etc., who are not part of her own unit, she has to manage important parts of the wards through these people’s own managers.

With links to patients, administrators and clinicians, matrons are key figures in hospitals and, according to her job description, Melanie should be liaising with just about everybody in the hospital, from cleaners to doctors and from other matrons to facilities’ managers – not to mention at least half a dozen people in the Foundation Trust, which governs another two hospitals, as well as hers. In theory, much of this can be done through sophisticated information systems, and much of Melanie’s time is inevitably spent at the computer. But she knows from experience that not all the information gets fed in accurately, or makes sense, or gets looked at, and that face-to-face relationships are essential if the hospital as a whole is to do the best for its patients. So, in Melanie’s case, managing people and managing information, managing through people and managing through information, managing her unit and managing the interfaces with other units, are all important and all fit tightly together.

As an example of a more senior manager, consider Ed, the managing director of a subsidiary division of Eagle Engineering, a general engineering and instrumentation company. Ed manages a manufacturing business with about 200 employees, including production facilities (a factory), product development, sales and accounts. HR, IT and other functions are managed from the parent company headquarters. Ed is responsible for a team of specialist managers covering the different parts of his business – a factory manager, a product development manager, a sales manager and so on – and on a day-to-day basis he manages largely through them, ensuring that their activities are properly informed and coordinated, and helping them to implement the strategies and policies that have been developed, with his help, by a team at the corporate headquarters. Both in people and information terms he is the gateway between the business and the wider corporation, and his management tasks reflect this. He reports in both directions: upwards, on the performance of the business and of his specialist managers; downwards, on strategy and incentive policies. He also meets regularly with union representatives, officiates at the factory Christmas party, and represents the firm in local business and community groups.

CHAPTER 2

Aspects of Managing

MANAGING AS COPING

Our first task on encountering any new situation is normally to cope. We may not use the word – we are more likely to think in terms of control, but it is control in the sense of being more or less in control, not in the sense of actively directing things. We begin by making sure we have control of ourselves: avoiding panic, not running away, not being frozen on the spot, like a rabbit in the headlights, unable to do anything. We then move on to achieving a stable footing, recognizing and coping with the environment, as well as with ourselves. Only once we have achieved that do we generally move towards active control and direction.

In this respect, management situations are much like any other situations. When you enter a management role or a new management role, when you take on new responsibilities or have them thrust upon you, your first challenge is to control yourself, to make sure that you are personally fit for action. With luck this will happen very quickly, but new responsibilities can be daunting. It is not unusual for first-time managers to begin by wandering around aimlessly, not knowing what they should be doing, or to keep doing their old jobs, clinging to the security those offer rather than facing up to the new challenge.

The challenge of coping in this most basic fashion can also arise from external events. You may face a crisis in your home life that is nothing to do with work but that takes you over, fills your thoughts and prevents you from functioning as you normally would. Or you may suffer from a disabling illness, such as depression or bipolar disorder, that can be kept under control most of the time, but that becomes a problem at times of stress, whether this arises from home or from work.

In circumstances such as these, you have a responsibility as a manager to limit any harm to your organization and especially to the people who work for you or depend directly on you. In the case of a crisis at home, you will quite rightly want to give priority to your family, and in the case of illness, it will be in everybody’s interests for you to prioritize getting better. But if you fail even to cope at work, in the sense of keeping control of yourself, the demands on your colleagues will be massive. And even this basic level of coping is only sustainable for a very short period, as, while some things might get done, others certainly won’t.

Fortunately, such circumstances are relatively rare, and assuming that you are more or less in control of yourself, the next step is to cope well, to be at least vaguely in control of yourself and your environment. We often talk of people in a new job ‘finding their feet’, by which we really mean finding their footholds: not just standing up but walking around, without falling down on the job.

This means getting the things done that need to be done: meeting your deadlines, communicating essential information, not letting people down and so on. It means not omitting to do anything essential, even if, in a more positive sense, you don’t actually achieve very much. If you think of a single mother trying to ‘manage’ with several small children, the analogy is not a bad one.

Of course, as a manager you will want to go beyond just coping, even coping well, and the purpose of this book is to help you do that. But in practice, many managers don’t. The Peter Principle, named after the humorous writer Laurence J. Peter, states that in a hierarchical bureaucracy, managers will be promoted to their level of incompetence. If you are good at a job, you get promoted and you keep getting promoted until you end up in a job that is beyond you, in which the most you can do is cope. The original intention may have been humorous, but sadly things do often work out that way. Few organizations have mechanisms whereby someone can be demoted, without great shame and blame, back to what they were best at. Cynics suggest that this is intentional. The Dilbert Principle, enunciated by another great humorist, the cartoonist Scott Adams, asserts that people are promoted to management because they are incompetent: the higher they are promoted, the less damage they are capable of doing. This one really is a joke, however: bad managers can do immense harm and the more senior they are, the further that harm can spread.

Good managers will not just resign themselves to coping and no more. But nor will they sacrifice the basics in order to do something more, if that means doing it badly. The positive response to finding yourself at, or beyond, the limits of your competence is to extend your competence. Be honest with yourself; seek advice, seek mentoring and build slowly. If, as a reader of this book, you find your work is largely about coping, turn to the guidelines and address them, not wholesale but two or three at a time (most cluster naturally into pairs and triplets). Work on them steadily. Put them into practice. Monitor your efforts and get feedback from colleagues. And if you think a possible promotion may be a step too far, don’t accept it, or accept it only with your reservations explicit and with arrangements in place for the support you will need.

MANAGING AS CONTROLLING

There are rather few managers in fiction, but one of the best known is actually called a controller: Sir Topham Hatt, the Fat Controller of the Thomas the Tank Engine series of children’s books. In real life, Sir Topham’s title would have been general manager, effectively the chief executive of a railway company or, after World War II, of a regional division of the nationalized British Railways.

As a manager, you will generally hope to do more than just be vaguely in control. You will hope to take control and actively direct the work of the unit for which you are responsible. The most obvious way of doing this is through the exercise of authority. In any hierarchical organization (and most organizations are hierarchical to at least some extent), people carry authority on account of their organizational status. There is a strong presumption that instructions coming from above will be followed, because that is the basis on which work is organized. Some people can also wield authority on the strength of their social status, their personal charisma or the respect in which they are held as individuals. The fictional Sir Topham embodies all of these: the chief executive of a hierarchical organization, a knight of the realm, a personally inspiring figure and a renowned engineer – which counted for a lot in a traditional railway company, even if it had nothing to do with the job in hand.

Authority is only part of the story, however, and it can be a liability, as well as an asset. It is only part of the story because it relates specifically to the managing of people and, as we have seen, you also need to be managing information. It can be a liability because it can lead to a manager’s advice and instructions being followed far too readily. Being a knight of the realm or a good engineer is not necessarily relevant to running a business. Charismatic managers inspire fervent and unquestioning loyalty, which can be very dangerous if the manager should take a wrong turning, or turn that loyalty to personal rather than organizational advantage. One of the most common problems faced by corporate chief executives is that they can’t even think aloud or float an idea without people taking it as an instruction and acting upon it.

Very rarely will good managers seek to control people in a strong sense. Some managers clearly do try to do this, either to gain personal power or through a strong conviction that they are right, or as a result of being carried away by the effects of charisma or status. Having experienced the power that control brings, they find that they rather like it. As a general rule, however, this kind of approach is neither ethical nor productive, and it does a lot of damage. In most organizations, the key to success is to get people to use their minds, to retain their critical faculties – not to question every instruction, which would be massively time and energy consuming, but to be able to question when necessary, and to apply the guidelines they receive from above in a thoughtful and intelligent way. Blind loyalty destroys this capacity.

There may, of course, be exceptional cases, such as in an extreme emergency, when you need to replicate the dynamics of an army in battle and secure people’s unconditional obedience. But that is very rarely necessary and it can be very dangerous in an organization that is not set up in the appropriate way. Indeed, even in the armed forces, obedience rests as much on trust, and the demonstrated trustworthiness of the officers, as it does on discipline.

You should not normally seek to strongly control people as a manager, but you should seek to direct them: to point them in the right direction, to guide them and to instruct them, both in the sense of teaching them how to do things and, sometimes, in the narrower sense of giving them instructions. (Remember that giving instructions is not quite the same as giving orders. Orders are peremptory and rarely appropriate in management. Instructions come with opportunities for clarification and explanation.) You will also seek to exercise control through people: encouraging and enabling them to be proactive rather than reactive, to anticipate opportunities and challenges, and to turn new developments to advantage, and winning their support and enthusiasm for change.

All this involves information. Good managers don’t control information either, in the sense of censoring it, but they do control information flows to make sure that the information needed is available, where it’s needed and when. Whether you are reporting on the work of your unit to superiors and peers, or reporting on the direction of the organization and other relevant developments to your unit, you will need, as a manager, to make sure that people have the information they need and, at the same time, that they are not swamped by information they don’t need. A mass of redundant information is no more helpful than a lack of information, so you need to exercise control over what is actively communicated and what is just made available for reference.