Although management has been replaced by leadership, the former should be restored its proper place: front and centre. Henry Mintzberg expands this belief in this exclusive excerpt from his new book, simply titled Managing. He says we should be seeing managers as leaders, and leadership as management practiced well, addresses managerial families.
Tolstoy began his novel Anna Karenina with the immortal words, 'Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way'. And so it may be with managers and their organisational families: they may have an unlimited number of ways to screw up, with ever more fascinating ones being invented every day, but perhaps few by which to succeed.
The tales of two managers
Let me bring two sets of two managers into the picture. Liz's and Larry's problems were rather normal. Both were smart, well-educated, modern managers. They worked near each other in the same company, one heading a major staff group, the other a major line operation. Liz leapt; Larry lingered. One made decisions too quickly, so that they often had to be remade; the other had difficulty making decisions at all, or else made them in ambiguous ways.
The results were similar: people in their units felt excluded, confused, discouraged. Beyond their own units, into the rest of the organisation, Liz confronted while Larry connived. She often fought with her colleagues in the company - she knew better – but not with the CEO, to whom she was deferential. Larry, in contrast, was careful not to upset anyone, so he hesitated to challenge when necessary.
Each, by the way, would probably recognise the other in this description. But would they recognise themselves? I need to add that although their respective managerial families were not particularly happy, these managers were not failures. None of these flaws was fatal. Things got done. They just could have been done more effectively, and happily.
The second tale comes from a study we did some years ago of a daily newspaper in a small Quebec town. It was owned, in succession, by two men of inherited wealth who went on to become quite famous as owners of Canadian media. Their approaches to managing were almost diametrically opposed. The first cared about the town, where he grew up but no longer lived, but he was passive with regard to the newspaper and so let its problems fester. The other, who followed him, was active all right; he cared about squeezing as much cost as he could out of the newspaper before selling it for a profit at a much reduced state.
We concluded our study as follows: our tale of two Canadian tycoons is one of sharp contrasts in leadership. One was detached administratively but involved sentimentally; the other was detached sentimentally but involved administratively. One served the organisation well so long as it didn't have to adapt; the other served it well only while it was forced to adapt. The failings of the first brought in the second. In that sense they complemented each other, at least over time. But we are left wondering, in conclusion, if either (or both, in sequence) is what we really want in our society. Perhaps the message [of this study] is that healthy organisations and a healthy society needs leaders who both act and care.
I am not going to propose a definitive list of the causes of managerial failures. If you wish to have such a list, let me suggest in place of 'decisive', you put waffling, and in place of 'upbeat', 'downbeat'. Or else keep the qualities as they are, but consider overdoing each. For 'decisive', you can put 'hasty'; for 'upbeat', 'hyper'. Indeed, just take these qualities and apply them in the wrong context.
To quote Skinner and Sasser in a Harvard Business Review article: 'When the failure patterns [of managers] … are examined as a group, they are so numerous and so contradictory that they may seem frightening … Managers get involved in too much detail - or too little. They are too cautious or too bold. They are too critical or too accepting….They plan and analyse and procrastinate, or they blindly plunge ahead…without…analysis or plan.
I offer some general groups of failure, and within each resides a wide variety of possible disasters: personal failures, job failures, fit failures and success failures.'
Managing by Henry Mintzberg is available for £19.99 (Financial Times Prentice Hall).
