Managerial Work and the Importance of Managers: Part 2 - Defining Managers and What They Do

Last week I introduced my multi-part series on managerial work and managers. Hopefully, I provided ample evidence to support the idea that highly effective managers are critical to the organization's success, so the next logical question is how do I select and develop managers for greater effectiveness? Before we can do that, we need to address two fundamental questions: (1) What is a manager? and (2) What do managers do? 

What is a manager?

If I were to put 20 HR professionals in a room and ask them to define a manager, I imagine I would get a variety of responses. Some might say they are employees that are responsible for other employees, or they might define a manager by listing activities they engage in, such as doing reports, disciplining employees, or setting employee schedules. In order for us to really understand how to get the best managers, we need to all agree on a common definition of what a manager is. So, here is my proposed definition of a manager:

"A manager is someone that has the formal authority to coordinate and oversee the work of someone else for the purpose of accomplishing some organizational goal, such as producing and selling a product or service."

Thus, the term “manager” is applicable to any individual appointed to coordinate the work of others, from the first level supervisor to the CEO. That was easy enough.

What do managers do?

Defining what is a manager is more simple than defining what they do. The textbook answer to this question is they plan, organize, lead, and control. Those are pretty broad terms that can encompass a wide variety of duties, but generally they do a pretty good job summing up managerial work. Another perspective, proposed by Henry Mintzberg, a well renowned management scholar, suggests that the best way to define what they do is through the roles they perform. This is all nice, but if you had to sum it up in one sentence, what would you say? My take would be that managers are responsible to turn a disparate group of people in a work unit into a cohesive group that can effectively accomplish the work unit's goals. Managers take a chaotic work environment and give it some degree of stability so that work can be accomplished. (Okay, that was two sentences.)

So there you have it, what managers are and do. Now that we know what they are and what they are supposed to do, we can try and figure out how to select the best ones. But before we leave this topic, I have one last question to ask. How do managers differ from leaders, or do they? The popular literature abounds with books and articles on leadership, getting better leaders, the five steps to leadership success, etc. Are managers and leaders different?

Historically, no. Early management scholars used the terms interchangeably. The assumption was that a manager and a leader cannot be distinguished. We went through a period (and maybe we still are), however, where the two concepts were definitely distinguished from one another. Managers were people that "did things right" by maintaining stability and directing the day-to-day operations, and leaders were people that "did the right thing" by articulating a vision and setting the direction of the organization. From a practical standpoint, one can hardly make a clear distinction between the two. Who would want a manager that isn't at least a decent leader and who wants a leader that has no clue how to manage? All managers have leadership responsibilities and vice versa. The biggest distinction lies in which duties are more prominent, and this probably revolves around job level; the higher up in the organization you go, the more leadership responsibilities you take on and vice versa.

So a manager coordinates the work activities of others to accomplish organizational goals, and all managers have managerial and leadership responsibilities. Now we are ready to start addressing the question of how to select the most effective managers, which we will start working on next week. Until then . . .