Management is more about communicating than controlling

Interested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon.

Mining engineer and business theorist Henri Fayol, in the early-1900s, described the task of managers as planning, organizing, co-ordinating and controlling. It seems on the surface an apt summary, but McGill University management professor Henry Mintzberg argues it’s actually a deceptive and wrong-headed one.

Each of the four words chosen – planning, organizing, co-ordinating and controlling – are essentially describing the same activity: Control. Yet Prof. Mintzberg’s classic 1970s study of five chief executives and his follow-up research over the decades found that managers struggle to control even their own demanding jobs.

That job, in his own capsule description, “entails communicating more than controlling, linking as much as leading and dealing as well as doing.” In his new book, Bust Those Management Myths, he dismisses Mr. Fayol’s viewpoint: “No wonder so many managers are called control freaks.”

Behind that notion of control, he notes, is a sense that managerial work is calm and collected. Certainly most of us would assume that is true in the executive suite, where hushed, thoughtful deliberations are presumably the order of the day. “The chief executives I observed met a steady stream of callers, from their arrival in the morning until their departure in the evening, with coffee breaks and lunches inevitably work related. As one put it to me, his work is ‘one damn thing after another,’” Prof. Mintzberg notes.

Managers at all levels, he adds, are held responsible for the success of what they manage, yet have no tangible mileposts to stop and say, “Now my job is finished, even for now.” The manager has to keep going, for fear otherwise things might suddenly come crashing down.

Most work in society involves specialization and concentration. An engineer can spend months designing a bridge. “Not so with managing. It is fragmented and constantly interrupted. Someone calls about a fire in a facility; next a few emails are scanned, then an assistant appears to inform about a legal challenge from a consumer group. Surprising, too, is that significant activities are interspersed with mundane ones in no particular pattern,” he writes.

And throughout, no matter what they are doing, managers are plagued by what they might do and what they must do.

“The pattern, pace and pressures of managing do not encourage the development of reflective planners. Rather, the job breeds adaptive information manipulators who prefer live, concrete action – dynamic, current, non-routine,” he says.

“It has been said that an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until finally they know everything about nothing. The manager’s problem is the opposite: Knowing less and less about more and more until finally they know nothing about everything.”

So control may be the instinct or desire – and the early 20^th Century theory – but it’s not the reality. Prof. Mintzberg also has little time for a powerful theory of this current century, which he dubs “the widespread myth of lofty leadership, that it is somehow better than mere management.”

People are told they must be leaders, not mundane managers, and he finds that terribly destructive of both leadership and management. “Managing and leading are two sides of the same job: Managers have to lead; leaders have to manage,” he stresses.

This myth traces back to business thinker Warren Bennis, who said leaders “do the right things” while managers “do things right.” Leaders take the long view and see the big picture, from on top; managers administer the consequences down below. Once we complained about being over-managed; now Prof. Mintzberg argues we are overled.

“Would you like to be managed by someone who doesn’t lead? That could be awfully discouraging. Well then, why would you want to be led by someone who doesn’t manage: They wouldn’t know what’s going on. Management is about rolling up your sleeves to find out what’s going on,’” he says.

That was part of the reason he refused for many years – while on staff at a school of management – to teach MBA students. The programs, which can take in students who have not had much workplace experience, are heavy on analysis and promise to turn out future leaders; indeed, one study found 62 per cent of case studies featured heroic leaders.

But Prof. Mintzberg is obsessed with the notion that leadership and management depend on understanding the context you are in. “Management is a practice, grounded in the experience of craft,” he says, rather than a blizzard of historical case studies. He suggests that graduates of MBA programs should be stamped on their forehead with a skull and crossbones that says: “Warning! Not prepared to manage.”

Challenged to create an alternative, he devised a program where students come in groups from various companies rather than individually and instead of dealing with cases drawn from management archives spend half their time discussing and reflecting on real problems in their own organization, buttressed with ideas, theories, examples and intellectual prodding from their professors. They shadow a fellow student from another organization at work, to understand that individual’s reality. And they meet in different places around the world during their time in the program, to be exposed to other contexts and cultures.

Perhaps that has been the most profound myth busting of his career (even if MBA programs remain jammed). Should you do an MBA, he asks? “Will sitting in nice, neat rows listening to lectures about the business functions, plus pronouncing case study strategies for companies you know little about really make you a better manager?” he answers.

Cannonballs

• Consultant Greg Satell does his own myth busting with these three facts his research found accurate but business leaders refuse to accept: Bigger organizations are actually more innovative than startups; levels of bureaucracy and hierarchy are increasing not decreasing; and markets (at least in the U.S.) are becoming less competitive not more.
• Consultant Julie Winkle Giulioni was surprised in a survey she ran that feeling unheard was cited as the top reason for employees “checking out” rather than lack of recognition or lack of growth. “That’s not the order I expected, and I don’t think it’s the order most organizations are optimizing for either,” she says.
• Leadership consultant Larry Coval claims there are no teams in business because the main attributes of a team – shared goals, interdependency of the work and personal sacrifice for the greater good – aren’t present. At the core, shared goals are anathema in business; it’s an individual sport with raises, rankings, promotions all a case of every person for themselves.

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.