What is Management?

What is Management?

All right, settle down; it’s not that funny a question. Actually, if you’ve spent any time in American Commerce in the last twenty years, you may have gotten the impression that management is, in fact, something you might find at the southern end of a northbound bull. Quite often “Management” as practiced in the United States (and other nations that have been contaminated by our views of business) is a collection of essentially random acts resulting from the Peter Principle at work. As formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter in his 1968 book of the same name, "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

If you have seen your nominal boss blame you for not reading his/her mind, fire the only members of the department who produce any work, refuse to take the action necessary to save the company from bankruptcy because it might interfere with his/her golf game, fail to understand why a national bank holiday might interfere with your deposits being credited that same day, issue directions that violate the Laws of Physics, or any number of other unfortunately common acts of idiocy, you may be excused for thinking all managers are, in fact, idiots who haven’t been fired yet.

But if that’s what management often degenerates into being, we should ask what it actually is. Allow me to quote what Dr. Edmund Gray, of Loyola Marymount University, told me and my classmates on my first day of business school. “Management is the science of getting necessary work done using other people,” Dr. Gray said. Then he paused, and smiled rather dryly at us. “If that idea bothers you, you’re in the wrong room!” he added.

The good doctor then went on to list a huge number of careers that you could pursue if you wanted to do all of the work yourself – the last one on his list being “Teacher.” “But if you want to be a manager,” he concluded, “you’ve got to accept the idea of using people the way a carpenter uses a hammer.”

This confused me, at first, because getting work done using other people is not quite as easy as all that – you can issue all the orders you want, but that doesn’t mean anyone is going to listen to them. It was much later in the program that I learned the other half of the equation: the definition of Leadership. To quote Dr. Gray again, “Leadership is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do.”

If you’ve made the logical connection that all leaders are therefore also managers, but not all managers are leaders, feel extremely good about yourself. It took me an MBA and five years of supervisory experience to draw the same conclusion.

Learning the science of management comes easy to some people; matching off the skill sets of the employees under your direction (your “human resources” in the literal sense) with the tasks you need to accomplish on the basis of efficiency and ability. Other people find it easy to convince people to do as asked, but have trouble selecting the right person for the right task, or avoiding assignments based on friendship or emotion. My point here is that you need to master both functions if you want to avoid becoming the punch line of Dilbert cartoon…