Modern management defined
Management can be defined as a way of achieving goals that add the most value1. It’s about being sufficiently organized to identify the right goals and the best means for achieving them. To take a simple example, whenever you set priorities for yourself you are managing your time.
Prioritizing means deciding which activities are most likely to achieve a specific goal and which tasks are the most urgent or important. Management is thus like investing, a process of allocating resources to obtain the best return, even if those resources are just your own time, knowledge and experience. Clearly, it is possible for all employees to manage their own time and other personal resources without occupying a formal managerial role and without managing people.
Management is closely linked to goal achievement. Suppose your goal is to develop a cure for a rare disease. You could achieve this goal in one of three ways:
By luck – you could stumble on a cure while looking for something else.
In a disorganized, wasteful manner, exceeding your budget and alienating stakeholders.
In a cost-effective, inclusive way that makes the best use of all resources.
If you prefer the third approach, you are opting for management over luck and chaos. Everyone has goals: personal, career, business, financial, social, learning and leisure among others. The fact is that a managed approach – and not necessarily regimentation — will allow you to achieve more.
Front-line employees who have no one reporting to them routinely need to achieve multiple targets in tight timeframes. This is possible only if they manage key aspects of their work and time. Clearly, they can manage a lot of things without having authority over people or a management title.
One immediate benefit of adopting this perspective is that it allows us to silence the call to banish management. Even without the complexity of the modern world, no one today can live without management. In fact complexity simply makes management all the more vital. Today we have self-managing knowledge workers and teams. As a result, the role of manager needs to change. The function itself, however, is essential.
The hue and cry to get rid of management is really a call to dismiss managers. Setting tradition aside, we need to separate management from managers. Industrial-age thinking treats them as one and the same, which is why management has been tarred with the same brush as managers. We need to see that managers are just as critical as management itself.
Management as we know it is not totally without its supporters, but even some of its champions are helping to sustain its industrial-era image. In his latest book, Managing, management thinker and author Henry Mintzberg equates management with the role of a manager, thus distorting the role and overlooking how non-managers manage themselves and their own resources.
The London Business School’s Julian Birkinshaw, attempting to reinvent management2, uses the Wikipedia definition: ” the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives.” The reference clearly applies to managers, thus ruling out self-management, not to mention the management of money or other non-human resources.
We need to rid ourselves of the concept and practice of industrial-age management, but not managers. As organizations evolve to meet new demands, management must be re-invented and re-defined accordingly. Importantly as well, industrial-age managers need to be replaced by modern managers, not by leaders.anager, but by seeing management as a process that can be led by all employees, not just managers.