The role of the manager
The operating style of industrial-age managers is represented by a metaphor of the organization-as-person, where the “head” thinks and the “hands” do. It is no coincidence that employees were once called “hired hands.” The implication of this metaphor is that managers do all the thinking and managing. The vision of employees as unthinking “hands,” to be moved around at will by a remote mind, is unsustainable in an age of empowerment and employee engagement.
We only started to disparage managers in the 1980’s, when Japan’s success in North America ignited the call to replace these same managers with leaders. Previously, management was regarded as a positive force in organizational life. But the 1980’s bandwagon was a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.3
Managers used to have a choice of styles: “theory y” (people are responsible and can be trusted) or “theory x” (people aren’t responsible and need to be controlled.) But the 1980’s call to replace managers with leaders arbitrarily restricted managers to the “theory x” style while gifting leadership the “theory y” style. This move was made because we wanted leaders to take over the domain of managers, getting work done through people. This left us with no way to differentiate managers from leaders except through totally arbitrary style assignments.
A broader definition of management rids us of this negative image and supports two claims:
All employees manage. Being more self-managing, they need to take more responsibility for ensuring that they obtain the best return on all of their efforts.
If management simply means getting work done in a way that makes the best use of all resources, then there is no implication of being rigidly controlling or mechanistic.