The Manager’s Job • HBR C LASSIC
works out a contract with the holdout superstar; the corporation president leads the company’s contingent to negotiate a new strike issue; the foreman argues a grievance problem
to its conclusion with the shop steward.
These negotiations are an integral part of
the manager’s job, for only he or she has the
authority to commit organizational resources
in “real time” and the nerve-center information that important negotiations require.
The Integrated Job
It should be clear by now that these ten roles
are not easily separable. In the terminology of
the psychologist, they form a gestalt, an integrated whole. No role can be pulled out of the
framework and the job be left intact. For example, a manager without liaison contacts
lacks external information. As a result, that
manager can neither disseminate the information that employees need nor make decisions
that adequately reflect external conditions.
(This is a problem for the new person in a
managerial position, since he or she has to
build up a network of contacts before making
effective decisions.)
Here lies a clue to the problems of team
management.15 Two or three people cannot
share a single managerial position unless they
can act as one entity. This means that they
cannot divide up the ten roles unless they can
very carefully reintegrate them. The real difficulty lies with the informational roles. Unless
there can be full sharing of managerial information—and, as I pointed out earlier, it is primarily verbal—team management breaks
down. A single managerial job cannot be arbitrarily split, for example, into internal and external roles, for information from both sources
must be brought to bear on the same decisions.
To say that the ten roles form a gestalt is
not to say that all managers give equal attention to each role. In fact, I found in my review
of the various research studies that sales managers seem to spend relatively more of their
time in the interpersonal roles, presumably a
reflection of the extrovert nature of the marketing activity. Production managers, on the
other hand, give relatively more attention to
the decisional roles, presumably a reflection of
their concern with efficient work flow. And
staff managers spend the most time in the informational roles, since they are experts who
harvard business review • march–april 1990
manage departments that advise other parts of
the organization. Nevertheless, in all cases, the
interpersonal, informational, and decisional
roles remain inseparable.
Toward More Effective
Management
This description of managerial work should
prove more important to managers than any
prescription they might derive from it. That is
to say, the managers’ effectiveness is significantly influenced by their insight into their own
work. Performance depends on how well a
manager understands and responds to the
pressures and dilemmas of the job. Thus managers who can be introspective about their
work are likely to be effective at their jobs.
The questions in “Self-Study Questions for
Managers” may sound rhetorical; none is
meant to be. Even though the questions cannot be answered simply, the manager should
address them.
Let us take a look at three specific areas of
concern. For the most part, the managerial
logjams—the dilemma of delegation, the database centralized in one brain, the problems of
working with the management scientist—revolve around the verbal nature of the manager’s information. There are great dangers in
centralizing the organization’s data bank in
the minds of its managers. When they leave,
they take their memory with them. And when
subordinates are out of convenient verbal
reach of the manager, they are at an informational disadvantage.
The manager is challenged to find systematic
ways to share privileged information. A regular
debriefing session with key subordinates, a
weekly memory dump on the dictating machine, maintaining a diary for limited circulation, or other similar methods may ease the
logjam of work considerably. The time spent
disseminating this information will be more
than regained when decisions must be made.
Of course, some will undoubtedly raise the
question of confidentiality. But managers
would be well advised to weigh the risks of exposing privileged information against having
subordinates who can make effective decisions.
If there is a single theme that runs through
this article, it is that the pressures of the job
drive the manager to take on too much work,
encourage interruption, respond quickly to
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