The Manager’ s Job • HBR CLASSIC
Henry Mintzberg is the Bronfman Professor of Management at McGill University. His latest book is Mintzberg on Management: Inside Our Strange World of Organizations( Free Press, 1989). This article appeared originally in HBR July – August 1975. It won the McKinsey Award for excellence. the problem of worker motivation, the manager— the person in charge of the organization or one of its subunits— has been forgotten.
I intend to break the reader away from Fayol’ s words and introduce a more supportable and useful description of managerial work. This description derives from my review and synthesis of research on how various managers have spent their time.
In some studies, managers were observed intensively; in a number of others, they kept detailed diaries; in a few studies, their records were analyzed. All kinds of managers were studied— foremen, factory supervisors, staff managers, field sales managers, hospital administrators, presidents of companies and nations, and even street gang leaders. These“ managers” worked in the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Great Britain.
A synthesis of these findings paints an interesting picture, one as different from Fayol’ s classical view as a cubist abstract is from a Renaissance painting. In a sense, this picture will be obvious to anyone who has ever spent a day in a manager’ s office, either in front of the desk or behind it. Yet, at the same time, this picture throws into doubt much of the folklore that we have accepted about the manager’ s work.
Folklore and Facts About Managerial Work
There are four myths about the manager’ s job that do not bear up under careful scrutiny of the facts.
Folklore: The manager is a reflective, systematic planner. The evidence on this issue is overwhelming, but not a shred of it supports this statement.
Fact: Study after study has shown that managers work at an unrelenting pace, that their activities are characterized by brevity, variety, and discontinuity, and that they are strongly oriented to action and dislike reflective activities. Consider this evidence:
Half the activities engaged in by the five chief executives of my study lasted less than nine minutes, and only 10 % exceeded one hour. 1 A study of 56 U. S. foremen found that they averaged 583 activities per eight-hour shift, an average of 1 every 48 seconds. 2 The work pace for both chief executives and foremen was unrelenting. The chief executives met a steady stream of callers and mail from the moment they arrived in the morning until they left in the evening. Coffee breaks and lunches were inevitably work related, and ever-present subordinates seemed to usurp any free moment.
A diary study of 160 British middle and top managers found that they worked without interruption for a half hour or more only about once every two days. 3
Of the verbal contacts the chief executives in my study engaged in, 93 % were arranged on an ad hoc basis. Only 1 % of the executives’ time was spent in open-ended observational tours. Only 1 out of 368 verbal contacts was unrelated to a specific issue and could therefore be called general planning. Another researcher found that“ in not one single case did a manager report obtaining important external information from a general conversation or other undirected personal communication.” 4
Is this the planner that the classical view describes? Hardly. The manager is simply responding to the pressures of the job. I found that my chief executives terminated many of their own activities, often leaving meetings before the end, and interrupted their desk work to call in subordinates. One president not only placed his desk so that he could look down a long hallway but also left his door open when he was alone— an invitation for subordinates to come in and interrupt him.
Clearly, these managers wanted to encourage the flow of current information. But more significantly, they seemed to be conditioned by their own work loads. They appreciated the opportunity cost of their own time, and they were continually aware of their ever-present obligations— mail to be answered, callers to attend to, and so on. It seems that a manager is always plagued by the possibilities of what might be done and what must be done.
When managers must plan, they seem to do so implicitly in the context of daily actions, not in some abstract process reserved for two weeks in the organization’ s mountain retreat. The plans of the chief executives I studied seemed to exist only in their heads— as flexible, but often specific, intentions. The traditional literature notwithstanding, the job of managing does not breed reflective planners; managers respond to stimuli, they are conditioned by their jobs to prefer live to delayed action.
Folklore: The effective manager has no regu-
harvard business review • march – april 1990 page 2