The Manager’s Job • HBR C LASSIC
How often can you work
for a half an hour
without interruption?
lar duties to perform. Managers are constantly
being told to spend more time planning and
delegating and less time seeing customers and
engaging in negotiations. These are not, after
all, the true tasks of the manager. To use the
popular analogy, the good manager, like the
good conductor, carefully orchestrates everything in advance, then sits back, responding
occasionally to an unforeseeable exception.
But here again the pleasant abstraction just
does not seem to hold up.
Fact: Managerial work involves performing a
number of regular duties, including ritual and
ceremony, negotiations, and processing of soft information that links the organization with its environment. Consider some evidence from the
research:
A study of the work of the presidents of
small companies found that they engaged in
routine activities because their companies
could not afford staff specialists and were so
thin on operating personnel that a single absence often required the president to substitute.5
One study of field sales managers and another of chief executives suggest that it is a
natural part of both jobs to see important customers, assuming the managers wish to keep
those customers.6
Someone, only half in jest, once described
the manager as the person who sees visitors so
that other people can get their work done. In
my study, I found that certain ceremonial duties—meeting visiting dignitaries, giving out
gold watches, presiding at Christmas dinners—
were an intrinsic part of the chief executive’s
job.
Studies of managers’ information flow suggest that managers play a key role in securing
“soft” external information (much of it available only to them because of their status) and
in passing it along to their subordinates.
Folklore: The senior manager needs aggregated information, which a formal management
information system best provides. Not too long
ago, the words total information system were
everywhere in the management literature. In
keeping with the classical view of the manager
as that individual perched on the apex of a regulated, hierarchical system, the literature’s
manager was to receive all important information from a giant, comprehensive MIS.
But lately, these giant MIS systems are not
working—managers are simply not using
harvard business review • march–april 1990
them. The enthusiasm has waned. A look at
how managers actually process information
makes it clear why.
Fact: Managers strongly favor verbal media,
telephone calls and meetings, over documents.
Consider the following:
In two British studies, managers spent an
average of 66% and 80% of their time in verbal
(oral) communication.7 In my study of five
American chief executives, the figure was 78%.
These five chief executives treated mail processing as a burden to be dispensed with. One
came in Saturday morning to process 142
pieces of mail in just over three hours, to “get
rid of all the stuff.” This same manager looked
at the first piece of “hard” mail he had received all week, a standard cost report, and put
it aside with the comment, “I never look at
this.”
These same five chief executives responded
immediately to 2 of the 40 routine reports
they received during the five weeks of my
study and to 4 items in the 104 periodicals.
They skimmed most of these periodicals in seconds, almost ritualistically. In all, these chief
executives of good-sized organizations initiated on their own—that is, not in response to
something else—a grand total of 25 pieces of
ma