For nearly 40 years Henry Mintzberg has advocated the study of what managers actually do in order to understand the nature of management. In his latest book, Managing, he tells us that very little has changed since his groundbreaking 1973 book, The Nature of Managerial Work. As he found in the early 1970s, managers still work at a frenetic pace, engage in brief, fragmented activities, communicate more informally than formally, display a bias for action, focus as much on lateral as vertical interaction and exert as much covert as overt control. To write his latest book, Mintzberg spent a day with each of 29 managers in business, healthcare, government and the social sector, across roles from a CEO to an orchestra conductor, a Head Nurse and a Police Commander, among others. Although he extracts common themes, the overriding message is one of diversity, making management seem inescapably context specific.

Mintzberg's descriptive, sociological approach unfortunately makes it difficult to define management in general terms. He criticizes conventional notions of management as too abstract, too removed from actual practice. But going to the other extreme of following managers around and observing how they spend their time, creates the opposite problem: how to generalize about management. Mintzberg rejects the possibility of professional managers who transfer managerial skills from one job to another. He takes the sensible idea that managers are best developed on the job to the point where it becomes hard to see how they can learn anything at all out of context.

What is Management?

To evaluate Mintzberg's thinking, we need a model of management that captures what all managers do without violating the contextual nature their work. Crucially, we need a way of differentiating managing from doing because Mintzberg seems to equate managing with everything done in a managerial role.

Managing can be defined as a process for achieving a goal with the aim of making the best possible use of all resources needed for achieving that goal.

Management so defined is similar to investment in that both activities share the objective of investing resources in a manner that generates the best possible return. This includes their own personal resources, particularly their time. Whenever managers decide to call a customer now rather than later, for example, they are prioritizing and that means wanting to invest their time where they can add most value. Managing is not restricted to the managerial role. Front line employees need to make effective use of their resources as well, their time and talent. You manage your time when you take explicit steps to make best use of it, prioritizing by challenging yourself to invest your time where you can add the most value. Even the unemployed need to manage their time and finances.

The traditional idea that management is about planning, organizing and controlling stems from an industrial age focus on hierarchy and power, thus why management is seen as a role instead of an activity or process that all employees can undertake. When we understand management as an investment activity, we can see that the conventional tasks of planning, organizing and controlling need not be done by managers. They can, at least in part, be delegated. Or the manager can use a facilitative approach where all stakeholders participate in developing a plan. Similarly, fostering self-managing teams delegates the lion's share of monitoring and controlling to the team itself. Just because the formal manager does less managing doesn't mean that management, as an activity, is absent.

Comparing management to investment shows how critical it is that managers manage themselves as well as other resources at their disposal. Just as you would review your financial investments regularly to decide whether you need to shift some of them to get a better return, managers need to think critically on a regular basis about how they should invest their own time and talent to add the most value. This perspective also shows that management is not just about getting work done through others. A manager might initiate process improvements relating to equipment use, logistics, quality, customer service and finance as well as people.

Focusing on the investment of resources sets up a normative dimension, enabling us to say something about what managers should be doing. By sticking religiously to a description of what managers actually do, Mintzberg struggles to move to a normative level when it comes to discussing managerial effectiveness. After all, managing in his world means doing whatever needs to be done in a context-specific management role.

Doing versus Managing

Because Mintzberg focuses on the role of the manager, he creates an artificial divide between doing and managing. He recognizes that managers do things such as selling work to clients in consulting firms, for example. But he rationalizes that such doing counts as managing because it might require the manager's level of authority and broader perspective. In other words, selling is doing when done by a sales agent but managing when done by a manager. When managers pitch in to help do the work of people reporting to them, however, Mintzberg tells us that this is not managing. Hence managers are only doing, in his account, when they do the work that constitutes the roles of their subordinates. He also sees a doing element in wheeling and dealing, negotiating with suppliers, partners or customers, but again he rationalizes assimilating such doing to managing by focusing on the role of manager.

Crucially, there is a vital type of work that Mintzberg overlooks - mental work - thinking, solving problems and making decisions. He takes the classic view that delegation is the primary way managers get work done. While delegation is an industrial age tool, it is still valuable in a knowledge driven era. But it is not the most important method of working through people when so much of what we do today is mental work, of which there are at least three distinct kinds:

·         solving complex problems with many variables to consider, some unknown.

·         making delicate decisions, such as whether to squeeze a customer for profit or take less to preserve an important relationship.

·         thinking creatively; being innovative to develop new products or processes.

One of the best ways to get mental work done through others is not delegation but asking questions, variations on "What do you think?" It's a matter of drawing solutions out of others (as Jim Collins portrays level 5 leaders doing) rather than offering your own solutions. Surely managers are doing when they generate their own solutions and managing when they draw them out of others. There are a number of benefits to this way of working:

·         better solutions, new ideas.

·         development of staff by stimulating them to think more deeply or broadly.

·         wider ownership of decisions and plans

·         greater employee engagement in determining organizational direction.

·         succession planning.

This technique needn't be limited to issues that team members raise. Managers can seek input on their own issues to reap all of the above benefits. This makes management much more interactive than the picture we get with the industrial age emphasis on delegation and hierarchical roles which conjures images of formal one-way communication.

Whether focusing on mental work or other tasks, managers should ask themselves whether to do them or get them done through others. Much of what Mintzberg's managers do could be considered doing rather than managing, such as negotiating with external stakeholders for example. Mental work such as thinking, problem solving and deciding, done autonomously by the manager, is also doing. When  managers manage themselves by prioritizing to invest their time and energy for the best return on their personal resources, they are managing; self-management by definition cannot be delegated or achieved through others.

Why Managers Spend More Time Doing than Managing

Mintzberg does not offer a rationale for identifying managing with everything managers do. Suppose you were a cook at a remote lumber camp. This is your role and title but you spend less than 20% of your time actually cooking. The rest of your day is taken up with washing dishes, cleaning your kitchen and the dining area, ordering supplies and repairing equipment. You may not like these other responsibilities but surely you wouldn't confuse them with cooking just because they came with the territory of being a cook. Similarly, suppose you are a B2B sales agent. Again, you might spend only a small portion of your time actually selling. Much of your day is spent travelling from one client location to another and back to your office where you face a mountain of paperwork. Your title is sales agent but you wouldn't call all of your activities selling. So, the question is this: What is so different about the role of manager that we would want to call everything a manager does managing? Why not say that managers engage in a mixture of doing and managing?

The fact is that most managers operate as if they were the managing partner of a professional services firm such as a medical practice, law firm or group of architects. Suppose you are the managing partner in a law firm. You like to practice law, what you were trained to do. The lawyers working for you operate independently and, being fully competent, you don't need to manage them. You can devote at least 80% of your time to your own legal caseload. In fact, if you get dragged into unexpected, messy managerial situations, you find it a waste of your time. You can justify this way of operating because your team does not produce a joint output. Nor is the output of your team integrated with that of other teams. The problem is that managers in other types of organization whose teams do produce integrated outputs also want the luxury of operating as if they were managing partners. This analogy is not perfect. Managing partners in a law firm do the same work as their "subordinates." Mintzberg's managers engage in higher level doing, but the point remains that much of their time is spent engaged in some form of doing.

Here are some reasons why managers spend so much time doing:

·         Doing is more fun than managing (boys like to play with toys).

·         Facilitating, nurturing, supporting and developing do not feel like real work.

·         Doing things, scoring goals, is the core of their identity, why they got promoted.

·         Management responsibility generates a strong feeling of ownership.

·         Ruthless accountability discourages mistakes (get it right first time).

·         Authority confers power, the right to call the shots.

·         No one likes to give the boss bad news thus doing things to make sure they are done right.

·         Thinking creatively or strategically is harder work than concrete forms of doing.

·         A bias for action encourages doing, making managers feel like they are achieving.

·         Lean and mean demands that everyone do more.

The result of these driving forces is that managers spend the bulk of their time doing exciting things like negotiating big deals, forming partnerships, liaising with customers and exploring new markets. But the pressure to get things right and the need to avoid criticism for mistakes also drives them to do less exciting tasks that could be delegated. Managers complain about being too busy but they create their own problem by conveying the impression of being indispensible. Organizations collude in this dynamic by expecting managers to have the answers, to be decisive, so they need to know everything, as far as possible, to decide confidently.

Managerial Effectiveness

Because Mintzberg sticks to describing what managers do in widely diverse contexts, he struggles to define managerial effectiveness. His focus on day to day operational work compounds the problem. He overlooks project management. While operational managers may work at a frenetic pace, engage in brief, disjointed tasks and spend little time planning and organizing, this is surely not true of project managers. Suppose he had spent his 29 research days with project managers, all at the stage of the initial set up of new projects. He might then have concluded that managers do nothing but plan!

The work of project managers clearly illustrates the value of defining management in terms of investment. The entire aim of the project manager is to achieve an outcome with the best possible use of resources. Operational managers also often view their fiscal year along the lines of a project, thus doing a fair amount of planning before the year starts. On a daily basis, they may spend a lot of time reacting to unforeseen crises, but they are constantly shifting their priorities in their heads, whether to call this client now or hold that meeting today. They keep their objectives in view and continually readjust how they are investing the resources at their disposal, especially their own time. The very meaning of prioritizing is to make the wisest investments of time and other resources and this is surely something all managers do regardless of context. In fact, if they don't exert themselves to prioritize, you could question whether they are managing at all as opposed to merely doing things. Would you be managing your finances if you just left your money in one place and ignored it?

By defining management along the lines of investment, we can ask managers tough questions that relate directly to effectiveness. We can ask them to justify in hard business terms why they have invested their resources as they have done, whether they could have added more value by spending more time on something else, or to justify doing tasks that could have been delegated.

Modifying Mintzberg

There is a simple modification Mintzberg could make to his picture of managerial work that would enhance his account of effectiveness. He identifies a number of roles that fall under the umbrella role of manager. Among his sub-roles are disturbance handler, figurehead and resource allocator. Because he is sharply critical of our obsession with leadership, he makes leading a sub-role as well. But if leading can be a sub-role, why not managing? This move would enable him to classify much of what managers do as doing and give him a foundation to build a model of effectiveness. This modification also makes sense of self-management and the fact that all employees can manage some resources despite not being in a managerial role.

In summary, Mintzberg offers a rich sociological description of how managers spend their time but the level of detail makes the role unnecessarily complex. By excluding project managers and not looking at how managers set their annual targets, his portrayal is of managers in mid-stream. Little wonder that he doesn't see much planning and organizing. In addition, his identification of managing with the role of manager makes it hard to differentiate between doing and managing, to account for non-managerial managing and to define management effectiveness. Finally, by overlooking mental work, he leaves himself only delegation to account for how managers get work done through others. This omission also hides the fact that much of the mental work managers do on their own is a form of doing. Defining management along the lines of investment could help to address these gaps in Mintzberg's account of managing.