Essential Learning for New Managers


Successfulmanagers understand the importance of differentiating between these two types of work. Better still, they have learned how to strike a good balance between them. They know that organisations often promote people because they are good at what they do. Once promoted, they are sometimes reluctant to let go of the familiar - the comforting and comfortable behaviours that brought themsuccess in the first place. They often do not realise that the new post, a people-managing role, requires a different set of philosophies, and behaviours. Those who see this and change, have the chance to become greatmanagers. Othersmay not be so perceptive andmay fail.


Paul Donovan, School of Business, Maynooth University


How to Manage – And How to Teach Others to Manage


Whatmakes a goodmanager?We all have experience of people in charge who brought out the best in us.We have alsomet supervisors who did not impress us. However, it is not so easy to define the essential difference. The tried and trusted definition ofmanaging is the one fromMary Parker Follett: getting results through other people. However, even in the bestmanagement textbooks it’s challenging to find information on how tomanage people, or the difference betweenmanaging and non-managing work. It’s rarer still to find answers to the question ‘how can we teach people tomanage’? Mostmanagement textbooks fail to elaborate on this definition or to give direction as to what distinguishesmanagers fromnon-managers in thatmost essential area – whatmanagers actually do.


Accordingly, those in L&D, whose job it is to developmanagers within the organisation, are left without support in thismost important task.When our organisation calls upon us to help develop themanagers of the future, we need to come up with the solutions.


A notable exception to the rule in themanagement literature is a book called Manage More by Doing Less (Loen, 1971). In this book, Loen clearly distinguishes the work thatmanagers do, i.e.managing work fromthat work which individual contributors do, i.e. doing work. Using Follett’s definition as a base, Loen categorises the behaviours and activities that help us to separatemanaging work fromdoing work.


Being able to definemanaging work is a threshold concept. Thismeans that it is a gateway to other important ideas in management. Managers who don’t ‘get it’ are likely to get ‘stuck’ and become unable to enter into a deep understanding of the key activities ofmanagers in leading,motivating, and delegating to staff. Accordingly, it is the responsibility of every person charged with the development ofmanagers to help themto understand the concept and to apply it in their daily work lives.


I teachmanagers thismanaging/doing concept by using a classroomexercise. The overall exercise has two principal learning objectives:


• Participants will be able to definemanaging work


• Participants will be able to distinguishmanaging work fromdoing work


In this exercise, I give thema set of debatable statements around the topic for their analysis and discussion. Table 1 shows a sample of these statements.While each trainer will have his or her own way of doing this,my favourite approach is to start the session with a brief discussion on Mary Parker Follett’s definition ofmanaging shown above. I introduce the session by inviting opinions on whatmanaging is. Usually, participants respond with suggestions around behaviour they think is appropriate. I gently reject these by asking themwhy we paymanagers at all.When participants contribute their typical answers such as deciding, or solving problems or delegating, I will note these on a flip chart. Eventually, we get there and someone will offer that organisations paymanagers for results. I then begin to writemy definition on the flipchart that ‘managing is….getting results’.


However, Imake it clear that we all know that organisations want all their staff to achieve results and not just themanagers. Therefore, what is different aboutmanagers? Finally, we arrive at a definition thatmanaging is getting results through other people. Then I issue the list of questions drawn fromLoen’s work, a sample of which is shown in Table 1 and invite groups to debate each statement, answering the question, is thismanaging work?


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