Managerial Duty: A Grease or Sand on Corporate Wheels?

 

In his 1954 book, The Practice of Management, Peter Ferdinand Drucker (who died at the age of 95 on November 11, 2005) stated that “the manager is the dynamic, life-giving element in every business.
Without his/her leadership, the ‘resources of production’ remain resources and never become productive.” In the 1950s, in the blush of the post-war boom in the United States, academics and management gurus like the late Peter Drucker began promoting a new way of managing that was both human and productive. They wanted democracy, participation, small collaborative groups, and management by objective rather than by fiat. They wanted every employee, including the women who had entered the workforce during the war, to be treated with respect. More than half-a-century on, did the ‘practice of management’ improves in the emerging and developing countries like Nigeria?

Being a manager, by definition, means having authority. It is both a gift and a burden. It signals what you can expect, and what people expect of you. It sketches out what constitutes appropriate behavior, and sets implicit rules about how you will behave in times of crisis. One of the first lessons that managers learn is that although authority empowers them, it also isolates them. They can no longer be just one of the guys – with subordinates, or with superiors. An invisible wall has gone up. To become comfortable, functional and productive with authority, a manager must accept this mixed bag of realities.

Ever since Adam Smith’s division of the economy into sectors of productive and unproductive labor, many social scientists, consigned managers to the latter category. Karl Marx and Tom Peters (the American management guru) have argued that most managerial work is essentially ‘unproductive’, and that, it is frontline, assembly-line or ordinary subordinate workers who are productive as well as responsible for productivity.  Herbert Casson (the Canadian management consultant) offered a more critical view on the perceived non-productivity of managers. After the observations and witnessing firsthand of the managers’ laziness and inactivity he saw around him, he wrote: “It is far safe, more sensible and more profitable to sack a do-nothing manager and put a bag of sand in his chair.”

The complexities of a manager’s life may be one reason that leadership skills have become such an important factor and determinant of manager’s productivity. The authoritarian manager of the old 20^th century simply is not adequate in this 21^st century world of cross-functional, cross-connected, fast-changing, and contradictory responsibilities and pressures. To be a productive manager in the 21^st century, a manager must become leader as well. So the authoritarian manager of old must become the new leader of today, with charisma, persuasiveness, and vision to get the hard jobs done.

Successful leadership does not depend on masculinity or feminism. It’s not about being tough or soft, or whether you are assertive or sensitive, it is about having a particular set of attributes which all leaders as well as productive managers should share. One, leaders need to have a strongly defined sense of purpose. A sense of vision, which is the essential difference between leading and managing. Two, the capacity clearly to articulate a vision. To communicate it simply, but also compellingly. But to communicate a vision you need more than words. Three, it’s about living the vision, day in day out – embodying it – and empowering your subordinates to implement and execute that vision in everything they do. Four, Generating Trust is another vital aspect. Leaders will have to be candid in their communications and show that they care. They have got to be seen to be trustworthy human beings. The leader will have to be able to generate and sustain trust and that also means demonstrating competence and constancy.

There are three consistent themes to leadership: First, leading is about transforming. Leaders as well as productive managers are visionaries who effect significant changes. Second, leaders/productive managers influence others. They persuade people to follow their visionary path to an objective. Managers did not create wealth themselves but they created the conditions in which productive labor could flourish and wealth be created. Finally, leaders/productive managers communicate competence and confidence to their followers. They engender trust, which induces others to move in the desired direction. There is a strong correlation between how well managers carried out their motivational tasks and how well workers performed. If the managers fail, then the company fails; if the managers do well, then the company, organization, institution, political party, or humanitarian group prospers.

“If modern managers are to succeed today,” argued Harold J. Leavitt, an author of a book published in 2005 titled Top Down, and a professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology at the Stanford University School of Business, “they need to develop leadership qualities.” Professor Leavitt strongly emphasized that, the managers must focus on three core activities in order to successfully be productive and help their employees to succeed. These are: (1) implementing, or making things happen; (2) problem solving, or making tough decisions to resolve complex challenges; and (3) pathfinding, or using one’s values to create a vision for where to go next. In the unfortunate absence of the above three core activities, a manager stands as sand rather than grease on the corporate wheels.

Dr. M. L. Yakubu (Lawal Karmanje)