The Lost Art of Management

In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Frederick Taylor helped business owners understand how effective management of workers could lead to increased productivity and profitability. Taylor showed that if managers planned the work and defined the most efficient processes, workers would perform better than when they had to figure things out on their own. The ratio of managers to workers grew in most industries as a result in the years leading up to World War II.

Peter Drucker defined management in the 1960s as getting the right things done through other people, but the ratio of managers to workers has been steadily declining since he printed that. Today, not many people have a role that is 100% managerial. Most managers I know maintain individual contributor roles and perform their managerial duties in their "spare" time. For example, a sales manager might have a personal sales quota that is 70-100% of what her sales reps have. This means that she's spending the majority of her time cultivating her own sales pipeline rather than helping her team be more effective in the way Taylor and Drucker envisioned.

I had the same challenges when I was an operations manager. I once calculated the number of weeks of vacation our operations team was eligible for during a year and figured out that our supervisors must spend at least 50% of their time doing nothing but covering for workers who were on vacation. In addition to covering vacations, they also had to manage new account start-ups, address any customer dissatisfaction issues, and cover any accounts left unserviced due to employee turnover. This left very little time to work directly with, mentor and develop our existing team. And most troublesome, the first thing that got squeezed out each month was time they planned to spend with our strongest technicians.  

One unintended consequence of the evolution of management into the 21st century is that companies promote people more and more based on their technical knowledge - which makes sense when you consider that managers are spending most of their time performing technical, not managerial work. But this has lead to increased job dissatisfaction and decreased levels of engagement from workers who consistently say they wish they received more feedback and had better interaction with their "technician" bosses.

The economic realities of this trend are not likely to change. Few companies can afford managers whose only responsibilities are to plan for and monitor the work of others, like Frederick Taylor recommended. But companies shouldn't forget the benefits of effective management and the costs that go along with devaluing management skills. 

The answer is not necessarily investing in more management. The answer is investing in better management. Helping those technical experts become better managers through training and coaching is one way. Promoting people into management roles who have a stronger management skill set to begin with, even if they don't have the strongest technical skills is another. Imagine promoting your 4th best sales rep into the sales manager role because she has a stronger management skill set than numbers 1-3 on the results board. This would send a definite message that the organization values management skills, not just individual results. 

Either way, the benefits of effective management are the same as they were in Frederick Taylor's day - workers will perform better and the firm will have higher productivity and profitability if workers have effective managers. The trick is figuring out how to equip managers to be effective within the realities of modern time constraints and aligning their rewards to include managerial excellence in addition to technical or individual contributor excellence.