MIT Sloan Management Review

Corporate Strategy, Leadership and Organizational Studies

Rounding out the Manager’s Job

By Henry Mintzberg

October 15, 1994

THE INTEGRATED JOB OF MANAGING HAS BEEN LOST IN THE CONVENTIONAL WAYS OF DESCRIBING IT — AS INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIORS, SUCH AS LEADING, CONTROLling, communicating, and so on. Each has generally been treated either in isolation or as part of a mere list of roles. The model the author presents here seeks to integrate what we already know managers do around a framework of concentric circles. At the core are the person in the job, the frame of the job, and its agenda. These are surrounded by roles managers perform at three levels: managing by information, managing through people, and managing action, each carried out inside and outside the unit. To demonstrate use of the model, and especially to understand different managerial styles, the author draws examples from his observations and interviews of a variety of managers. He concludes that managing has to be “well rounded.”

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Tom Peters tells us that good managers are doers. (Wall Street says they “do deals.”) Michael Porter suggests that they are thinkers. Not so, argue Abraham Zaleznik and Warren Bennis: good managers are really leaders. Yet, for the better part of this century, the classical writers — Henri Fayol and Lyndell Urwick, among others — kept telling us that good managers are essentially controllers.

It is a curiosity of the management literature that its best-known writers all seem to emphasize one particular part of the manager’s job to the exclusion of the others. Together, perhaps, they cover all the parts, but even that does not describe the whole job of managing.

If you turn to the more formalized literature, you will find all kinds of lists — of tasks or roles or “competences.” But a list is not a model (even if presented in the form of a circle, meaning the ends have been joined), and so the integrated work of managing still gets lost in the process of describing it. And without such a model, we can neither understand the job properly nor deal with its many important needs — for design, selection, training, and support.

To play with a metaphor, if the toughest nut to crack in our knowledge of management has been the manager’s job itself, then that may well be because we have... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

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