The Campaign For Real Managers

What do these people do all day?

We fetishize leadership. Authentic leaders. Transformational leaders. Visionary leaders. Servant leaders. Ethical leaders. Leadersome leaders leading leaderily.

We don’t talk so much about managers anymore.

Leadership is sexy and exciting. Yay! Management is dull and boring. Boo!

Now I suspect that many managers play a vital role in keeping their organizations running. But what do these people do all day?

This was the question that Fred Luthans and his colleagues asked nearly 40 years ago. Rather than just ask managers what they did through questionnaires and interviews, they looked at what they actually did. Literally. They assembled a team of observers who watched what managers did all day. And they didn’t just do this for CEOs, they did it for managers at all levels. They did some other things as well that we will come to shortly.

And they published the results in a book - Real Managers. Which is not, Brian (and Google for that matter), about Real Madrid club managers. You will find no Spanish soccer secrets here. So what will you find?

• Managers spend their days doing 4 kinds of things:

  • Communicating - up / down / sideways. N.B. This is not just passing on information. This is enabling people to make sense of and act on that information.

  • “Traditional” management (after Fayol) - controlling, decision-making, planning.

  • Human resource management - hiring, training, motivating, disciplining, and managing conflict.

  • Networking - interacting with outsides, socializing/politicking.

Luthans & co also looked at how well managers were doing.

• Some managers are more “successful” than others - i.e. they move up the hierarchy quicker. These people spend a disproportionate amount of time networking.

• Some managers are more “effective” than others - i.e. they are rated highly by their subordinates and seem better at achieving goals. These people spend a disproportionate amount of time on routine communication and human resource management.

• Very few managers are both.

Real Managers is probably the best description of what a manager does all day that I have ever read and I would strongly recommend it to any new manager. It also provides solid evidence for organizational patterns that most of us suspect are going on but rarely call out - because to do so would be “career-limiting”.

However I don’t hear the ideas from this book thrown around as widely as, say, Bill George’s Authentic Leadership. As the foreword to the latest edition of the book so eloquently states:

Why has this book been ignored? … One reason is that management research, like popular music, is subject to fads, and Luthans’s book was never associated with popular fads such as “agile leadership” or “transformational leadership”. A second reason, I suspect, is that that leadership researchers, management consultants, and executive recruiters didn’t like his message. Actually, there are two messages. The first is that organizations like, reward, and promote managers who stand out and make a strong positive impression—whether or not they demonstrate any talent for management… Luthans suggests that everyone is wrong… The second message is that organizations tend to ignore or pass over managers who are good at their primary task—building effective teams.

So what are you going to do as a manager? Well, we could strive to be one of those rare managers who is both successful and effective. This is a noble effort. But there is a reason that these managers are rare.

The book itself is non-judgmental. After outlining its beefs with various managerial myths, it gives plenty of advice about how to do routine communications, networking, and human resource management. It’s mostly fine. And mercifully short on both hype and pages.

Most of us will carry on in our human, fallible way; trying to make sure that stuff gets done without breaking people in the process. Doing the dull, boring, necessary work on maintaining reality day to day. While the leadersome leaders lead leaderily.