Managing Leadership^®

One of the key questions Peter Drucker struggled with was the issue of who a manager is. It was common, and still is, to understand a manager as someone who is responsible for the work of others - a boss. But he knew that there are members of organizations who perform vital functions that are independent of the number of subordinates, if any, those members have. Indeed, their contributions are often more vital than that of those of their peers with numerous workers under their authority. That is, someone who manages a plant with hundreds of line workers is often less influential over the fortunes of a company, or has less impact even on its current operations, than one who makes financial, logistical, or marketing decisions for the firm, even if the latter have few, or even any, assistants.

As a result, Drucker, in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, developed the following as the basic answer to the question of who is a manager in modern, complex organizations:

It is responsibility for contribution. Function rather than power has to be the distinctive criterion and the organizing principle.”

Drucker recognized that this doesn’t lead to a neat answer, especially in the age of the knowledge worker, many of whom perform important functions that contribute greatly to the fate of the organization, but whose identities are often stronger with their specialty than with the firm at which they are currently employed. Nevertheless, he insisted, in this and in every substantial sense, that contribution through one means or another is the key to determining the presence - indeed, the effectiveness - of management.

Even as early as 40 years ago, in The Effective Executive, he criticized the growing wave of books on management that focused on the singular individual. Effective management, he argued, arose from the work, not the person, and any ordinarily intelligent person can be an effective manager. Moreover, he stressed that doing so arises not from who you are, but what you do. We will look at that next.

—

Please be sure see all the posts in this series!

1. Marketing Management
2. Defining Management
3. Understanding what we do
4. Understanding who we are
5. Faith or deeds?
6. Doing “certain - and fairly simple - things”
7. The fundamental requirements
8. The basic resource of the business enterprise
9. Making tasks meaningful
10. Making it matter
11. Setting the rules
12. Book Review: Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

—

You should really try this out: If you double-click on any (non-hypertext-linked) word on the main page of the site, a window provided by Answers.com will open providing definitions or encyclopedic material about that term, together with links to additional sources of information. Try it out - it’s interesting and fun.

And, of course, while you’re clicking around, don’t forget to click on your choice of an email or RSS-feed subscription to these pages - we’ll be proud to have you join us!

Technorati Tags: manager, work, boss, organization, company, Drucker, responsibility, contribution, Function, power, knowledge, worker, effectiveness, management