What managers do

5.2 The academic study of what managers do

The first significant study of management was by Henri Fayol, a French business executive. His key book General and Industiral Management (1916) suggested that 'to manage is to forecast and plan, to organise, to command, to coordinate and to control'. 

Fayol's list formed the basis of Henry Mintzberg's attempt in the 1970s to identify what, exactly, managers did with their time. On average, managers are only able to carry out an activity for 9 minutes before being interrupted. To describe the work of a manager, Mintzberg identified six characteristics of the role:

• Managers process large, open-ended workloads under tight time pressure.
• Managerial activities are short in duration, varied and fragmented and often self-initiated.
• Managers prefer action-driven activities and hate letters (emails) and paperwork.
• They prefer verbal communications through meetings and phone calls.
• They maintain relationships mainly with subordinated and external parties - least with their superiors.
• Their involvement in the execution of the work is limited thouh they initiate many of the decisions.

Mintzberg's list risks understating the relative chaos he identified. He found that management was largely reactive, fighting short-term fires and often failing to put them out.

Peter Drucker has remained the key figure in saying what managers should be doing. To Drucker ,the key was to keep the manager's eyes on the prize - and that prize was reaching the objectives. It's importat to keep in mind that Drucker's key research and writing about business was between 1944 and 1950 - towards the end of WW2. Although Drucker wanted managers to develop staff and use them humanely, he was even more seized by the need to achieve the mission, be it defeting Hitler or finding a way to survive in a tough competitive environment.

So, what should managers do, according to Drucker?:

• Set clear objectives that all staff…