Management is today’s mass profession. Almost any brainworker is, at least partly, also a manager.
Let us distinguish between our tasks as a professional expert in engineering, biotechnology, architecture, or marketing and our management tasks. Designing power plants, developing new medicines, designing transport infrastructure concepts, or designing a new marketing campaign all require expert knowledge. But organizing the set-up of a power plant, the production of a new medicine, or executing a marketing campaign also requires our know-how as a manager. Why is this so important?
Management as a profession
In our globalized world all modern societies are turning into knowledge societies. The importance of expert knowledge in designing a modern power plant is unquestionable. But it is not this alone that turns a new power plant into existence. Expert knowledge in itself has no practical value as long as it is not being used to produce concrete results. To do so, action is needed. And to do so effectively, management is needed.
How you manage might be different in China, Europe, or South Africa. How you relate to hierarchies, how openly you communicate, or how you tell your boss you don’t appreciate what he or she is doing, all depend on a society’s culture. But what you do in order to achieve results is everywhere the same! In China, as well as in Europe or South Africa, you have to set objectives, you have to organize, and you have to take decisions. The content of management is not dependent on any culture and is the same all over the world.
Management has to be seen as a profession or a craft. It is actually the profession of achieving results. More specifically, “management is the control, design and development of complex systems for the purpose of converting resources into benefits”. (Fredmund Malik).
As with any profession or craft, management is defined by four elements: by its tasks, the tools required to fulfill these tasks, principles which provide guidance, and by the accountability or responsibility which attach to the consequences of our actions.
Management Tasks
There are five basic tasks to be taken into account when defining management: providing objectives, organizing, taking decisions, monitoring, and developing people. These tasks can be taught and can be learnt. A person who performs them is a manager. A person who does not is not a manager.
Management Tools
As in any profession, a manager needs tools to carry out his or her tasks. One of the most important tools of a manager is a meeting. In management a meeting is a tool to achieve a certain result; it is not a social gathering. Personal working methods, written reports, and appraisal interviews are other management tools. All management tools can be taught. And they have to be learnt.
Management Principles
Talking about the basic principles of management means talking about effectiveness: doing the right things in order to convert resources into the intended results. Management principles are based on insight into the profession and they too can be taught. The more difficult and complex the situation, the more important the application of the basic principles. Well-defined management principles provide the practical “genetic code” of effective management and effectiveness in general.
Responsibility
Assuming responsibility means standing by what you do and sometimes by what you don’t do. For assuming responsibility, a basic framework can be created and accompanying conditions defined. But assuming responsibility can, in the end, not be taught. It requires a personal decision.
Management has to be learnt
Management matters to every person in modern societies. Without basic management skills you cannot be successful. “Everything depends on the ability to manage professionally: performance, career, respect, power and income and, in the end, health, satisfaction and a fulfilled life – in business, but also in all society’s other institutions.” (Malik) A consensus on what is good management exists. It is based on the early research of Peter Drucker, the Austrian-born mastermind and inventor of the profession, and on cybernetics, the science of steering and control. Good management can be learnt and has to be learnt, systematically and thoroughly.
From Management to Leadership
True leadership is first of all based on effective management. Being effective - by mastering the basic principles of effectiveness and by mastering the fulfillment of essential management tasks - is a first and essential step.
But true leadership needs more. It needs a personal decision to take responsibility for your own actions and their consequences, and for the actions and consequences of your department or company. True leaders never claim success for themselves, but always for their team or company. And true leaders always accept personal responsibility for their own or their company’s failures.
Hans Stoisser is co-founder of Effective Management. Effective Management GmbH is the official Partner of Malik Management Centre St. Gallen for Africa.
Malik Management Centre St. Gallen has been the leading institution for executive education and management consultancy in Europe for the last 30 years. With around 300 employees and offices in Vienna, Toronto, London, Berlin and Shanghai, the Malik Management Centre St. Gallen, under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Fredmund Malik, has been leader in general management for more than 30 years. Within the group of companies, experts do pioneer work in management cybernetics, contributing to a consolidated management theory and effective management practice.