I was sitting in Borders (large US bookstore chain) the other night, and started flipping through The Essential Drucker, a compilation of some of Peter Drucker’s essays on management.
Here’s a cool quote on management from the first chapter:
Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant. (p. 10)
Management is often maligned more than it is praised; the typical portrayal of the office features a manager who is bumbling, incompetent, or clueless–or some combination of all three. Dilbert, Office Space, sit-com “The Office” (both UK and US versions), all feature managers of this sort; there are probably dozens of other examples in film, television, or other media.
It also seems to be universally the case that the average person, when confronted with portrayals such as Dilbert, et al, will say, “Oh yes, that’s just like my office…” in some form.
There are a couple major conclusions one could draw from this; for one, one could assume that most managers are not good managers. The other conclusion could be that most employees are not able to accurately guage the skill of their manager(s).
Of course, there must exist many skilled managers, whose subordinates also recognize them as skilled and competent managers. But the preponderance of popular culture reference to the “terrible manager” archtype would lead us to believe, again, that either there are hundreds of thousands of incompetent managers at large… or else the people who are labelling them as “incompetent” are, in fact, incorrect.
The three things that Drucker mentions: enabling joint performance, accentuating people’s strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses… are not necessarily the activities which people may be judging their managers upon. So, people may be coming to the conclusions that their managers are incompetent, when in fact those managers may be doing exactly what they should be doing.
That being said, there are undoubtedly managers who may not be skilled in managing people; that’s a fact of life as well. Also, we could suggest that the best manager would be one who was able to not only implement those things Drucker described, but also to communicate to his people what he is doing, and why; in other words, ideally, communication would be effective enough that people do not form a wrong impression about the competence of a particular manager.
As a caveat, I don’t currently have the responsibility of managing people, and I’ve certainly had my share of managers who were (in my opinion at the time) good, bad, or various shades in between. I’m not attempting a blanket defense of all managers everywhere; I just thought that Drucker’s quote was extremely interesting, and that there must be some way to account for the fact that, in popular culture, the archtype is for the manager to be incompetent.
So, does anyone out there have stories about managers who are competent, who do the things that Drucker defined “management” as being?
