Is management still a profession or, as some believe, a role that will become obsolete as society and organizations evolve?
This was the question debated at an event presenting a Lucca study on the professional aspirations of the French (The French and work: changing aspirations and worsening conditions). Experts faced off in battles on three of the study’s themes: do companies makes people incompetent, is pursuing a career still desirable, and finally is manager still a job or, as some think, a role that will become obsolete in the light of changes in society and organizations?
Do we need managers or management?
Of course we need managers, and I’ll just give you an example.A group of 6 people go to the cinema together and have to choose which film to see. There’s never a consensus: some disagree, others let the others choose, but in the end there’s one person who decides for the group. There’s always a need for someone to decide, but you have to admit that the manager’s job is very poorly mastered.
But it doesn’t work like that anymore Why does it always have to be the same person who decides? The manager’s job is disappearing, because Taylorist organizations are disappearing, and we’re going to use all employees for facilitation.
New forms of management are here to stay, albeit in their infancy. The end of the manager is not the end of management, but it will require a great deal of rigor.
It’s important not to equate decision-making power with being a manager: a manager is someone who makes things happen.
Authority is above all a question of charisma, but it is defined in different ways depending on the era and even the country. But even when distributed, authority remains authority , and it comes from legitimacy.
No! authority must be divided up between people, and not embodied by one person.
But we have the perfect counter-example with Ted Lasso (a character in an Apple fiction). He manages a soccer team without knowing anything about the sport, he’s blissfully optimistic, he’s a punk. He thinks that his benevolence will create a space in which people can try things out and progress. But in the end, he’s the one who decides and distributes this freedom.
Miles Davis was a tyrant, but he can be credited with inspiring thousands of jazzmen who have blossomed thanks to him.
But authority isn’t necessary What about mentoring, for example?
At the end of the debate, a quick poll of the audience, mainly from the HR world, showed that for 76% of those present, managing was still a profession.
Let’s take a closer look.
Manager has never been a profession
At the risk of shocking a lot of people, I’d like to say that management has unfortunately never been a job, as confirmed by one of the speakers when he said “a poorly mastered profession”.
Many managers have been promoted as a reward for their performance in the field, and continue to take refuge in demonstrating their technical expertise to establish their legitimacy, giving only the smallest portion of their time to tasks linked to their role, a role that remains secondary to their job.
Companies are also at fault, as they too often consider management to be an innate science. There’s certainly a part of it that’s innate, and it’s not for nothing that we talk about the “managerial fibre”, but there’s a whole mass of responsibilities and associated tasks that go with the role, and which we think it’s obvious that managers will carry out without anything being formalized (Do you have a delivery model for management?). And I’m only talking about content, not even posture.
So, in too many companies, management has never been a job, with managers neglecting all the obligations that go with the role out of ignorance, lack of time or fear of failure.
Embodied or distributed management
The debate has focused not so much on management as on its embodiment: embodied by one person or distributed to all or to those who are recognized as having authority.
But the two are not mutually exclusive: in a team, you can have a manager and people to whom he can delegate things, or even to whom employees recognize authority in certain areas. A good manager will often rely on them.
But in the end, you need someone to make decisions and, above all, to take responsibility.
You can have a highly participative management style, but in the end, it’s the manager who has to take sole responsibility for decisions. Collective responsibility in business (almost) never works, because if everyone wants to decide, no one wants to take responsibility.
Moreover, the shortcut made between hierarchy and Taylorism doesn’t seem appropriate to me: in a company, work is organized in different ways, as are decisions, and hierarchy is merely a model for distributing responsibilities. It’s up to the manager to assume this as he sees fit, and to implement the managerial model that seems most relevant to him, and why not a highly participative one?
Creating a command structure is part of human nature
I really liked the parallel drawn with the choice of a film in the cinema, and I agree with the premise that setting up a hierarchy and a chain of command (no matter how authority is exercised) is natural.
A class at school, a team in a sport, a group of friends, no matter how it happened or how it’s formalized, in the end there’s a leader.
This reminds me of a speech by someone who was never a management guru, but who said something pretty accurate on the subject: I’m referring to Bernard Tapie, a french businessman and entrepreneur.
“The whole society is organized like the hierarchy. Put 150 people on an island, come back a year later, there’s a boss, two deputies….
Because it’s natural, because human nature wants it that way
The most egalitarian political regimes on paper have often ended up with the most authoritarian powers, sometimes in a bloodbath. Let’s not even mention the French Revolution, which held out the hope of a radical transformation of society, where the principles of equality, liberty and fraternity would redefine the social order, but ended in a spiral of violence and terror.
If you dig deeper into what really happened in certain companies that, at the time, went down the road of the “liberated enterprise” (which, by the way, is no longer talked about), there were sometimes the worst managerial horrors, with unprecedented violence and toxicity.
So even unofficially, hierarchy exists and is embodied, but worse still, the most egalitarian movements have ended up producing the most violent and authoritarian forms of hierarchy.
And still in the same vein, we urgently need to stop criticizing authority on the sole grounds that it is confused with authoritarianism (No, authority is not an outdated notion in the workplace).
In any case, the point is not to reduce this question to one of hierarchy or no hierarchy. It’s necessary and natural, and the key is to find the right balance, even the most innovative companies in terms of their management model have realized this. (Why it’s dangerous to have a company without hierarchy, according to pioneers of Google’s Startup Accelerator).
A necessary reflection on the role of the manager
All this, as in the two different debates, brings us back to one question: what is the definition of a manager, what is his or her role? And I’d be surprised if there were any consensus on the subject, nor if there necessarily has to be.
One speaker said “the manager creates the space for team members to try out and progress”, which is more or less how I see things (A manager is someone who makes things happen).
I really liked the Ted Lasso analogy (I admit that I wasn’t too keen on the show at first, but it made me reconsider my opinion) and I’m thinking of writing something specific on the subject at a later date, as I realized that at a fairly recent time I did Ted Lasso without realizing it.
This brings us back to a fundamental question: should a good manager be a technical expert in the field? Does this alone give him legitimacy and authority?
My answer is no, or rather not all the time. I understand that this is very relevant for highly technical and specialized professions, but less so for others.
While I’ve seen the “Ted Lasso” model work very well (especially for me), the opposite model works just as well in a company like Apple.
Apple is not a company where general managers oversee managers; rather, it is a company where experts lead experts. The assumption is that it’s easier to train an expert to manage well than to train a manager to be an expert.
[…]
Early on, Steve Jobs came to embrace the idea that managers at Apple should be experts in their area of management. In a 1984 interview he said, “We went through that stage in Apple where we went out and thought, Oh, we’re gonna be a big company, let’s hire professional management. We went out and hired a bunch of professional management. It didn’t work at all….They knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to do anything. If you’re a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can’t learn anything from? And you know what’s interesting? You know who the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be…because no one else is going to…do as good a job.”
Harvard Business Review – How Apple Is Organized for Innovation
Remember Louis de Funès in La Folie des Grandeurs (an old french movie)? “What’s to become of me? I’m a minister, I don’t know how to do anything!”
I’ll come back to this later, because for once I don’t totally agree with Steve Jobs, but I do think that the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. It all depends on the company, its business and even its vision of its business.
I’d say Ted Lasso could manage an HR team or be COO, but not a team of engineers in the nuclear industry or…at Apple.
But that’s an open question, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
And finally, it’s often said that when something goes wrong in a company, it’s rarely because of the people, but because of the system.
Dr. W. Edwards Deming, renowned professor, statistician and author, stated that 94% of problems are the fault of the system. People can’t perform better than the system allows.
Hyken.com -TheProblem Isn’t the Employee, It’s the Business System
What applies to employees also applies to managers, which brings us back to a more global reflection on the company as a system, and what it does or does not allow employees and managers to do, and even the complication and contradictory injunctions it generates and prevents employees from working well and managers from managing well (The organizational complication: the #1 irritant of the employee experience).
Bottom line
In my opinion, it would be a good thing if management finally became a profession, as this would finally lead us to question the content of this profession.
Next, we must not confuse the scope of a manager’s prerogatives with his or her posture. Managers have a responsibility and a number of missions with regard to the company and their employees, and they will carry them out in their own way, unless the company prescribes or prohibits certain roles.
In the same company, with the same roles, missions and responsibilities, you could have a tyrant or a Ted Lasso.
Defining the function is important, but no less so than the way in which it will be embodied and in which business system.
Image: Useless manager by Elnur via Shutterstock