Managers Part IX - What Does a Manager Do?

So what does a manager do? To most people, a manager is just a higher-paid, busier version of the people he or she manages, who also bosses people around. What just what is a manager supposed to manage? According to Bill Oncken Jr., whose book Managing Management Time is one of the most detailed, practical management guide that I have ever seen, a manager is someone who, in contrast to someone who does things, a manager is someone gets things done.  How does a manager get things done? Allowing for the fact that some people with the title "manager" don't supervise anyone, but oversee processes, managers get things done by way of other people. How the professional manager utilizes others to get things done consists largely in how his or her time is spent.

There are broadly three categories of time: boss-imposed, system-imposed, and self-imposed. As we progress, you'll see that time can also be divided in other ways, some that overlap with the three categories listed here. Boss-imposed time is pretty easy to explain - it's the time you spend doing things that your immediate supervisor tells you to do. System-imposed time is time that you spend dealing with the administrative tasks - paperwork, tracking, answering emails. The amount of system-imposed time varies from industry to industry and flourishes when there active factions within a company all vying for control and influence. Self-imposed time is a little harder to pin down. It's not playing hooky from work and going fishing or playing golf, it's not deciding to spend your work day with your feet up on the desk. What it is, is time that you spend conducting your business as you see fit, free from the constraints of the system or the orders of your boss. It's the time you spend planning, the time you spend coaching your subordinates and anticipating and solving problems that haven't occurred yet. In a perfect world, your boss- and system-imposed time will be minimized and your self-imposed time will be maximized. But how do you do that? We'll look at the boss and the system in a later post, but first let's look at a group of people who aren't really part of the three categories of time: subordinates.

In theory, there is no such thing as subordinate-imposed time. In any organizational chart that you're likely to see the big boss is on top, medium and little bosses are under him, front line supervisors are father down and the workers are on the bottom. There is no organizational chart in the world where the subordinates, again, in theory, can tell the boss what to do, or make demands on his time. The fertilizer flows downhill! So, if you are allowing your subordinates to determine how your time is to be spent, then you are exercising some self-imposed time by willingly upending that org chart. (This is not to say that lower-level managers and workers are without worth - later on we'll talk about how to manage your manager). You are letting yourself be managed, reversing the roles and eating up your self-imposed time.

More detail on this in a later article, but the key to eliminating subordinate-imposed time is to delegate. Let me point out that delegating and assigning are two different things. Assigning is when I give you a task, perhaps even tell you how and when to do it. Delegating is when I give you responsibility and authority for a certain aspect of your job and hold you accountable for getting it done. Certainly training and coaching is involved, but someone to whom responsibility is delegated does not wait to be told what to do, or how or when to do it. Someone who has tasks assigned, goes from one duty to the next, and is at a loss when the list of jobs runs out. Time for a break! (or to go ask the boss what to do).

At one time in my life I managed a retail store. When I left for the day, I entrusted the operation of the store to an "evening supervisor". Once I had fully trained this person and clearly communicated my expectations, I allowed him to manage his time as he saw fit, as long as the standards that I had set had been met. My immediate supervisor however, insisted that I provide my evening supervisor with a list of things to do every night. Not only that, but I had to let him inspect this list at any time to prove that I had created it, complete with check-marks indicating that my supervisor had completed the list. And I couldn't just hand out a generic list every night - no - it had to be a brand-new, fresh list every night. My boss-imposed time increased and forced me to burden my subordinate with some boss-imposed time as well. Nobody won.

But there is a way to minimize, or even eliminate, subordinate-imposed time...stay tuned.