Managers Part XIV - Management Time vs. Vocational Time

One of the false yardsticks that you hear all the time is that a good manager isn't "afraid to get his hands dirty", or "helps out". As we have already looked at, the job of a manager is to "get things done", not "do things". Before we get into the details of using leverage to get things done, we're going to look at another division of time: management time vs. vocational time.

Very few people start their careers as managers. In typical fashion the first rungs on the corporate ladder involve doing things: making things, selling stuff, serving people, repairing items. It is during this epoch where your worth as an employee is measured by your output, you learn that everything that you do can be measured. How many widgets did you produce? How fast did you ring up those orders? How many errors per thousand did you make? Quality comes into it as well; did you repair that vacuum cleaner correctly? But it's all about doing things and doing them according to standard. In most companies the path to a bigger paycheck lies along the management track. You start out making widgets, soon you're a widget team leader, responsible for some other widget makers, eventually you're the widget department manager, responsible, not only for all the widget makers and team leaders, but the budget, payroll, supply ordering and shipping. Even though you now have all these additional responsibilities, in your heart, you're still a widget maker. You wear a little leather tool belt that carries your needle nose pliers and little screw driver that you use to assemble widgets. Once or twice a day you head down to the widget room to make a few widgets and build some camaraderie with your team. When you have some free time you're back down there. Why? There are three broad categories of vocational lures:

1. Identity: this is who you are, a widget maker! Once you become a manager, you're not just a manager, you're a widget manager. Very few people identify as a manager, i.e. a practitioner of the craft of management, but rather as a member of the vocation from which you were promoted.   
2. Pride of Craft: before you were a manager you could point to what you produced and be proud of it. You could see the widgets, or the displays that you built. You can't see management
3. Instant Feedback: When you're doing things, you know when you're done, you know when it's complete. Even if it's just paperwork. You're always right there where it's happening. But as a manager, since you're planning, fixing, correcting, training, observing etc., you're either at the scene after everything is completed, or anticipating the scene before it happens. If something goes wrong you find out about it afterwards. You don't get that endorphin rush from getting things accomplished because what you're doing may not bear fruit for days or weeks or years. 

None of this means that a manager never does physical work. On the contrary, many management jobs include a physical component. In my previous career, a department manager was required, due to labor constraints, to do a certain amount of stocking and cleaning. In my current job, statutory requirements necessitate that many tasks be done by a manager because the law says so. The definition of vocation vs. management time will vary depending upon the job description and staffing levels. Stocking the yogurt on a Monday morning may be necessary for a manager in a small grocery store, but unnecessary vocational time in a large superstore. In short, anything that is not in the manager's job description, but is in the job description of a subordinate, is vocational time and should not be indulged in by a manager. There is nothing intrinsically vocational about a task, as long as it isn't supposed to be done by someone else. 

Some managers cannot seem to grasp this concept and make several classes of excuses to continue to be vocationally occupied:

• "If you want something done, do it yourself" - which presupposes that you be everywhere at once, and did a bad job of training your subordinates
• "I want my people to know that I am willing to do anything that I ask them to do" - admittedly this has short term benefits - the crew thinks you're a good guy - but what about the jobs that you are really bad at?
• "We were really busy"/"We were really shorthanded" - there may be times when it is necessary to lend a hand, but what you're doing is training your people forgo thinking and just expect you to jump in. 

Most first-level supervisory jobs still require a large amount of vocational time and a small amount of management time, say 30 hours vocational and 10 hours management, with the amount of vocational decreasing and the management component increasing as your amount of responsibility rises. What happens, however, if you insist on spending the same amount of time "in the trenches" as you did when you weren't a manager, your work week will expand. The reason that your work week will expand is that if you're keeping your vocational component at 40 hours, in your first management job in the example earlier in this paragraph, you will be working 50 hours (10 management and 40 vocational). And you're only getting paid for 40, since you're on salary - but hey, 50 hours isn't bad, right?. But as you move up in rank, the management portion will increase, so if you're still dead set on spending all that time "doing things", pretty soon you'll find yourself working 70 hours a week (30 management and still 40 vocational). Your subordinates are all used to this, so trying to cut back will leave you, in effect, short-handed. 

It's a trap...but there is a way out...