To appreciate the role and importance of management we need to understand how the concept has evolved in recent years.
Management was thrown in the garbage in the late seventies following the onslaught of Japanese business in the U.S. We needed to blame something for our poor competitiveness. Management was portrayed as overly controlling, bureaucratic and mechanistic so it was pushed aside by a strident call for leadership. There were popular slogans like: “You can lead people but only manage things.” We wanted a new vision to save us from the Japanese. Ever since, leadership has been glorified and no one has wanted to be a mere manager. This is a mistake, a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Management Yesterday
Management was once conceived as being like engineering, a very analytical, rational and mechanistic function whose sole aim was assembly line efficiency. In the early world of management, workers were seen as pawns or parts in a machine, not as people. The manager was a machine operator, the organization a machine. Management was a very masculine occupation conceived in terms of narrowly masculine values. The backlash against management in the seventies and eighties contrasted this image with one of leadership portrayed as inspiring and people focused.
Management Today
We need both management and leadership. Both have an equal concern for task and people. They simply have a different purpose. Leaders promote new directions; management implements them. But modern managers can be inspiring and sensitive to people. They can be good coaches, facilitators, enablers and supporters of employee development. Management is essential to get anything done efficiently, to make the best use of resources and to work through complexity. Management today is more feminine than it was in the past because it recognizes the need to nurture people and foster collaboration. Emotional intelligence is essential to modern management. Rational intelligence is no longer sufficient.
Leadership can be shown by anyone, regardless of position. It is just a matter of promoting a better future and enlisting support for the change. But management has the responsibility to get us to the destination, a less creative, but equally challenging and demanding task. Excellent management put the first man on the moon, plans and erects complex structures and puts food on our table. To make the most of limited environmental resources, we need even better management in future. Management is like investment. It is the rational identification and realization of the best return on a set of resources for the achievement of a particular goal. To be effective, management today needs to balance the needs of people with the demand for efficiency.
