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Don’t call me manager
by Stefan Stern

Roy Keane is not really sure how much he is enjoying this management lark. The former hard-man of the Manchester United midfield became manager of Sunderland football club towards the end of August. But as Christmas draws near he has confessed on a fans’ website that he is finding it all a pretty thankless task.

“To tell the truth, I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy it – and managers I have spoken to say it only gets worse,” he said. “You’re just constantly on the go. When you win a game you’re happy, but you have no real time to reflect on it, straight away you start thinking about the next match and what you could do to improve on your last performance.”

Keane was echoing the views of fellow international Thierry Henry, who told this paper a few days ago: “I don’t know about being a manager, because I don’t know if I would like to be under that kind of pressure after I finish playing.”

It is not just elite performers from the world of football who balk at the idea of becoming a manager. Some high-flying young executives seem a bit queasy too. When 50 executive MBA students at a leading international business school were asked recently what word they would use to describe themselves, they opted for labels such as “catalyst”, “change-agent”, “consultant” and “leader”. None of them wanted to be thought of as a “manager”.

Where does this distaste for the “m” word come from? Perhaps the job title has been devalued by being applied to an ever greater number of people – “we are all managers now”. But maybe the word has simply become tainted and is seen as a proxy for that other dreaded and derided phenomenon, bureaucracy.

When some of our catalysts and change-agents were pressed on what they understood by the term manager, they said it conjured up for them an image of a person who was probably not terribly imaginative or bright. One declared that a manager was someone who was “bossy, weak and insecure, who tries to intimidate people and does not contribute to the bottom line”.

Chris Grey, professor at the UK’s Judge Business School in Cambridge, was not surprised to be offered this kind of response from his cohort of EMBA students.

Last year Prof Grey published a highly entertaining polemic entitled A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Organisations. This slim volume more than lives up to its title. And in the space of 140 pages he explores (among other things) why management has such an image problem.

Prof Grey paints a convincing picture of the modern, efficient corporation, where managers have become distanced from the people they are supposed to be managing. The project-based nature of work can lead to the regular chopping and reshaping of teams, with managers moving on before they have to deal with the consequences of what they have just been doing. The “high potential” boss departs, without having to clear up his own mess. “This in itself is a recipe for irresponsibility,” he writes. Dealing with the unintended consequences of previous actions becomes the main activity of the new team leader. Outsourcing puts even more distance into the already semi-detached relationship.

And in an environment where anybody with any sense (and ambition) will expend a good deal of energy in self-promotion, an unreal world is created where managers regularly claim to have found “solutions” that can be delivered
after a “simple reorganisation”. But employees tend to realise when they are about to become the latest in the growing line of victims of a manager’s ego. Hence the cynicism and distrust of managers and management. And hence the students’ wish to be seen as almost anything but a manager.

Prof Grey characterises this destructive world in an imagined bed-time dialogue between a manager and his son:

Child: What do you do all day, Dad?

Dad: Well, I, sort of, exploit people.

Child: How do you mean?

Dad: Well, you know, I dehumanise them by making them work as hard as I can for as little money as possible.

Child: Oh.

Whatever the reality, we have certainly come a long way from the happy, confident world in which Peter Drucker could write, as he did in The Practice of Management (1955): “Management will remain a basic and dominant institution, perhaps so long as Western Civilisation itself survives.”

Resilient organisations, Prof Grey believes, are ones where there is a stronger, healthier bond between managers and those that are being managed. To rebuild that bond managers need to be able to take pride in what they do. But that means moving away from the “Velcro” model of corporate life – here today, gone tomorrow – and taking more seriously the fundamentally human task of managing people.

So in 2007, why not eschew the fads, the gimmicks, the God-awful PowerPoint presentations, the jargon and all the rest of that dishonest management bullshit? Join me in my campaign to get Back to Basics. And mark the wise words of Alan Curbishley, the newly appointed manager of West Ham United football club: “The managers who’ve been around a long time don’t wear head-sets, they don’t have three-way communication with people all round the stadium, they’re football managers and they manage, they try to get the best out of their players and that’s what I’m going to be about.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

(18/12/2006)