BUSINESS: The Ultimate Resource

November 2003 Upgrade 14

MANAGEMENT LIBRARY

The Nature of Managerial Work

by Henry Mintzberg

Why Read It?

Mintzberg is regarded by many as a leading contemporary management thinker, and this book was the first to explore what managers actually do at work. It goes behind the myths and the self-perceptions to describe the day-to-day work of a manager.

Getting Started
What managers actually do, how they do it, and why, are fundamental questions. Managers believe they deal with big strategic issuesin reality they move from task to task dogged by diversions. Managerial work is marked by variety, brevity, and fragmentation. Managers have three key roles and the prominence of each role varies in different managerial jobs.

Contribution
1. What Managers DoThe Myth
What managers actually do, how they do it, and why they do it, are fundamental questions. There are a number of generally accepted answers. Managers believe:

that they sit in solitude contemplating the great strategic issues of the day; that they make time to reach the best decisions; that their meetings are high-powered, concentrating on the meta-narrative rather than the nitty-gritty.

The reality largely went unexplored until Henry Mintzbergs book.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2003

BUSINESS: The Ultimate Resource

November 2003 Upgrade 14

2. What Managers DoThe Reality

Mintzberg went in search of the reality. He simply observed what a number of managers actually did. The resulting book blew away the managerial mystique. Managers did not spend time contemplating the long term. They were slaves to the moment, moving from task to task with every move dogged by another diversion, another call. The median time spent by a manager on any one issue was a mere nine minutes.

3. The Characteristics of the Manager at Work

Mintzberg observed that the typical manager:

performs a great quantity of work at an unrelenting pace; undertakes activities marked by variety, brevity, and fragmentation; has a preference for issues that are current, specific, and nonroutine; prefers verbal rather than written means of communication; acts within a web of internal and external contacts; is subject to heavy constraints but can exert some control over the work.

4. Managers Key Roles

From these observations, Mintzberg identified the managers work roles as:

interpersonal informational decisional

5. Interpersonal Roles

Figurehead: representing the organization/unit to outsiders. Leader: motivating subordinates, unifying effort. Liaiser: maintaining lateral contacts.

6. Informational Roles

Monitor: overseeing information flows. Disseminator: providing information to subordinates. Spokesman: transmitting information to outsiders.

7. Decisional Roles

Entrepreneur: initiating and designing change. Disturbance handler: handling nonroutine events. Resource allocator: deciding who gets what and who will do what.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2003

BUSINESS: The Ultimate Resource

November 2003 Upgrade 14

Negotiator: negotiating.

All managerial work encompasses these roles, but the prominence of each role varies in different managerial jobs.

Context
Henry Mintzberg is perhaps the worlds premier management thinker, according to Tom Peters. His reputation has been made not by popularizing new techniques, but by rethinking the fundamentals of strategy and structure, management, and planning. His work on strategyin particular his ideas of emergent strategy and grass-roots strategy makinghas been highly influential. Influential author Gary Hamel commented: Five reasons I like Henry Mintzberg: he is a world class iconoclast. He loves the messy world of real companies. He is a master storyteller. He is conceptual and pragmatic. He doesnt believe in easy answers. The Nature of Managerial Work has produced few worthwhile imitators, but Mintzbergs rigor and originality have given his ideas staying power.

For More Information

Mintzberg, Henry. The Nature of Managerial Work. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2003