Has Management Become Just a J-O-B? Five Enduring Lessons

A couple of weeks ago, I asked whether ‘management’ is obsolete. As a discipline, it’s less than 100 years old and emerged in response to the large and complex organizations that grew after World War I. Management doesn’t have an exam like the law or licensure like medicine to demonstrate proficiency. Nevertheless, management is a difficult practice that many have come to with poor training and confusing expectations. And yet, while some practices must change, there are some enduring lessons about management I’ve learned during my career:

Embrace Your Outliers: I had a manager in London who was gender blind and that was a real asset to me, who wanted to be one of the first women to present insurance risks at Lloyd’s of London. It was about competence and potential, not whether we used the same bathroom.

Get a Mentor; Be a Mentor: One of my favorite managers made it his job to take on new recruits in a structured way to develop our skills and show us the ropes even if we were not in his department. He insisted that we give back by becoming a mentor and I found that teaching was the best way to learn.

The Better You Are, The Better I Look: This was the philosophy of a dynamic manager who made a point of surrounding himself with the best people he could recruit. The team couldn’t have been more different and while that caused friction, it also made for amazing innovations, growth and surprising agility. I learned from him that diversity of thought is a competitive advantage and that as change is the only constant in business, it was advantageous to get out in front of it or get out of the way.

Make a Decision: I once asked a manager for feedback on areas to improve after a performance review. He thought for a minute and then said, “Don’t take forever to make a decision. Gather information, hear opinions and then make a decision. You can always modify it but people hate dithering.” Good advice.

You Are the Culture: If you are a manager, even if you aren’t the uber-manager, you set the tone for your department. People learn the way things are done from you, good or bad. Employees don’t leave their jobs; they leave their managers. A hard lesson I learned as a manager was when I took over from someone who had very different ideas about what it meant to manage. If I had to do it over, I’d spend a lot more time changing the culture before thinking I could change anything else.

I agree with Gary Hamel that management processes have to be redesigned to take account of new organizational structures, different workforce dynamics and technological advances. His Management Innovation Exchange is an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management. It doesn’t mean throwing out every good thing we learned as managers; it’s just about kicking out what no longer works, like celebrity managers.