Can We Call Management "A Job?"

There are a couple of different ways to answer this question:

If you are an executive-level person: “Yes, generally. I could do without them and am looking into automating them, if we’re being honest. But I don’t really want to talk to the worker bees. That feels beneath me. I’m past that point of my professional arc. So I need managers in that sense.”

If you are a middle manager type: “Absolutely. Nothing would get done around here without me. I make the trains run and keep the peons on task.”

If you are a standard employee: “I’ve had good ones, but honestly I’ve mostly had bad ones. The bad ones have been the worst part of those jobs. A lot of them don’t understand the work to be done, or how to prioritize it. To be productive, you almost need to go around them.”

I’d say these are the conventional approaches to what “management” even means, and how actually useful it is — it varies by rank and title how you will perceive the idea of management, and it requires you to admit that work is an exercise in feudalism. The kings don’t want to talk to the pawns, so there needs to be a layer in the middle of the kings and the pawns, and if that layer s terrible, it generally can be ignored so long as the kings are doing their thing (deals), the pawns are doing their thing (tasks), and the revenue can be stated as “growing.” Basically, there’s no true responsibility in the middle management ranks, but there’s a high perception of responsibility, which allows for virtue-signaling galore and justifications of necessity. In sheer realistic terms, though, most middle managers cripple the bottom line.

Good essay earlier this week from Ed Zitron on whether management is a real job , including some notable pull-outs:

1. “Good” managers are seen as stewards of successful organizations that they rarely interact with the actual work product of — but because they’re in ‘management,’ they are given credit.
2. Welding management to control has given us a bizarre and broken view of the average company’s corporate structure — we know that managers get paid more and seem to have better treatment at the company…so surely they do something, right? Oh, right, they order other people around. That’s a job, I think? Maybe?
3. The problem comes from when the manager begins to see their role not as a form of labor, but as a kind of royalty — a Duke or Lord that makes people do stuff because it’s “beneath” them because of the hierarchy of the office.
4. This is one of the specific issues with modern management — the people that make calls and demands of laborers based on a vague understanding of the work product, which leads to micromanagement and laborer misery. Shitty managers bug you about things that they know you don’t have an answer for, and make unrealistic demands based on only understanding outputs rather than processes. The disconnection from the process is perhaps deliberate within the executive sect — that you are disconnected from the pain of actual work and can simply rise above it and “call the shots.”
5. Management theory and professional-personal branding have led to a transformation of words like “leadership” and “management” and “strategy” into totally meaningless LinkedIn memes. We have lionized the idea of “leadership,” describing CEOs as if they are generals on a battlefield making the calls that can win the day, without asking whether any of these people lead or make the decisions that change their companies. What calls do these CEOs make? What do they do on a day-to-day basis, and how much of that matters to the company’s bottom line?

All good stuff. Check out his article.

In reality, most managers need to be coaches, but coaching gets lip-serviced as some type of “soft skill.” Managers think they’re “go-getters” who “make things happen,” when in reality many cannot set their own work priorities. They focus exhaustively on tasks and check-ins — how many managers have you had who demand daily meetings, even though 4 of the 5 in a given week are about absolutely nothing? — and they deem every single project “urgent,” and yet somehow, some way we’re still writing articles trying to explain why burnout happens. Uh, it largely happens because of these managers.

Is it a job? Depends on who you ask. But the fact that it’s not definitively a job and yet it’s the only way to make more money in most organizations … well, that seems like a massive problem.

Takes?