Do Managers Matter Anymore?
Back in 2008, Google launched Project Oxygen—a companywide study of management practices at the organization, based on employee experience and feedback, in an effort to understand what good management is. ?
In the early days, Google had attempted to keep hierarchies to a minimum and eliminate the need for oversight. But as the company grew, the need for managers grew apace. By 2008, Google executives noticed a disturbing trend in exit interviews where outgoing employees consistently blamed unsatisfactory management as their reason for leaving. Project Oxygen was created in response.??
Google wanted to understand—Why do managers matter? Do managers matter??
But to understand why this question was important and why it desperately needed to be asked, we need to first understand where our ideas of management come from. ?
What is management, really??
Ask a manager how they define their role and I’ll bet they will give you an answer that is some mix of words like planning, project management, strategy, etc. Certainly, managerial job descriptions highlight words to attract talent. ? ?
But contrast this with what you see most managers do and you’ll find that the role is not one-size-fits-all. There are countless duties that are central to good management that is not listed in any job description. Motivating my team through challenges, crafting work that keeps them engaged and invested, and building a positive and inclusive work environment. ??
The century-old mindset of managers as overseers is out of date. The role has outgrown all definitions of supervision and expanded into something that is critical to any organization.?
Which brings me to the question—What does It mean to be a manager in this day and age? Is management a rank, a responsibility, or simply a title? ? ?
Manager as supervisors?
For much of the 20th century, a manager’s role was defined by processes and goals. A manager was a person with the authority to direct workers towards a certain goal. A product of the ongoing Industrial Revolution, early theorists like Henri Fayol?drew from military theory and practice to figure out how to manage the people under their supervision. Unsurprisingly, this meant a reliance on rigid hierarchies was baked into the role. The fundamental skills of a manager at this time were planning and organization.?
Hierarchies became more important as the size of companies grew over the next few decades. An average corporation employed thousands of people across multiple places?and the role of the manager grew from process supervisor to middleman. They now acted as a bridge between the upper-level leaders and the general workforce. Effective communication became an essential skill for the job.?
Managers as people wranglers????
When I first became a manager in the mid-90s (managing my uncle’s newspaper) the idea of the manager was undergoing a huge evolution. The understanding that management was a science had entered the public consciousness in the early ‘80s and was being practiced by the ‘90s. ?
I was taught that, in addition to overseeing process deployment, to be a successful manager I?had to be a people wrangler. Build relationships with the company’s?leaders, clients, and employees. Create productive workspaces, not through supervision alone but collaboration as well.?It wasn’t enough to tell people what to do. You also had to understand what they needed. ?
These changes were driven, not just from the top but from below as well. Companies like Toyota and Whole Foods revolutionized management science by introducing innovative new ideas based on the principles of collaboration and mutual growth. ?
Toyota, for example, introduced to American corporations the idea that innovation could be a two-way street. They encourage their front-line employees to be innovators and change agents. Most American companies at the time relied on high-level input and staff experts to develop improvements to their manufacturing processes. But Toyota gave all their employees, especially the ones on the ground in their manufacturing plants, the tools, and permission to act as subject matter experts in their respective fields. ?
By harnessing the intellect of its ordinary employees, Toyota consistently outperformed their competitors for most of the ‘90s and early ‘00s. ??
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Managers as coaches?
We are in the middle of another revolution right now. The idea of management is going through another tectonic expansion. Thanks to rapid technological innovations, flattening hierarchies, agile work, and new attitudes about talent. Managers have to do more than ever. Their spans of control are bigger and more fluid. ??
With Project Oxygen, Google researchers began by trying to prove a negative. In their quest to understand why managers matter, they began by asking—Do managers matter??
They wanted to eliminate managerial oversight from teams to see if this had any impact on productivity and satisfaction. The answer, as they very quickly figured out, was a resounding YES! Teams with managers were happier and more productive.??
What then made a good manager??
This is where things got really interesting. By conducting surveys and performance evaluations, Google found out that what employees wanted from a manager wasn’t simply direction or project management. According to the study, to be a great, managers had to:?
Compare this with the understanding of management in the preceding decades and it’s clear how huge an evolution there has been in our understanding of the role.?
Certainly, as the CEO of PTP, I do a lot more and expect a lot more from my management team. As a manager, I like getting involved with the different departments, understanding their needs, and highlighting their successes. I expect my managers to understand what makes my employees tick, what their expectations are from their jobs, and what the leadership team?can do to help them grow.?? ?
I believe managers should build empathetic connections with their teams, create collaboration in the workspace, mentor and guide talent, and create effective communication between the top and the bottom.?
I believe that good management means creating and leading a community. ???
Conclusion?
As the workplace evolved, our expectations from the manager have evolved with it. Managers today need to be more than just effective organizers or authoritarians. They’re responsible, not just for business results, but also for employee development, organizational culture, and digital transformation. They’re expected to lead teams and projects flexibly, remotely, and with empathy. For example:?
Our expectations from our managers have expanded but our definitions are still catching up. If we want our managers to prepare for the role as it exists today, rather than the role as understood twenty or even a hundred years back, we need to start focusing on the skills that matter the most today. We need to leave behind?established dogmas to embrace a more nurturing understanding of management science.?
This means deemphasizing some of the fundamental skills we previously prized in management and learning some new ones. Less focus on organization and command, more on collaboration, mentorship, and empowerment. ??
And as managers we need to be asking ourselves, “Should I be up-skilling, re-skilling, changing the way I think about this job?”?