What is Management?

I have had a odd career path over the last 20+ years of full time work. As part of that path, I have been a manager in several different kinds of businesses. Yet when I go on interviews in my current field (Technical Operations/DevOps), I have often been told that my management experience outside the SaaS world "doesn't count". When I have tried to open a conversation into why (or why not) that experience is irrelevant, I have yet to receive anything resembling an answer. Faced with what seems like a hard-point of irrational belief, I have shifted into a discussion of what management is, only to discover that the people I am discussion with cannot define management either.

I found this very odd.

This led me back into rechecking the book, articles and blogs that are famous in the 'management world', only to find that they don't really ever define management in a simple comprehensive way. They either focuses on specific behaviors, or waxed on about System 2 philosophies/approaches.

Now if you have read the work of the late Nobel prize winning Dr Daniel Kahneman's book: Thinking, Fast and Slow, then you know what I am referring to. If not then I try to summarize System 1 and System 2 in my previous article.

This left me wondering if I had a simple definition of management that could fit into a System 1 response. After all, I do consider myself a good manager, with the System 1 responses most of the time. Looking to explain my knee-jerk reactions, this is what I came up with:

Management is finding the balance point between the needs of the company and the needs of your employees.

But what do you think?