Managers' Roles Shift

Even though I'm semi-retired (I teach two courses a year at The New School), I can't break a 55-year habit of reading about management and management trends.

My favorite books over those years have been: Peter Drucker's The Practice of Management, Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence, Richard N.Foster's Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage, John Kotter's Leading Change and Jim Collins's Good to Great.

My favorite magazine has been the Harvard Business Review and its online blog, HBR.org. I'm probably being too nerdy, but HBR is the only magazine I tend to read cover to cover because I'm still fascinated by how the media and academia, where I have spent my entire career, are managed.

In general, I believe the legacy media--newspapers, magazines, broadcasting and outdoor (OOH)--are quite poorly managed, with the exception of The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Harvard Business Review and iHeart Media. Of the new media, Google clearly leads the way, and Facebook is a at the bottom of the pack.

If the media, in general, are poorly managed, then academia is disastrously managed. Administrative and bureaucratic bloat has gotten bloatier and less productive in the last several years as tenure, among other things, continues to stifle innovation.

Management-challenged media companies and academic institutions would do well to read a Harvard Business Review article in the current March-April issue titled "Managers Can't Do It All: It's Time to Reinvent Their Role for the New World of Work" by Diane Gherson and Lynda Gratton. In the article the authors write that the roles of managers have changed across three dimensions: power, skills and structure. Here's how the roles have changed:

POWER: From "My team makes me successful" shifts to "I’m here to make my team successful." From "I’m rewarded for achieving business goals" shifts to "I’m also rewarded for improving team engagement, inclusion and skills relevancy." From "I control how people move beyond my unit" shifts to "I scout for talent and help my team move fluidly to wider opportunities."                         

SKILLS: From "I oversee work" shifts to "I track outcomes." From "I assess team members against expectations" shifts to "I coach them to achieve their potential and invite their feedback on my management." From "I provide work direction and share information from above" shifts to "I supply inspiration, sensemaking and emotional support.

STRUCTURE: From "I manage an intact team of people in fixed jobs in a physical workspace" shifts to "My team is fluid and the workspace is digital." From "I set goals and make assessments annually" shifts to "I provide ongoing guidance in priorities and performance feedback." From "I hold an annual career discussion focused on the next promotion" shifts to "I’m always retraining my team and providing career coaching."

Wow! The centralized command-and-control, top-down management style of media management that I grew up in and probably used is going the way of the buggy whip. Let's hope media companies and academia read the Harvard Business Review and change their management style, and let's hope Vladimir Putin and the Russian military don't.