Well – in another entirely non-joking mood – I don’t think it is bizarre. Not bizarre at all in fact, to manage anything well you have to have at least an understanding, preferably a passion, for the field in which you are managing. If that field happens to be academic in nature I firmly believe that not only do you have to find academic pursuits helpful & crucial but also you have to feel that specific academic pursuit helpful & crucial. So – at least in some shape or form – you have to be some kind of academic. The notion that it is possible to fly in a ‘manager’ to better perform in a ‘position’ is the worst of all.

That being said, insofar as my PS interests you, I was some kind of academic. Not only did I forego a lot of income that year but, more importantly, I graduated cum laude (it is admittedly not the most significant distinction but still: they asked me for a research position so I guess there was something).

I don’t hold a grudge by the way. I find the preselection mechanism for managers (and politicians) is counterproductive but this is how things are. The persons related to the PS were not in the field of sociology or group psychology so they’re not the ones to be making breakthroughs in this.

PS: what is the academic field studying ‘managerialness’? It certainly isn’t economics & MBA’s are about anything but managerial skills.

Perhaps it’s more would [and would stay on ‘happily’] than “could.”

The root issue is not, I think, whether managers should be gurus, be more parental or have to enjoy bringing the bad messages … the root issue is as Harry hinted above: manager selection has a basic flaw. Typically the best subject-matter experts survive the pre-selection and after that the final selection stage is limited to a group not necessarily including the best managers (this is a common problem in our complex society; politicians on the ballot are rarely part of the set of people best suited for office).

The only way to solve the problem is to force the selection process to be different. Mind you: the solution is not to select ‘managers’ right away. The worst managers are those that have no expertise whatsoever or have no interest in the field or domain in which they manage. A whole industry of absolutely ridiculous management litterature is predicated on the nonsense that to be a manager is to have some specific stand-alone skill.

PS: I lied, I have some experience in the academic field. In a sabbatical I got a master degree in cognitive sciences and was offered a job as researcher. I would have to settle for half of the pay (which could have been OK) but on my question “given my background, maybe I could help by also helping to manage the department” I got total stupefaction on the other side. Apparently – at least in that University – ‘helping to manage’ was interpreted as a threat to the status quo and they largely preferred to stay oblivious of modern people management experience ;-)

PPS: It would be unfair to single out as per tha above academics – the same reaction would be a natural one for an engineering, a finance, a HR or most every other functional area ;-(

If I may expand on three of his points:

1) Communicating up and down the org chart. This is easily the most important function, where “communicating” is taken to mean: “your job is to facilitate the transfer of the maximum amount of data with least noise and fastest cycle-times, while providing the least amount of interruption in ongoing work.” Or something like that.

2) Understanding and negotiating with those who know more than you about how to get things done (while dealing with related asymmetry of your greater knowledge regarding why they need to get done: Repeat three times after me: “3rd Quarter Earnings Call…”). The more I reflect on this one, the more I’m sure the U.S. is screwed long-term from our ridiculous management of risk- and reward-sharing in both our employment and social contracts (especially given increased visibility into both: “So, you wrote the entire MMIX plug-in for Eclipse this weekend—that’s great: I happen to love Donald Knuth! Now when are you going to finish that Drupal form-checking module you’ve been working on all month?” meets “Hey, saw the 10-K we released last week: $220K in revenue per employee, up 23%… Explain to me again why I only got a 4% raise with a 6% bonus this year: Did PwC not have the numbers ready or something?”).

3) Keeping teams motivated and working in same direction/at the same pace (no critical path weirdness; no team pathologies: I once had a senior developer who checked the code of a peer developer of whom he was jealous—but who reported to him on the project—into a CVS directory called “piss bucket”).

This is one of the things I love about the show “Dirty Jobs” – the guys (and it is virtually all guys, sorry) who do the filthiest work always seem to have the biggest smiles on their faces…

Isn’t he really describing what he thinks of as the ethos of a good manager. I don’t think he is denying that managers have power over their employees. I think he is saying that if you want to be a good manager you have to focus more on the responsibilities than the power.

Which is probably a good lesson in a lot of areas.

I thought there were useful things in Schwartz’s article, but I hate the “turn the org chart upside down” nonsense. Neither employees nor managers ever believe it. If you are telling other people what to do you have power over them. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best. I also find org charts to be inaccurate pictures of how power and control is distributed throughout the organisation. People spend time playing with them in lieu of actually tackling real problems.

That said, I think it is crucial for any manager to retain a painful sense of her own ignorance and incompentance: everything that counts is being done by the competent people that work for you. You should however beat them at overview of the work, knowledge of the larger goals of the organisation and knowledge of everyone’s skills.

I do not believe that managing academics can be very different from managing any other group of skilled professionals. Managing is not about firing people, that is not the lever you use to get people to perform and in most European companies it is a long an costly process. Managing people involves cheering them on, telling them frankly that behaviour must change, steadfastly defending their interests and having more attention on their growth and development than they have themselves. You can do it without any form of hierarchical power if you can convince those you are managing that what you do is useful.

If you cannot convince them perhaps you should be otherwise engaged.

The heart of the problem for many academic, health and nonprofit organisations is that people work there mainly because they care about the content. They get promoted from the ranks but would be much, much happier doing X rather than managing the doing of X: it is a different skill set which rarely crops up in the same person.

engels (#33): I, too, thought that was an unnecessary flourish. The grain of truth might be that if you do it well people don’t especially notice that you do it well (but doing something difficult well is a major source of satisfaction for human beings, which is one reason that distributing education and opportunities for doing difficult things well much more equally is important).

rdb’s link was pretty good I thought—the comment about the stupidity of the idea that you can become a good manager by reading a book that takes 10 minutes is pertinent here. I took aaron’s comments to be material for reflection for someone starting out, and I not only think they’re pretty good for that, but that anything more would have to get very context-specific.

I say all that, having had very little experience as a manager, and not having liked what I’ve had—but as someone who has watched several managers closely and with a lot of interest.