Managing Leadership^®

In Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Peter Drucker identifies the following as the five basic operations in the work of a manager:

1. Setting objectives
2. Organizing
3. Motivating and communicating
4. Measuring
5. Developing people

As simple as they are to enumerate, they are carefully considered instruments of managerial effectiveness. Drucker was concerned that most managers attain such poor control of their own time that they actually spend hardly any of it at all on these essential managerial jobs. Failure to do so will cause an organization, or members within it, to drift aimlessly – you’ve all likely seen this at one time or another.

But focusing on these brings them back in sync with each other and, more importantly, with the organization’s goals. They all require not merely analysis, but discipline. For example, setting objectives doesn’t tell us merely what to do, but what not to do – and that’s where the discipline comes in. Organizing means we arrange ourselves and our processes around our goals, and not the reverse.

Motivating and communicating is an especially large topic; it requires close attention and often significant amounts of the manager’s time, but most of the rest of a manager’s work might as well not be done if this part of it isn’t done conscientiously and effectively. Of particular interest in this regard (of syncing people and the organization) is measuring, which Drucker identified as involving the establishment of methods for determining both the organizational and individual effectiveness of what we are doing; it helps us connect our work to the efforts of others and its overall purpose. Developing people includes, specifically, yourself, and it is largely what this current series of posts is intended to help you do intelligently.

These five operations are conceived and inter-related as they are in order to enable the manager to do his or her two most important tasks: 1) develop a productive enterprise, that is, one that produces more than it consumes, or that, in Drucker’s own words, makes itself greater than its parts; and 2) integrate both the present and long-term needs of the organization into every current decision and activity. This requires that the manager develop the ability to simultaneously exhibit both perspective and focus, and to cause this integration to be meaningfully expressed in his or her organization.

It is of increasing importance for managers operating in the world of social networks and the “wiki-workplace” to understand these managerial roles as delineated by Drucker. We will take them up in the coming months. For now, we will turn to the subject of top management. See you tomorrow.

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Please be sure see all the posts in this series!

1. Marketing Management
2. Defining Management
3. Understanding what we do
4. Understanding who we are
5. Faith or deeds?
6. Doing “certain – and fairly simple – things”
7. The fundamental requirements
8. The basic resource of the business enterprise
9. Making tasks meaningful
10. Making it matter
11. Setting the rules
12. Book Review: Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

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