Managerial profiles

Engineering Management International, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company,

MANAGERIAL

1 (1981) 57-61 Amsterdam - Printed

57 in The Netherlands

PROFILES

Luis C. Vite Privada del Seguro Social No. 5, Hermosillo,

Sonora

(Mexico)

ABSTRACT

This article presents some thoughts management styles, the relationship

ordinary management and leadership, sets forth some of the characteristics effective leader/managers.

on of

and of

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INTRODUCTION

Good managers, the ones who get the best from their subordinates, and who thereby produce positive results for their organizations, are the keys to success for an institution. Perhaps the biggest challenge for the technical manager is that he must develop an impressive and almost frightening array of skills and resources, not only in the technical areas, but in the social and human behavioral sciences as well. The superior manager has to be a craftsman and his first task is to make his enterprise perform its purpose; but this is not enough. In our society of organizations, managers also have to assume social responsibilities, they have to think through the values, the beliefs, and the commitments of their society, and they have to assume leadership responsibility beyond the accomplishment of the specific mission of their institutions. This responsibility creates a major “new challenge”, and raises many difficult problems. A question that the good technical manager must continually ask himself: “Just how efficient and effective is my engineering group?” Measures of efficiency for engineering groups are often difficult to find 0167-5419/81/0000~000/$02.50

0 1981

Elsevier

but the answer will depend on the characteristics and functions of the specific “Efficiency” groups. refers to the ratio of the output to resource input (productivity) and “effectiveness” refers to the extent to which objectives are reached. Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is concerned with doing the right things. Efficiency and effectiveness can be considered to be the two main challenges of administrative positions and managerial roles. Thus if the manager finds ‘his department lacking in efficiency and effectiveness, he should evaluate his own performance as a leader; let us see why.

MANAGEMENT

AS AN ART

If we assume that management is an art (and who would say that it is not?), we can find three indispensable aspects of the artistic process: craft, vision, and communication (Boettinger [ 19791). Just as artists need to master their crafts, managers need to master their skills in dealing with people and in expressing themselves. Just as artists need vision to realize their art, managers need imagination and audacity to redesign their organizations. Just as great masters communicate their visions, great

Scientific

Publishing

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leaders inspire those who work for them. If we take the comparison of management with art further, we will find that art has some attributes that could be applied to the managerial practice. “Art is the imposition of a pattern, a vision of a whole, on many disparate parts so as to create a representation of that vision; art is an imposition of order on chaos” (Boettinger, 1979, p. 196). The artist must have not only a vision of what he or she wants to communicate, but also the skills or craft with which to present the vision. To see how this distinction relates to management, we shall underline two qualities that good artists have: competence (technical skills) and imagination (the facility of mind to arrive at a vision). By combining these qualities a leader, like an artist, can communicate his visions and create a response in those around him. In the arts, the proper use of tools evolves after years of innumerable mistakes and a few precious successes. We may ask: “Are companies making sure that their managers are masters of the best available techniques before they become responsible for important tasks?” Acquiring technique is essential for competence. Most artists use materials whose nature has to be known in detail to produce the best work, e.g. musical instruments are complex in their construction and difficult to manipulate, but the true artist knows their limitations and how to work with them.

MANAGEMENT

AND LEADERSHIP

The materials with which the managerial leader works are human talents (including his own) and managerial tools. The core of his job is to accomplish big purposes through human efforts and through adequate use of managerial functions. On the other hand, a manager must understand not only the persons in his own organization, but also the drives, anxieties and reactions of those

beyond the perimeter of his control like stockholders, customers, competitors, government officials, etc. A fundamental question is: “What is the ideal way to develop adequate managerial leadership?” Leadership inevitably requires using power to influence the actions and thoughts of other people. A manager, is mainly a problem solver, whether his energies are directed towards goals, resources, organization structures or people. Based on this conception, leadership is a practical effort to direct affairs, because the manager requires that many people operate at different levels of status and responsibility. To be a superior manager takes persistence, hard work, analytical ability, toughmindedness, intelligence and, perhaps most importantly, tolerance and goodwill. Managers and leaders differ widely in their world views. These differences include: orientation toward their goals, their work, their human relations and themselves. Leaders adopt a personal and active attitude toward goals. They influence by altering things, evoking images, and establishing specific desires and objectives to determine the direction a business takes. The net result of this influence is to change the way people think about what is desirable, possible and necessary. Ordinary managers, on the other hand, tend to adopt impersonal, if not passive attitudes toward goals; in this case, the managerial goals arise from necessities. The leader, to be effective, needs to project ideas into images that excite people, and only then develop choices that give meaning to the projected images. Consequently, leaders create excitement in work. Leaders work from high risk positions, indeed, they are often disposed to seek out risk, especially where opportunity and reward appear high. On the other hand, for those who become ordinary managers, the instinct of survival dominates their need for risk, and their ability to tolerate mundane work assists their survival. The

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same cannot be said for leaders, who sometimes react to mundane work as to an affliction. In human relations, ordinary managers it makes avoid solitary activity because them anxious. They prefer to work with They relate to people according people. to the role they play in a sequence of events or in a decision making process. Leaders, on the other hand, are concerned with ideas, and relate in more intuitive and empathic ways. Empathy is not simply a matter of paying attention to other people, it is also the capacity to sense intuitively the thoughts and feelings of others, to take in emotional signals, and to make them mean something in a relationship with an individual. Empathy is a very important component of communication skills (Hybels and Weaber, 1974). The ordinary manager’s orientation to people as actors in a sequence of events deflects his attention away from the substance of peoples’ concerns and toward their roles in a process. The distinction is simply between a manager’s attention to how things get done, and a leader’s attention to what the events and decisions mean to the participants. That is, ordinary managers focus the attention of others on procedure and not on substance. Here, actors become involved in the problem of how to make decisions and not what decisions to make. Leaders attract strong feelings of identity and difference, or of love and hate. Thus, human relations in leadership structures often appear turbulent and intense. Such an atmosphere intensifies individual motivation and often produces unanticipated outcomes. In contrast, ordinary managers seek out and need order instead of the potential chaos that many fear in human relationships. Considering their sense of self, ordinary managers see themselves as conservators and regulators of an existing order of affairs with which they personally identify, and from which they gain rewards. Perpetu-

ating and strengthening existing institutions enhances a manager’s sense of selfworth. Leaders tend to be people who feel separate from their environment. They may work in organizations, but they never really belong to them. Their sense of who they are does not depend upon memberships, work roles and other social indicators of identity. This notion of separateness seems to explain why certain individuals search out opportunities for change. The methods used to bring change may be technological, ideological, or political, but the object is the same: to alter profoundly human, economic and political relationships. An integrated person, someone whose intuitive and rational capacities are both highly developed, can make a good leader. Often these people also move others with words. They excite emotions in support of a cause. That is why the most effective managers, the ones who are successful in motivating their employees, are those who feel a need to influence others for the good of the company. Good managers are not motivated by a need for personal aggrandizement, or by a need to get along with subordinates, but rather by a need to influence other people’s behavior for the good of the whole organization (McClelland and Burnham, 1979). In other words, good managers want power. However, power can lead to authoritarianism and therefore needs to be balanced with maturity and a high degree of self-control. Apparently, the key to managerial success is what psychologists call, “the need for achievement”, the desire to do things better or more efficiently than they have been done before. Because these people focus on personal improvement, or doing things better by themselves (achievement motivated), they want concrete, short-term feedback of their performance, so that they can tell how well they are doing (Koontz, 1968; Luthans, 1973; Maslow, 1970). On the other hand, the manager’s job

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seems to require someone who can influence people rather than someone who does things better on his own. We might expect that in the motivational aspect, the successful manager will have a greater need for power than a need to achieve. But what about the need to be liked, - the “affiliation motive?” The manager with a high need to be liked is precisely the one who wants to stay on good terms with everybody and therefore is the one most likely to make exceptions in terms of particular needs. This kind of manager might create poor morale because other people in the organization will tend to regard exceptions to the rules as unfair to themselves. Another important type of manager is the one who is motivated by a need of personal power; these kinds of people might be more effective if they are able to create a greater team spirit. Generally, however, they are not disciplined enough to be good institution builders. Finally, does this indicate that a good manager is one who cares only for power and is not concerned about the needs of other people? Surely not, because influencing people without having to use power is the key to leader effectiveness, and the good manager has other characteristics that must still be taken into account (Zaleznit, 1979). We may conclude that either kind of power orientation creates better morale in subordinates than the “people or affiliative” orientation. We must consider that a concern for power is essential to good management. Leaders must choose the kind of leader they want to be, and nobody else can make that choice for them. Naturally, in making a choice, the first consideration will be the criterion of effectiveness. What is the leadership or managerial style that makes a manager more effective -- in building a team, making good decisions, getting productivity, improving morale, etc.?

MANAGEMENT

STYLE

Style is an emphatic, coherent, consistent, and conscious statement about ourselves; it is the image we offer to the world. That is why it is important for a manager to develop a natural and highly personal managerial style. It is also important for the manager to try to acquire a sensitivity to how people react (Uris, 1969). A manager has a choice of basing his managerial style on one of two main theories: theory X or theory Y or perhaps he may develop something in between (McGregor, 1960). The assumptions of theory X are that most people inherently dislike work, and will try to avoid as much of it as possible. They must be directed, controlled, and threatened with punishment for failure, so that they will make adequate efforts toward meeting company objectives. Because most people wish to avoid responsibility and want security, they prefer external direction to individual decision-making. Theory Y, on the other hand, basically assumes that: (1) most people do not inherently dislike work - it is as natural as rest or play; (2) people will exercise selfdirection and self-control to meet objectives to which they are committed; (3) commitment to objectives is a function of rewards associated with their achievement; (4) most people can learn not only to accept but also to seek responsibility; (5) imagination in the solution of organizational problems is widely, not narrowly distributed among the population; (6) in modern industrial life, the intellectual potential of most people is only partially used. For most technical managers, theory Y has much more to offer than theory X, particularly in managing fellow professionals. Within theory Y there is considerable leeway for individuality in choosing the response to a given situation. The occasional use of authority is not inconsistent with this theory, if commitment to organizational

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objectives cannot be obtained by other means. Once the commitment has been obtained and the obstacles have been rehowever, reliance on authority moved, should give way to participative management; i.e. in getting employees directly involved in the process of defining their responsibilities, identifying the meaningful indicators of their performance, establishing their performance goals and formulating their own improvement targets. REFERENCES Boettinger, H.M., 1979. Is management really an art?, In: Harvard Business Review On Human Relations, Harper & Row, New York, pp. 195206.

Hybels, S. and Weaber, R.L., 1974. Speech/Communication, Van Nostrand, New York. Koontz (1968). Principles of Management: An Analysis of Managerial Functions. Luthans, F., 1973. Organizational Behavior, McGrawHill, New York. Maslow, A.H., 1970. Motivation and Personality (2nd edn.), Harper & Row, New York. McClelland, D.C. and Burnham, D.H., 1979. Power is the great motivator, In: Harvard Business Review On Human Relations, Harper & Row, New York, pp. 341-358. McGregor, D., 1960. The Human Side of Enterprise, McGraw-Hill, New York. Uris, A., 1969. Increasing your interpersonal awareness, Chem. Eng., (February 10): 134-138. Zaleznic, A., 1979. Managers and leaders: are they different? Relations, 179.

In: Harvard Business Review On Human Harper & Row, New York, pp. 162-