In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of writers came together in management. They were looking for a scapegoat to blame for the failure of corporate America to deal with the Japanese trade encroachment. The rallying cry was to replace managers with leaders. One of the most strident critics of management was Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik. It is time to resurrect management, to take its rightful place alongside leadership as an essential organizational function. To do this, we need to expose the writings of management’s detractors to show what nonsense they were writing. There was really nothing wrong with the management function in the 1970s, just the way it was practiced. It is especially important to address Zaleznik’s attack because the Harvard Business Review still publishes his original 1977 article (Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?) in its collection of leadership articles, thus creating the impression that his views are still relevant. and updated when in fact they are dangerously outdated and harmful.
Zaleznik makes his case against modern management by comparing it to the scientific management theories of Fredrick Taylor. Given that Taylor died in 1915, it’s surprising that Zaleznik doesn’t show why it’s legitimate to compare Taylor’s views to the way modern managers operate, so his views are questionable before we even begin. to examine their arguments.
In a book published in 1989, The Managerial Mystique, Zaleznik says that “what Taylor proposed through his management system lies at the heart of how modern managers are supposed to think and act. The principle is rationality. The goal is efficiency.” More importantly, Zaleznik believed that managers and leaders differ in terms of their personalities. Following Taylor’s example, Zaleznik describes managers as cold efficiency machines who “take impersonal, if not passive, attitudes toward goals.” Furthermore, “managers see themselves as conservators and regulators of an existing order of things.” He tells us that the “managers’ tactics seem flexible: on the one hand, they bargain and haggle; on the other, they use rewards, punishments and other forms of coercion”. Thus, managers are only seemingly flexible and are coercive, even manipulative in Zaleznik’s eyes. In his 1977 article, Zaleznik makes exactly the same claim, stating that: “…subordinate managers are often heard characterized as inscrutable, aloof, and manipulative.”
Zaleznik would have us believe that while managers seek activity with people, “they maintain a low level of emotional involvement in those relationships.” Apparently, they also “lack empathy.” Zaleznik expands on the emotional theme in The Managerial Mystique by telling us that managers “operate within a narrow range of emotions. This emotional softness, when combined with concern for process, makes managers appear inscrutable, aloof, and even manipulative.
It is unclear what evidence Zaleznik has for these damning charges. He seems to be doing nothing more than extrapolating Fredrick Taylor’s conception of management without ever asking whether management as a function is compromised by Taylor’s characterization. Beginning with Taylor’s adoration for mechanical efficiency, Zaleznik has branded every manager of all time with the same brush.
Zaleznik believes that leaders are creative and interested in substance, while managers are only interested in process: how things are done, not what. For Zaleznik, “leaders, who are more concerned with ideas, relate more intuitively and empathetically.” managers
Fundamentally, there is no real basis for this personality distinction. It is not enough to say that managers were in control from Taylor’s time until the Japanese invasion exposed them. Even if this is historically accurate, there is nothing in this alleged fact that commits management to operating in this manner today. The simple way to avoid Zaleznik’s condemnation of management is to define it functionally, in terms of what purpose it serves, not in terms of how it actually achieves its purpose. This leaves the means of management completely open.
Management vs. Leadership
An easy way to define leadership and management is to say that leaders promote new directions while managers execute existing ones. Furthermore, it is widely recognized today that leaders can have very different personalities, from calm, determined and factual to bubbly, erratic but inspiring cheerleaders. The whole movement to differentiate leaders from managers along personality lines has failed miserably and it is time to abandon it. The truth is that both leaders and managers can be inspiring, they just have a different approach. An inspiring leader moves us to change direction, while an inspiring manager motivates us to work harder. Yes, managers promote efficiency, but this doesn’t have to mean Fredrick Taylor’s mechanical assembly line efficiency. Management is like investing. Effective managers deploy all the resources at their disposal where they will get the best return on that investment. In modern organizations, populated by savvy knowledge workers, this could mean creating self-managing teams. To get the best performance from such talent, modern managers must be good people coaches, nurturers, and developers. Sure, they need to measure and monitor performance to know if their people deployments are paying off, but this doesn’t mean doing it in a cold, mechanical, or controlling way.
In conclusion, management is as important a function in organizations as leadership and it is time to put aside the views of writers like Abraham Zaleznik who argue otherwise. Also, the fact that his writing is still endorsed by Harvard Business School raises questions about his credibility.