Management
Management is the art of getting work done through others. It involves marshalling a set of resources to achieve desired objectives. This section of the book provides a selection of important models and perspectives to help individuals do their jobs as managers more effectively.
What are the key things managers do? First, they make decisions about allocating people and money in an effective way. There are many analytical tools to help decision making, including decision trees and net present value analysis, but our focus here is on the behavioural side of things. Most decision making is not as rational as we might expect it to be. The chapter on cognitive biases in decision making discusses why people often make snap judgements that are flawed, and how effective managers can overcome these biases to make better decisions. There is also a chapter on negotiating techniques, with a specific focus on BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) that describes tactics for making decisions while in negotiation with others.
Second, a large part of effective management is about motivating others to take on work and do it in an effective way. This is hard because every individual has their own unique set of personal drivers, so that what works for one person may not work for the next. There is a chapter on emotional intelligence to tackle this question of how we understand and relate to others.
Finally, management involves making change happen. In large organisations there are standard, routine ways of working that everyone is comfortable with, so keeping things moving in an existing direction is actually very straightforward. But shifting the focus in another direction is where management gets difficult. John Kotter’s eight-step change management model is described as a well-known way of approaching this difficult challenge.
We often make a distinction between management and leadership, where management is about getting work done through others, and leadership is a process of social influence. Every executive really needs to be good at both, as they are complementary activities. But being an effective leader is difficult because, ultimately, it is about how others perceive you. To be a good leader, you therefore need to know yourself as well as you know your people. This is partly about emotional intelligence, as described earlier. It is also about getting feedback from others. So, the final model in this section is 360-degree assessment, which is a tool that leaders increasingly use to understand their own strengths and weaknesses.