The last 100 years brought revolutions in science, culture, and economies across the world. While industries and the people working in them changed rapidly, the evolution of management inside those organizations often lags behind. Fortunately for you, that lag gives you an opportunity to stand out if you adopt the right mindset and develop the right skills. We’ll call this ‘Modern Management’.
In most workplaces today, you can still find ‘Old-School’ managers. These folks see themselves as the task-master and disciplinarian over replaceable employees. In contrast, modern managers see themselves as catalysts of change, growth and job satisfaction for a highly-skilled and educated workforce.
This article will help you be the latter by walking you through roles you’ll fill and the skills you’ll need to successfully manage a team in today’s workplaces.
How Did We Get Here?
Let’s start with some context. The early 20th century brought the popularization of Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management, which preached improved economic efficiency through standardized practices, reduced waste and work ethic. Workplaces applied Taylorism by making jobs that were simple and repetitive. In those days, the manager’s job was to make sure employees did their work as efficiently as possible.
For the most part, mid-century workers and employers were ok with this. Workers got well-paying jobs without the need for expensive degrees, and to the benefit of employers, the post-war workforce considered loyalty and work-ethic as a source a pride.
Today’s jobs are more complex and dynamic, wages and benefits have been driven down, and the staff who do the jobs have changed just as dramatically. Millennials, who famously value intrinsic benefits and development over money and job security, are now the largest age-group in the workforce. These people are willing and able to change jobs in pursuit of greater satisfaction, and a raise is rarely enough to buy their loyalty.
Meanwhile, middle-management and support roles are being cut to save costs, meaning that front-line managers often find themselves serving as recruiters, trainers, project managers, and analysts.
This means modern managers need to be highly innovative and involved in order to succeed.
So What Exactly is a ‘Manager’?
In a nutshell, a manager is someone who builds and supports a team. However, managers also act as messenger between middle-management and the front-lines. From the front-lines, they feed information to middle-managers to support strategic planning. From middle-management, they take strategic plans and turn them into reality. As a manager climbs the corporate ladder, they become less involved in managing people and more involved broader organizational initiatives.
Think of a manager as a juggler working to keep several balls in the air. But instead of cheap rubber balls, the manager juggles thousands or millions of dollars’ in inventory, personnel, contracts, and infrastructure. While there is no generally accepted list of manager responsibilities, I would sort the work of a manager into four main roles (their ‘juggling balls’):
Operations
This involves managing inventory and equipment, employee schedules and assignments, and services such as utilities and cleaners. This role involves prioritization and constant trade-offs. A manager can expect to make operational decisions throughout the day, every day.
Coordination
In this role, a manager is like a conductor directing each section of their orchestra to create music. Instead of sheet music, employees have clear instructions and expectations. Instead of instruments and the skill to play them, employees have the right tools and training. Once the work has begun, the manager simply manages the flow and keeps people coordinated.
In a work environment, problems arise and adjustments need to be made. Instead of a violinist with a strained wrist, you’ll have sick employees and broken equipment. A modern manager prepares for, identifies and responds to these challenges. They decisively assign work, direct employees from one role to another, and communicate changing priorities.
Leadership
The goal of any manager is to develop a high-performing team. Modern managers do this by creating an environment where employees are able and willing to execute their roles effectively.
Modern managers understand that the best way to do this is by building teams with shared values and trust with one another. The best leaders hire the right people, empower them, coach them, assign them the right tasks, and manage their performance.
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning starts with a vision of the organization’s future. From the vision, leadership works backward to determine what needs to happen between now and then to make the vision come true. This involves defining priorities, setting goals and allocating the necessary resources to take action.
Large-scale strategic plans generally come from upper middle-management and executives. However, given the proximity of front-line managers to the customers, they’ll often be asked to contribute. While macro-level strategies come from above, each manager needs a strategic plan to meet the goals and targets of their own team. For those reasons, every manager needs to understand strategic planning concepts.
This is a very general breakdown of the roles of a manager — you’ll find more detail on the job posting or summary for the specific role. For example, many of today’s managers participate in front-line work such as serving tables at a restaurant, stocking shelves in a retail store or laboring at a construction site.
What a Modern Manager Isn’t
Everyone has a different impression of what a manager is supposed to be, and for good reason. If you’re managing a team of engineers, you may be expected to be the most skilled engineer. However, if you manage a team of analysts, you’ll probably be needed more for your soft skills than actual analytical skills. This can confuse people, especially when there’s inconsistency across the organization.
Adding to the confusion, pop-culture loves portraying managers as idiots and power-trippers (I’m thinking of Michael Scott, Bill Lumbergh and the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert). To set things straight, here is a brief list of things that a modern manager is not:
Ruler of the Workplace
Managers typically have the power and responsibility of setting work schedules, appraising job performance, organizing training and development, and perhaps even discipline, recruitment and strategic planning.
However, most modern managers don’t have the power to unilaterally rule the workplace. A manager’s ‘legitimate authority’ is defined and limited by corporate HR policies, organizational objectives, collective agreements, and labor laws. In fact, many front-line managers are seeing their authority decline as large corporations delegate more responsibility to HR professionals.
That doesn’t mean managers aren’t immensely influential in the workplace. Instead of relying on legitimate authority, modern managers build and leverage their ‘charismatic authority’, which derives its power from the trust, connection and loyalty of their staff.
Human Resources Professional
Most modern managers work for large organizations with strict HR policies and HR specialists on staff. In these organizations, a manager does not have the power to simply give an employee a pay-raise, a promotion, discipline them or fire them.
Instead, managers have to provide documentation and evidence to an HR department. HR will then offer their recommendations and support the manager as they carry them out. Final signoffs and pay raise decisions usually fall to HR professionals. In my opinion, this is a good thing. Those people are usually well versed in labor relations and corporate policies and are able to make more objective decisions. In my own experience, I’ve always valued these folks, as they tend to save the manager from a lot of paperwork, and their due diligence can save you from charges of wrongful dismissal.
Expert at Everything
While ‘managers as experts’ are common in some fields (engineering for example), most managers supervise people who have more expertise in their respective roles.
This is ok. In fact, the best managers leverage the expertise of their employees to grow their own capacity. As the manager builds trust with an employee, they can delegate more, spend less time monitoring work, and extract valuable information from them to inform strategic decisions.
A modern manager needs to understand the job well enough to make operational and strategic decisions, but they need to be able to trust their staff to be the experts.
Some say managers will be obsolete in the growing knowledge & gig economy. I disagree — but it needs to evolve. Management should be a support role with decision-making authority. Spend less time telling people what to do and more time providing coaching and support. #Leadership
— Chris (@ChrisjBergen) February 20, 2020
What Skills Does a Modern Manager Need to Have?
While I mentioned that managers don’t need to be an expert in all aspects of the business, they do need to be an expert in some of them. Below is a broadly applicable set of skills any modern manager needs to have:
Leadership
This is a massive topic, and the scope of competencies it comprises is open to debate. In a nutshell, I would say it means being able to communicate a vision and empower and motivate the people around you. To do this well, you need self-awareness, self-management, communication and relationship management skills.
On one hand, you’ll be the cheerleader, generating energy, excitement, and positivity. On the other, you’ll be the General, setting expectations, providing direction and holding people accountable. In both of these roles, a leader shows unwavering humbleness, empathy, and pride.
Modern managers embody leadership through constant feedback, coaching, and one-on-ones. For the manager, these are both skills to be learned and habits to be developed. Without them, the manager cannot lead the team to reach its potential.
Communication
Effective communication is the foundation of effective motivation, coaching, team-work and conflict resolution. I’d say that 90% of management is communication. I’d also say that effective communication comes naturally to no-one.
That’s why modern managers never stop studying. They read books, take courses and experiment often. And despite all their ongoing efforts, they accept that they’ll never be a master — there is always more to learn. While you’ll learn a lot of tactics through your studies, you’ll find that effective communication can be summed up by this simple statement from Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is about drawing on data, facts, and experience to form an opinion. Good critical thinkers draw reasonable conclusions from information, determine what information is useful, and decide how much information is enough to make a decision.
Modern managers need to be able to think critically because their jobs are all about solving problems and making good decisions. To do this well, they need to understand the impacts of their decisions and how their decisions fit into the bigger picture. Great decision-making is what defines the very best managers and leaders.
Finances
Your team needs to be financially viable, that’s the bottom line (pun intended). To do this well, you need to understand the basic costs of doing business.
Most managers receive direction from head-office in the form of labor, sales, and operating budgets. So, while you probably won’t need financial expertise, you do need to understand the impacts of your actions. For instance, imagine an employee in sales asks you for permission to offer a discount to close a sale. As the manager, you’ll need to be able to weigh the financial implications of the discount and make a good decision.
You might even be responsible for inventory and office supply orders, business services, promotional efforts, employee recognition and more. If this is the case, you’ll need to exercise financial diligence all the time. I’ve seen managers who failed to connect their spending habits to the bottom line. For these folks, the result is often a stern call from head office, formal discipline or worse.
Don’t be scared though — if you don’t know what to do, ask someone! There will always be experienced people around. Modern managers aren’t afraid to admit when they don’t know something and seek help.
Project Management
Good managers find opportunities to improve their business, and they implement solutions. Often it’s just a quick adjustment they can make on-the-fly. Other times, it involves making a complex change to established business processes. When that’s the case, you’ll need to complete projects using project management techniques. This will involve analyzing the problem, developing a solution (often collaboratively), implementing an initial solution, and making adjustments. Sometimes, a process change will take several iterations before implementation is entirely complete. The more stakeholders are involved, the more complex the project becomes, and the more rigid your approach will need to be.
Project Management skills include being able to make judgment calls. For instance, are you moving one staff member from one department to another to help while it’s busy? You probably don’t need a formal project management process for that. Considering onboarding a group of temporary auxiliary staff for the Christmas season? That would probably merit a formal project management process.
Final Thoughts
Some modern theories claim that the role of the manager is becoming obsolete in the growing knowledge-based and gig economy. I disagree — instead, I believe it’s evolving (perhaps slower than it should be). Management in today’s workforce is a support role with decision-making authority. You’ll spend less time telling people what to do, and more time providing coaching and support.
Managers will always be difference makers. Wherever you find people working towards a common cause, you’ll find management — whether they call that person a manager, coach, supervisor, team lead, coordinator or scrum master — if they keep people rowing in the same direction, they’re managing.
Thanks for Reading!
