Tyranny of Managing as Decision-Making

What is management? We train some of our managers in business school. They study marketing, accounting, finance, statistics, operations, policy, organizational behavior, economics, and decision-making. Recently, students also have courses in ethics, leadership, and entrepreneurism. Dig into the syllabus and you'll find an emphasis on making good choices. That's right, to manage is understood to mean be the decision maker. What a burden.

It's time we gave up the notion that the head of the organization can control the body.

I'm not saying our future managers needn't study the above subjects. Those subjects introduce the wanna-be manager to the everyday conversation of managing. However, I am saying that managing as decision-making as a way of understanding the primary role of a manager is obsolete.

The managing as decision-making paradigm is left over from the time when we thought the head is smarter than the body. The one person on top tells the rest what to do. The brain controls the rest of the organism. Armies, the Roman Catholic Church, and governments worldwide have been based on that view. We now understand organisms don't work this way. It's time we gave up the notion that the head of the organization can control the extensive body of autonomous thinking and caring human beings.

There's no reason to accept a portfolio of projects where a few succeed while the others miss important objectives.

So what is it that managers do in this alternative view of an organization? They cultivate conditions or circumstances for performance. Managers care for the promises to the customers, the network of commitments for delivering on those promises, and the well-being or futures of the people they manage. Giving one more importance over the other won't succeed in the long-run.

Greg Howell, Lauri Koskela, John Draper, and I authored a paper which we presented at IGLC-12, in Denmark, titled Leadership and Project Management: Time for a Change from Fayol to Flores. In that paper we contrast the prevailing style of project management with a style we see emerging. We don't think you need to settle for lackluster project performance. There's no reason to accept a portfolio of projects where a few succeed while the others miss important objectives. I could say that we need to make numerous changes to the way we do projects, but I won't. We need to make one significant change. Give up the tyranny of being a manager who has to make the right decisions. Instead, create planning conversations in your organization and on your teams that continue to unfold with the changing futures. The success of your projects depends on it. Even more, so does your sanity!

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