What Do Managers Do?
Managers are individuals who achieve goals through other people.
There are three key managerial activities:
- Make Decisions.
- Allocate Resources.
- Supervise Work.
As I write above, it feels like being a manager is very easy, but it is actually not — it is very difficult because you are dealing with humans, who are fallible in all the ways we know.
So perhaps a better definition of managers is that they are individuals who achieve goals through other people, regardless of the fact that those people are not perfect!
And the only reason we need managers is that we work in organizations. And the only reason we work in organizations is to achieve objectives that we otherwise could not achieve by ourselves.
Perhaps at a broader level, we could define management as facilitating the organization’s ability to achieve long-term goals by coordinating and efficiently utilizing available resources.
In general, “management” gets a bad rap and for good reason too. There are a lot of bad management teams in the world, and so investing the time to learn to become a good manager is even more important.
