March 2004 / No. 28

Management

The Five Minds of a Manager

The chief executive of a major Canadian com­pany complained recently that he can’t get his engineers to think like managers. It’s a common complaint, but behind it lies an uncommonly important question: What does it mean to think like a manager?

Sadly, little attention has been paid to that question in recent years. Most of us have become so enamored of “leadership” that “management” has been pushed into the background. Nobody aspires to being a good manager anymore; everybody wants to be a great leader. But the separation of management from leadership is dangerous. Just as management without leadership encourages an uninspired style, which deadens activities, leadership without management encourages a disconnected style, which promotes hubris. And we all know the destructive power of hubris in organizations. So let’s get back to plain old management.

The problem, of course, is that plain old management is complicated and confusing. Be global, managers are told, and be local. Collaborate, and compete. Change, per­petually, and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. How is anyone supposed to reconcile all this? The fact is: no one can. To be effective, managers need to face the juxtapositions in order to ar­rive at a deep integration of these seemingly contradic­tory concerns. That means they must focus not only on what they have to accomplish but also on how they have to think. Managers need various ‘mind-sets’.

Helping managers appreciate that was the challenge we set for ourselves in the mid-1990s when we began to develop a new master’s program for practicing managers. We knew we could not rely on the usual structure of MBA education, which divides the management world into the discrete business functions of marketing, finance, ac­counting, and so on. Our intention was to educate man­agers who were coming out of these narrow silos; why push them back in? We needed a new structure that en­couraged synthesis rather than separation. What we came up with—a structure based on the five aspects of the man­agerial mind—has proved not only powerful in the class­room but insightful in practice, as we hope to demon­strate in this article. We’ll first explain how we came up with the five managerial mind-sets, then we’ll discuss each in some depth before concluding with the case for interweaving the five.

The Five Managerial Mind-Sets: The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Cres­cent Societies, headquartered in Geneva, has a manage­ment development concern; it worries that it may be drifting too far toward a fast-action culture. It knows that it must act quickly in responding to disasters every­where—earthquakes and wars, floods and famines—but it also sees the need to engage in the slower, more delicate task of building a capacity for action that is careful, thoughtful, and tailored to local conditions and needs.

Many business organizations face a similar problem—they know how to execute, but they are not so adept at stepping back to reflect on their situations. Others face the opposite predicament. They get so mired in thinking about their problems that they can’t get things done fast enough. We all know bureaucracies that are great at plan­ning and organizing but slow to respond to market forces, just as we’re all acquainted with the nimble companies that react to every stimulus, but sloppily, and have to be constantly fixing things. And then, of course, there are those that suffer from both afflictions—for example, firms whose marketing departments are absorbed with grand positioning statements while their sales forces chase every possible deal.

Those two aspects establish the bounds of manage­ment: Everything that every effective manager does is sandwiched between action on the ground and reflection in the abstract. Action without reflection is thoughtless; reflection without action is passive. Every manager has to find a way to combine these two mind-sets—to func­tion at the point where reflective thinking meets practi­cal doing.

But action and reflection about what? One obvious an­swer is: about collaboration, about getting things done co­operatively with other people—in negotiations, for exam­ple, where a manager cannot act alone. Another answer is that action, reflection, and collaboration have to be rooted in a deep appreciation of reality in all its facets. We call this mind-set worldly, which the Oxford English Dictio­nary defines as “experienced in life, sophisticated, practi­cal.” Finally, action, reflection, and collaboration, as well as worldliness, must subscribe to a certain rationality or logic; they rely on an analytic mind-set, too.

So we have five sets of the managerial mind, five ways in which managers interpret and deal with the world around them. Each has a dominant subject, or target, of its own. For reflection, the subject is the self; there can be no insight without self-knowledge. Collaboration takes the subject beyond the self, into the manager’s network of relationships. Analysis goes a step beyond that, to the organization; organizations depend on the systematic decomposition of activities, and that’s what analysis is all about. Beyond the organization lies what we consider the subject of the worldly mind-set, namely context—the worlds around the organization. Finally, the action mind­set pulls everything together through the process of change—in self, relationships, organization, and context.

The practice of managing, then, involves five per­spectives, which correspond to the five modules of our program:

·       Managing self: the reflective mind-set

·       Managing organizations: the analytic mind-set

·       Managing context: the worldly mind-set

·       Managing relationships: the collaborative mind-set

·       Managing change: the action mind-set. If you are a manager, this is your world!

Let us make clear several characteristics of this set of sets. First, we make no claim that our framework is either scientific or comprehensive. It simply has proved useful in our work with managers, including in our master’s pro­gram. Second, we ask you to consider each of these managerial mind-sets as an atti­tude, a frame of mind that opens new vistas. Unless you get into a reflective frame of mind, for example, you can­not open yourself to new ideas. You might not even notice such ideas in the first place without a worldly frame of mind. And, of course, you cannot appreciate the buzz, the vistas, and the opportunities of actions unless you en­gage in them.

Third, a word on our word ‘mind-sets’. We do not use it to set any manager’s mind. All of us have had more than enough of that. Rather, we use the word in the spirit of a fortune one of us happened to pull out of a Chinese cookie recently: “Get your mind set. Confidence will lead you on.” We ask you to get your mind set around five key ideas. Then, not just confidence but coherence can lead you on. Think, too, of these mind-sets as mind-sights-per­spectives. But be aware that, improperly used, they can also be mine sites. Too much of any of them—obsessive an­alyzing or compulsive collaborating, for instance—and the mind-set can blow up in your face.

Managing Self:

The Reflective Mind-Set

Managers who are sent off to development courses these days often find themselves being welcomed to “boot camp.” This is no country club, they are warned; you’ll have to work hard. But this is wrongheaded. While man­agers certainly don’t need a country club atmosphere for development, neither do they need boot camp. Most man­agers we know already live boot camp every day. Besides, in real boot camps, sol­diers learn to march and obey, not to stop and think. These days, what managers desper­ately need is to stop and think; to step back and reflect thought­fully on their experiences. In­deed, in his book Rules for Radi­cals, Saul Alinsky makes the interesting point that events, or ‘happenings’, become experi­ence only after they have been reflected upon thoughtfully;­ “Most people do not accumu­late a body of experience. Most people go through life under­going a series of happenings, which pass through their sys­tems undigested. Happenings become experiences when they are digested, when they are re­flected on, related to general patterns, and synthesized.”

Unless the meaning is under­stood, managing is mindless. Hence we take reflection to be that space suspended be­tween experience and explanation, where the mind makes the connections. Imagine yourself in a meeting when someone suddenly erupts with a personal rant. You’re tempted to ignore or dismiss the outburst—you’ve heard, after all, that the person is having problems at home. But why not use it to reflect on your own reac­tion—whether embarrassment, anger, or frustration—and so recognize some comparable feelings in yourself? Your own reaction now becomes a learning experience for you: You have opened a space for imagination, between your experience and your explanation. It can make all the difference.

Organizations may not need “mirror people”, who see in everything only reflections of their own behavior. But neither do they need “window people”, who cannot see beyond the images in front of them. They need managers who see both ways—in a sense, ones who look out the window at dawn, to see through their own reflections to the awakening world outside. “Reflect” in Latin means to refold, which suggests that attention turns inward so that it can be turned outward. This means going beyond introspection. It means looking in so that you can better see out in order to perceive a familiar thing in a different way—a product as a service, maybe, or a customer as a partner. Does that not describe the thinking of the really successful managers, the Andy Groves of the world? Com­pare such people with the Messiers and Lays, who dazzle with great mergers and grand strategies before burning out their companies.

Likewise, reflective manag­ers are able to see behind in order to look ahead. Successful “visions” are not immaculately conceived; they are painted, stroke by stroke, out of the ex­periences of the past. Reflective managers, in other words, have a healthy respect for history—not just the grand history of deals and disasters but also the everyday history of all the little actions that make organizations work.

Consider in this regard: Kofi Annan’s deep personal understanding of the United Nations, a comprehension that has been the source of his ability to help move that complex body to a different and better place. You must appreciate the past if you wish to use the present to get to a better future.

Managing Organizations:

The Analytical Mind-Set

Literally, analysis means to “let loose” (from the Greek ana, meaning “up” and 1yein, meaning “loosen”). Analysis loosens up complex phenomena by breaking them into component parts—by decomposing them.

Analysis happens everywhere—in context (industry analysis), with relationships (360-degree assessments), and so on. But it is especially related to organization. You simply can’t get organized without analysis, especially in a large company. Good analysis provides a language for organizing; it allows people to share an understanding of what is driving their efforts; it provides measures for per­formance. And organizational structure itself is funda­mentally analytic—it is a means of decomposition to es­tablish the division of labor. Just look at any organization chart, with all the boxes neatly lined up.

Picture the modem manager in an office in a tall build­ing, looking down on the grid of the city below and across at the offices of companies in other buildings. From this perspective, the manager does not see individual people so much as systems of organization, power, and commu­nication. Turning around, that manager is surrounded by the plush paraphernalia of his or her own company, the fruits of many people’s tireless work on structures and sys­tems and techniques. All of this represents analysis in the conventional sense: order and decomposition. How is such a manager to escape the analytic mind-set?

We prefer a different question: How is the manager to get truly inside the analytic mind-set, beyond the super­ficialities of obvious analysis, into the essential meanings of structures and systems? The key to analyzing effec­tively, in our view, is to get beyond conventional ap­proaches in order to appreciate how analysis works and what effect it has on the organization.

Consider three related tasks, one simple, one compli­cated, one complex. Building a pleasure boat can be rela­tively straightforward—it’s about such things as the ratio of displacement to length. Building an aircraft carrier is far more complicated, involving the coordination of all kinds of subsystems and supply networks. Yet even here the component parts can be readily understood and the necessary behaviors made rather predictable. But a deci­sion on whether or not to deploy that aircraft carrier can be truly complex: Who is to say with any certainty what is the right thing to do, or even what is the best thing under the circumstances?

Making that kind of complex decision means standing above shallow analysis and easy tech­nique—just running the num­bers—and going deeper into the analytic mind-set. You have to take into account soft data, including the values underlying such choices. Deep analysis does not seek to simplify complex deci­sions, but to sustain the complexity while main­taining the organizations capacity to take action. That was the great power of Winston Churchill’s rhetoric during World War II. His simple expres­sions captured the complexity that was Great Britain and the war in which it was engaged.

We have come across examples of deep analy­sis from managers participating in our own pro­gram who were being forced into obvious deci­sions by shallow analyses: Close the plant, speed up a slow project. After studying the analytic mind-set during the second module of our pro­gram, they went back to their jobs and probed more deeply. They analyzed the analyses of oth­ers—where these people were coming from, what data and assumptions they were using. They dug out other sorts of information that didn’t make it into the conventional analyses and found limita­tions in the techniques used. Most important, they recognized biases in their own thinking. As a result, they saw things differently, encouraged others to change course, and helped resolve problems. Was this analysis or reflection? It was reflective analysis.

The problem for many managers today, as well as the business schools that train them, is not a lack of analysis but too much of it—at least, too much conventional analy­sis. This is exemplified by that popular metaphor in fi­nance of the tennis player who watches the scoreboard while missing the ball (much like the marketer who stud­ies the crowd while missing the sale). The trick in the an­alytic mind-set is to appreciate scores and crowds while watching the ball.

Managing Context:

The Worldly Mind-Set

We live on a globe that from a distance looks pretty uni­form. “Globalization” sees the world from a distance, as­suming and encouraging a certain homogeneity of be­havior. Is that what we want from our managers?

A closer look reveals something rather different. Far from being uniform, this world is made up of all kinds of worlds. Should we not, then, be encouraging our managers to be more worldly, more experienced in life, in both sophisticated and practical ways? In other words, should we not be getting into worlds beyond our own—into other people’s circumstances, habits, and cultures—so that we can better know our own world? To paraphrase T.S. Eliot’s famous words, should we not explore ceaselessly in order to return home and know the place for the first time? That to us is the worldly mind-set.

Being worldly does not require global coverage, just as global coverage does not make a worldly mind-set. In­deed, global coverage does not even ensure a global perspective, given that the managers of so many “global” companies are rooted in the culture of the headquarters’. But there are companies that seem to be reasonably global as well as worldly—a Shell, perhaps.

Shell has, of course, long covered the globe. But because of social pressures, including a head­ers that has always had to work across two cultures (Dutch and British), it has struck us in personal contacts as rather worldly. By this we mean that the company tailors and blends its arts across the world, socially and environmentally as well as economically. It must find and extract oil without violating the rights of the people under whose territories the oil sits, and it has to refine and sell that oil in ways that are respe­ctful of the local environment. That may seem clear enough today, but think about what companies like Shell went through to get there.

We conclude from this that while global managers may spend a lot of time in the air, and not just literally, they be­come worldly when their feet are planted firmly on the ground of eclectic experience. That means getting out of their offices, beyond the towers, to spend time where products are produced, customers served, and environments threatened.

Of course, shifting from a global to a worldly perspective ­is not easy. In James Clavell’s novel Shogun, a Japa­nese woman tells her British lover, who is perplexed by the strange world of seventeenth-century Japan into which he has fallen, “It’s all so simple, Anjin-san. Just change your concept of the world”. Just!

But maybe it’s not quite as hard as it seems. One way to begin (as in the novel) is through immersion in a strange context: Get into someone else’s world as a mirror to your own. That is why we hold our programs module on the worldly mind-set in India: For all but the Indian manag­ers, India is not just another world, but, in a sense, other­worldly. Being there, especially among fellow managers from Indian companies, takes the non-Indian participants past the nice abstractions of economic, political, and so­cial differences, down onto the streets, where these dif­ferences come alive.

“How can you possibly drive in this traffic?” an Ameri­can marketing manager from Lufthansa, shaken up dur­ing her ride from the airport, asked an Indian professor. He replied, “I just join the flow.” Learning can begin! That is not chaos on the streets of India, but another kind of logic. When you realize it, you have become that much more worldly.

We ask the participants in our program, after they go back to work between sessions, to write reflection pa­pers on what they’ve learned at the modules. After the India module, a Russian manager from the Red Cross, with his own share of third-world experiences, wrote about seeing a pile of tires with a huge black cross on it: “Black Cross: The Clinic for Tires” read the sign. He was struck by a symbol so familiar to him used in such a radi­cally different context. He wrote: “Once again India [has reminded me] how interdependent, similar, and different at the same time are our worlds.” This is the worldly mind­set in action: seeing differently out to reflect differently in. We might say that the worldly mind-set puts the re­flective one into context.

In our view, to manage context is to manage on the edges, between the organization and the various worlds that surround it—cultures, industries, companies. What Ray Raphael has written about ‘Edges’; in his book by that title, is germane to every manager:

“Many of the most interesting things, say the biolo­gists, happen on the Edges—on the interface between the woods and the field, the land and the sea. There, liv­ing organisms encounter dynamic conditions that give rise to untold variety...”

Variety, perhaps, but there is tension as well. The flora of the meadows, for example, as they approach the woodlands, find themselves coping with increas­ingly unfavorable conditions: the sunlight they need might be lacking, and the soil no longer feels right. There is also the problem of competition with alien species of trees and shrubs. The Edges, in short, might abound with life, but each living form must fight for its own.

No wonder managers must be worldly. They have to mediate those wide zones where organization meets context—not just, for example, “customers” acting in “markets” however “differenti­ated” but all those particular people in particular places buy­ing and using products in their own particular ways.

Managing Relationships:

The Collaborative Mind-Set

It need hardly be said that man­aging is about working with peo­ple—not just as bosses and sub­ordinates but, more important, as colleagues and partners. Yet despite all the rhetoric about collaboration, in the West, at least, we often take a narrow view. Thanks to the influence of economic theory, we see people as independent actors, detach­able human “resources” or “as­sets” that can be moved around, bought and sold, combined, and “downsized.” That is not the col­laborative mind-set.

In fact, our own original defi­nition of the collaborative mind­set got a jolt when our Japanese colleagues began to design the program’s fourth module. It had been called Managing People. But they pointed out that a truly collaborative mind-set does not involve managing peo­ple so much as the relationships among people, in teams and projects as well as across divisions and alliances. Get­ting into a truly collaborative mind-set means getting beyond empowerment—a word implying that the people who know the work best must somehow receive the bless­ing of their managers to do it—and into commitment. It also means getting away from the currently popular heroic style of managing and moving toward a more en­gaging style.

Engaging managers listen more than they talk; they get out of their offices to see and feel more than they re­main in them to sit and figure. By being worldly them­selves, they foster collaboration among others. And they do less controlling, thus allowing other people to be in greater control of their own work. If “I deem, so that you do” is the implicit motto of the heroic manager, then for the engaging manager it is “We dream, so that we do.” Our Japanese colleagues call this “leadership in the back­ground”—it lets as many ordinary people as possible lead.

When John Kotter was asked if the members of the Harvard Busi­ness School class of 1974, whose careers he followed in his book The New Rules, were team players, he replied, “I think it fair to say that these people want to create the team and lead it to some glory as opposed to being a member of a team that’s being driven by somebody else.” That is not the collaborative mind-set. Having to run the team may be necessary at times—although we suspect it’s needed far less often than most people think—but it hardly rep­resents a collaborative point of view, nor does it foster team­work. Leaders don’t do most of the things that their organiza­tions get done; they do not even make them get done. Rather, they help to establish the structures, conditions, and attitudes through which things get done. And that requires a collaborative mind-set.

We talk a great deal about net­works these days, as well as teams, task forces, alliances, and knowl­edge work. Yet we still picture managers on “top”. Well, then, pic­ture yourself on top of a network, looking down on it. That puts you out of it; how can you possibly manage its relationships that way? To be in a collaborative mind-set means to be inside, involved, to manage throughout. But it has a more profound meaning, too—to get management beyond managers, to distribute it so that responsibility flows nat­urally to whoever can take the initiative and pull things together. Think of self-managing teams, of skunk works; indeed, think of who “manages” the World Wide Web.

Managing Change:

The Action Mind-Set

Imagine your organization as a chariot pulled by wild horses. (That may be easy for you to do!) These horses represent the emotions, aspirations, and motives of all the people in the organization. Holding a steady course requires just as much skill as steering around to a new direction.

Philosophers from Plato to Vivekenanda have used this metaphor to describe the need to harness emotional en­ergy; it works well for management, too. An action mind­set, especially at senior levels, is not about whipping the horses into a frenzy, careening hither and yon. It is about developing a sensitive awareness of the terrain and of what the team is capable of doing in it and thereby help­ing to set and maintain direction, coaxing everyone along.

Action, and especially change, need no introduction, of course. Everybody today understands them and the need for them. That’s the problem.

There is now an overwhelming emphasis on action at the expense of reflection. The Red Cross Federation is unusual, not in experiencing this problem, but in being aware of it. In addition, peo­ple are obsessed with change these days. We are told, re­lentlessly, that we live in times of great upheaval, that everything is changing, so we had better be in a constant state of alert. Change or else.

Well, then, look around. What do you see that has changed re­cently? Your clothing? (Your grandpar­ents wore cotton and wool; they too but­toned buttons.) Your car? (It uses the basic technology of the Model T.) The airplane you’re flying in? (That technol­ogy is newer: the first commercial jet aircraft took flight in 1952.) Your tele­phone? (That changed—about ten years ago. Unless, of course, you are not using a cellular phone.)

Our point is not that nothing is chang­ing. No, something is always changing. Right now it is information technology. But many other things are not changing at all—and these we don’t notice (like buttons). We tend to focus on what is changing and conclude that everything is. That is hardly a reflective mind-set, and it is detrimental as well to the action mind-set. We have to sober up to the re­ality that change is not pervasive, and that the phenomenon of change is not new. If the reflective mind-set has to re­spect history, then the action mind-set could use a little humility.

Change has no meaning without con­tinuity. There is a name for everything changing all the time: anarchy. No one wants to live with that, certainly no or­ganization that wishes to survive. Busi­nesses are judged by the products they sell and the services they render, not the changes they make. So change cannot be managed without continuity. Accord­ingly, the trick in the action mind-set is to mobilize energy around those things that need changing, while being careful to maintain the rest. And make no mistake about it, managing continuity is no easier than managing change. Remember those wild horses.

The dominant view of managing change is Cartesian: Action results from deliberate strategies, carefully planned, that unfold as systematically managed sequences of deci­sions. That is the analytic mind-set, not the action one. Monsanto went into genetically engineered agriculture with that approach, with its strategy all worked out in advance. With control of seed varieties and certain pesti­cides and fertilizers, it could bring an entire ecosystem to the market. And it had the research capacity and pres­ence worldwide to do it. So it set about a series of bril­liantly conceived acquisitions and effectively positioned the company to be the Microsoft of agribusiness. But the farmers and consumers weren’t there—they were more enthusiastic about continuity at that point—and the plan collapsed.

Change, to be successful, cannot follow some mecha­nistic schedule of steps, of formulation followed by implementation. Action and reflection have to blend in a natural flow. And that has to include collaboration. Satish Kumar, the director of the Schumacher Institute in the United Kingdom, put it nicely in the title of his latest book, You Are Therefore I Am: A Declaration of Depen­dence. We had better be reflectively collaborative, as well as analytically worldly, if we wish to accomplish effec­tive change.

Of course, energized action is necessary too, but that doesn’t mean being hyperactive or fiddling around end­lessly with structure. It means remaining curious, alert, experimental. Changing is a learning process, and so is maintaining course. We may think of stasis as the norm and change as driven, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Active members of an organization may resist change im­posed on them because they understand that the change would be dysfunctional. And they in turn may engage in “silent change” of their own, continually re-creating op­erations for better performance.

Weaving the Mind-Sets Together: Clearly, these five mind-sets do not represent hard-and-­fast categories. We need distinct labels for them, but they obviously overlap, and they are more than mere words. They are more than metaphors too, but a metaphor can help us understand how they come together.

Imagine the mind-sets as threads and the manager as weaver. Effective performance means weaving each mind-set over and under the others to create a fine, sturdy cloth. You analyze, then you act. But that does not work as expected, so you reflect. You act some more, then find yourself blocked, realizing that you cannot do it alone. You have to collaborate. But to do that, you have to get into the world of others. Then more analysis follows, to ar­ticulate the new insights. Now you act again—and so it goes, as the cloth of your effort forms.

But one piece of cloth is not enough. An organization is a collective entity that achieves common purpose when the cloths of its various managers are sewn together into useful garments—when the organizations managers col­laborate to combine their reflective actions in analytic, worldly ways.

We have been emphasizing the need for all managers to get deeply into all five mind-sets. But many manag­ers naturally tilt to one or another, depending on their sit­uations and personal inclinations. Some people are more reflective than others, some more action oriented, some more analytic, and so on. Finance and marketing have their share of calculating managers (lots of analysis); salespeople can sometimes be a little too worldly; those from HR a little too enthusiastic about collaboration. So the weaving often has to be collaborative, too, like the sewing, as managers come to understand one another and combine their strengths.

Companies have been quite concerned about seam­lessness in recent years. Yet we all appreciate seams that are nicely sewn, just as we appreciate mind-sets that are nicely combined. Effective organizations tailor handsome results out of the woven mind-sets of their managers.

Courtesy of Harvard Business Review, December 2003