What Do Managers Do?
In
baseball, the manager wears a uniform much like the players wear, but he
doesn’t pitch, hit or defend. (In most
cases; baseball history has had a few player-managers.) The manager may instruct/train his players on
baseball skills, but mostly he relies on coaches for that. His main jobs are personnel related: he
assigns player to places in the line-up to start the game, and he makes
substitutions for hitters, defenders and pitchers. Sometimes, consulting with his coaches, he
makes strategic decisions, such as positioning defenders or intentionally
walking an opposing hitter; on offense: stealing a base, the hit-and-run play,
or bunting. Of all these decisions,
perhaps the most important are decisions about relief pitchers: which one and
when.
The
managerial goal is often summarized this way.
Put players in positions where
they are more likely to succeed. To
do this, the manager must weigh carefully his players’ abilities and the
strengths and weaknesses of the opposing players. Of course, it is the players who play the
game, and the outcome depends mostly on their abilities. If the manager does his job well, he can
perhaps marginally increase the chances of winning. It’s not much, but it’s important. At least, we think so. Since so much of the success or failure of a
team rests on the highly-honed skills of the players, it’s very hard to
determine how much a manager’s decisions contribute to wins and losses.
Now let’s
think not of baseball managers but of managers in general. The first thing to notice about managers is
their ubiquity. Managers are everywhere. We find them in the postal service, the navy,
for profit corporations, hospitals, schools and colleges, the pastoral staff of
churches, political parties, the local youth soccer league, United Nations
agencies—in short, almost every human
organization will have managers.
Sometimes managers are like the player-manager; they directly “do”
whatever it is the organization seeks to do. The postal manager may help sort the mail or
deliver it. But managers always have personnel tasks. They make decisions about what other people
are supposed to do. “Decisions about
what other people do” covers a lot of ground: managers hire and dismiss workers,
they teach skills, they make and monitor budgets, they assign people to groups
and sub-groups, they evaluate individuals’ performance, and much more. Like the baseball manager, non-baseball
managers seek to put their people in situations where they can succeed. Of course, what counts as success varies
widely from one organization to another.
The goals of Habitat for Humanity differ from Facebook’s. Success for the Salvation Army is not like
success for the U.S. Army.
Can a
person learn how to be a manager?
Universities all across the country, including my own, offer classes in
business management and/or organizational management. (I’ve even taught such classes! But that was long ago.) There has to be some
sense in which management can be taught and learned.
Alasdair
MacIntyre says we ought to be skeptical of management science. In After
Virtue, one of the most influential books in philosophy of the last
generation, he argues that our social sciences will never be able to predict
the future. First, we never know when a
new scientific theory or concept will radically change our ideas about some
subject. (If, in 1880, someone had
predicted that a new theory would emerge to unify Newtonian mechanics with
recent experimental measurements of the speed of light by a theory of relativity,
that person would not have predicted
the theory; rather he would have invented
it.) Second, when an individual
faces a certain decision and has not yet decided, she does not know what the
decision will be. Her close friend might
be able to predict her decision, but the agent doesn’t yet know. The close friend, until she decides how to
respond, doesn’t yet know how she will respond.
And since our decisions influence later decisions, we can’t predict what
will happen. Third, we often don’t know
what “game” we are playing when we make decisions. We can buy board games or computer games and
practice skills to win them; the games are well-defined. But in the real world we often face
situations that are not well-defined. Two
college students are talking. Is their
conversation a debate about politics, a diversion at a dinner party, a
rehearsal of facts and strategies for a class examination, or a first move in
courtship? Could it be all of these at
once? Do the “players” know? Fourth, events in the world are sometimes
affected by sheer contingency. Cosmic
rays strike one person and cause cancer, but not another. A butterfly flaps its wings . . .
The upshot
of MacIntyre’s argument is this. There
cannot ever be a social science that discovers law-like regularities (think:
Boyle’s law of gases) that will allow predictions of human futures. Therefore, managers do not have the “expertise” that would rationally justify the great
power and authority they exercise in human organizations. Nevertheless, all organizations must resort
to managers.
If managers
don’t have expertise, they may have wisdom.
MacIntyre says managers invent proverbs to guide behavior, and sometimes
they obey their proverbs. For instance,
a manager might believe (as is often claimed in management textbooks) that free
and open communication within an organization will promote cooperation and
creativity, and that cooperation and creativity will help the organization
achieve its goals. This belief is a
proverb. It is not law-like
generalization based on repeatable experiments.
Nevertheless, the belief may contain wisdom, and managers who encourage
free and open communication in their organizations may experience success.
Manager-leaders
who act on wisdom from such proverbs are as good as it gets in organizations. They cannot guarantee success. Not even baseball managers can do that.
