In the earlier part I had, using Henry Mintzberg's classic article in the HBR mentioned that the actual role managers seem to be performing in real-time is far different from the classical version that he spends time in leading, organizing, planning and so on... More on the same theme follows:
Autobiographical Leadership: In many organizations, one does come across such managers who, at the slightest hint or provocation, get into the autobiographical mode. Whatever the problem they start narrating about their previous experience and how they tackled them successfully. Such managers are so firmly rooted in their past that all their anecdotal stories acquire a very predictable pattern. What is true of managers is equally true of trainers. The same jokes, the same anecdotes and the same slides. I knew about a well-known trainer from ASCI in the early 80s who had his 45 slides and whatever the topic he would run through them. Once he misplaced his slides and was caught almost without pants figuratively.
Delegating Managers: Commonsense and management literature has conditioned us to believe that delegation is a useful tool for management development. We also know that usually, delegation is downwards from superiors to subordinates. But a new class of managers believe in delegating upwards. How often one has seen managers marking a cc to all and sundry? The underlying assumption is that once all are informed they do not own any responsibility for things going wrong. Outlook Express has greatly contributed to this modern phenomenon. Another set of managers usually pretend to delegate but so often they check the status with their subordinates that in effect they are doing the work themselves. Let me explain this by an analogy. A manager is promoted and given a new car. As he is entitled to a driver he hires a driver to drive the new car. On the first day, our manager sat next to the driver and continuously instructed the driver not to press the brakes release the clutch or blow the horn. No wonder by evening our manager is driving the car with the newly hired driver sitting to his left and enjoying the ride! This "driving the driver" syndrome is the bane of any modern organization.
The Powerpoint Manager: In every organization we see this category whose only name to fame is to prepare PPT presentations usually copied from the net and survive an entire lifetime doing this. of course, the organizations also encourage this as it is mistakenly believed to be a substitute for real work.
The Deaf Manager: This is also an extension of the autobiographical leadership where the manager has deeply fallen in love with his voice and is also gifted with a powerful vocal cord. This means that in any meeting or seminar, only one voice is heard and that belongs to the deaf manager. But if the organization is blessed with an ignorant but assertive boss then god save the followers!
Let me stop here as I do not want to antagonize the managerial fraternity more!!!
