In the late 1970s and early 1980s, various writers banded together against the administration. They were looking for a scapegoat to blame for the failure of American companies to deal with the Japanese trade invasion. The rallying cry was to replace managers with leaders. One of the loudest critics of management was Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik. It is time to resurrect management to its rightful place alongside leadership as an essential organizational function. To do this, we need to expose the writings of the administration’s detractors to show what nonsense they were writing. Actually, there was nothing wrong with the management function in the 1970s, just the way it was practiced. Addressing the Zaleznik attack is especially important because the Harvard Business Review is still publishing its original 1977 article (Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?) In its collection of articles on leadership, thus creating the impression that their views follow. being relevant and up-to-date when in reality they are dangerously out of date and harmful.

Zaleznik makes his case against modern management by comparing it to the scientific management theories of Fredrick Taylor. Considering that Taylor died in 1915, it is surprising that Zaleznik does not demonstrate why it is legitimate to compare Taylor’s views to the way modern managers operate, so his views are questionable even before we begin. to examine their arguments.

In a 1989 book, The Managerial Mystique, Zaleznik says that “what Taylor proposed through his management system lies at the core of how modern managers are supposed to think and act.” The principle is rationality. The goal is efficiency. ” Most importantly, Zaleznik believed that managers and leaders differ in terms of their personalities. Following Taylor’s lead, Zaleznik describes managers as cold-efficient machines that “adopt impersonal, if not passive, attitudes toward goals.” Furthermore, “managers see themselves as conservatives and regulators of an existing order of things.” He tells us that the tactics of the “managers” seem flexible: on the one hand, they negotiate and haggle; on the other, they use rewards, punishments and other forms of coercion. ” So managers are only seemingly flexible and coercive, even manipulative in Zaleznik’s eyes. In his 1977 article, Zaleznik makes exactly the same claim, stating that: “… subordinates are often heard characterizing managers as recordable, distant, and manipulative.”

Zaleznik wants us to believe that while managers seek activity with people, “they maintain a low level of emotional involvement in those relationships.” They also apparently “lack empathy.” Zaleznik expands on the emotional theme in The Managerial Mystique by telling us that managers “operate within a narrow range of emotions.” This emotional softness, when combined with concern for the process, gives the impression that managers are recordable, distant, and even manipulative.

It is unclear what evidence Zaleznik has for these conviction charges. It seems that it does nothing more than extrapolate Fredrick Taylor’s conception of management without ever asking whether management as a function is committed to Taylor’s characterization of it. Starting with Taylor’s adoration for machine-like efficiency, Zaleznik has criticized all managers forever with the same brush.

Zaleznik believes that leaders are creative and interested in substance, while managers are only interested in the process – how things get done, not what. For Zaleznik, “ leaders, who are more concerned with ideas, relate more intuitively and empathetically. ” Leaders are certainly more interested in ideas than how they are implemented, but there is no basis for calling leaders more empathetic than managers.

Fundamentally, there is no real basis for this personality distinction. It is not enough to say that managers were in control from Taylor’s time until the Japanese invasion showed them. Even if this is historically accurate, there is nothing in this alleged fact that commits the administration to operate in this way today. The simplest way to avoid Zaleznik’s condemnation of management is to define it functionally, in terms of the purpose it serves, not in terms of how it actually accomplishes its purpose. This leaves the means of management completely open.

Management versus leadership

An easy way to define leadership and management is to say that leaders promote new directions while managers execute existing ones. Additionally, it is widely recognized today that leaders can have vastly different personalities ranging from the calm, determined, and objective cheerleader type to the cheerleader, erratic yet inspiring. The whole movement to differentiate leaders from managers in terms of personality has failed miserably and it is time to quit. The truth is that both leaders and managers can be inspiring, they just have a different approach. An inspiring leader encourages us to change direction, while an inspiring manager motivates us to work harder. Yes, managers promote efficiency, but this doesn’t have to mean the mechanical efficiency of Fredrick Taylor’s assembly line. Management is like an investment. Effective managers deploy all the resources at their disposal where they will get the best return on that investment. In modern organizations, populated by smart knowledge workers, this could mean creating self-managing teams. To get the best out of such talent, modern managers must be good coaches, caretakers, and people developers. Of course, they need to measure and monitor performance to see if their people deployments are paying off, but this doesn’t mean doing it cold, mechanically, or controlling.

In conclusion, management is as important a function in organizations as leadership and it is time to put aside the opinions of writers like Abraham Zaleznik, who argue otherwise. Also, the fact that his writing is still endorsed by the Harvard Business School raises questions about his credibility.