reminding managers to motivate and communicate: a primer on the basic operations in the work of the manager Reginald L. Bell, Ph.D.

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nyone who has spent time working under the totalitarian rule of an incompetent boss can tell you that not all bosses should call themselves managers. Just because someone has the formal title of “manager” does not mean that person can manage. The word manager can be a foreign concept to some. Nevertheless, a manager is expected to judiciously utilize limited resources to accomplish goals. In this article, I give managers a primer on the basic operations in the work of the manager, with motivating and communicating as the most crucial operation for managerial success. The Dreaded Boss There are a lot of people who could tell you horror stories about their experience working for a boss from hell. Some bosses feel that management means hovering over the shoulders of ever y worker; dogging their heels on deadlines; snarling at them over the minor issues on low priority assignments; openly criticizing their work; or, mocking their inputs. Not only do these rude behaviors ensnare

employee motivation in a tangled web they can lead to depressingly low morale and high turnover. Some individuals with few options will stay working under a dictatorial rule, but, they are prone to hide important information from the boss. Often, the boss is the last to know about problematic situations that tend to suddenly explode because he or she in the past has punished employees’ openness with such harsh rebuke that even the bravest employee fears managerial retaliation. But, not all bad bosses are tyrants. There is the milquetoast boss, a meek person suffering from emotional disconnect and apathy. There is the incompetent boss, a person placed in a management position perhaps because they are the son or daughter of the owner or because they were outstanding in a sales job or did excellent work in a staff position. Sometimes, a person is encouraged to take a linemanagement job by a superior whose hopes for them exceeded that person’s own ambitions. The documented and catastrophic

consequences of such decision making becomes clear after the fact that person did not have the skills to be a manager in the first place. Regardless of the label one places on a bad manager, the entire organization suffers under the rule of an incompetent boss. Bad managers seem to be unaware of the five basic operations in the work of a manager. The Basic Operations in the Work of a Manager In 1954, Peter F. Drucker in his book the Practice of Management argued that there are five basic operations in the work of a manager: 1) sets objectives, 2) organizes, 3) motivates and communicates, 4) has the job of measurement, and 5) develops people. These basic operations are still valid. Drucker on motivates and communicates writes: “He makes a team of people that are responsible for various jobs. He does that through the practices with which he manages. He does it in his own relation to the men he manages. He does it through incentives and rewards for

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successful work. He does it through his promotion policy. And he does it through constant communication, both from the manager to his subordinate, and from the subordinate to the manager.” All present-day managers work within the larger framework of the organization’s goals. Plans and goals can be operational (frontline management) tactical (middle management) or strategic (top management) and can only be achieved if managers can function at the respective levels. Hierarchy of goals is a theory that achieving higher level goals is dependent on achieving lower level goals first. In 1916, Henri Fayol in Administration Industrielle et Générale classified management functions into the areas of planning, organizing, developing, staffing, coordinating, and budgeting. He also understood the serious problem of no lateral communications between managers outside of a formal unbroken chain of command from top to bottom. His solution was the “Gang Plank Theory,” a novel idea that managers should be able to talk across managerial lines in addition to talking up and down formal lines of authority. What Fayol called a “scalar chain” is now commonly referred to as an organization chart. Today most principles of management textbooks organize their contents around four main managerial functions. In fact, dozens of textbooks define management generically as: the process of planning, organizing,

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leading, and controlling the limited financial, material, informational, and human resources available to a firm in order to effectively and efficiently achieve the stated goals. MerriamWebster’s Online Dictionar y defines management as: “(1) The act or art of managing: the conducting or supervising of something (as a business); (2) judicious use of means to accomplish an end; and (3) the collective body of those who manage or direct an enterprise.” management. A manager is “(1) a person who conducts business or household affairs or (2) a person whose work or profession is management.” Harold Geneen, a former ITT executive, in his book Managing wrote that “Defining our terms, ‘management’ is the team of managers who operate a business, an enter prise, or whatever. ‘Manage’ means to get something done, to accomplish something that you, or the team of managers, set out to do, which presumably is worthy of your effort.” What’s implicit in all the aforementioned definitions is that managers work for owners, especially in profit seeking enterprises. Managers Work for Owners Managers help owners run a business to ensure it is operated successfully. They help owners achieve organizational goals— whether those goals are dominating market share as a low cost leader in the retail industry, attempting to end poverty in a

third-world nation, or striving to develop a drug that prevents breast cancer. Owners determine these goals because they bare the risk of failure or the safety of success. Moreover, every employee expects that owners will provide the means, that is, the resources for them to do their jobs. Thus, the real work of a manager is to help owners utilize resources, judiciously, in a way that the owners can accomplish what owners want to accomplish. In non-profit organizations benefactors (i.e., a foundation funded by a wealthy family) in government organizations stakeholders (i.e., taxpayers or registered voters) can be equivalent to owners of a profit seeking enterprise. Helping owners achieve their goals requires managers to motivate and communicate. If managers pay attention to the key words in the aforementioned definitions of management they would gain awareness of what they are supposed to do as managers. Furthermore, managers control the management process. When managers motivate and communicate, conscientiously, they are better managers. For example, financing is used to leverage assets for favorable returns. Extra income (profits) can be distributed to owners as dividends or retained as earnings in order to fund operations that expand the business. Information is mostly an intangible asset that is used to create coordination among the units of the business to streamline operations so that

each unit moves along succinctly according to the plans and goals established. Material resources are the tangible hard assets that can be used in facilities for manufacturing of quality goods or housing people (i.e., a customer support center) for necessar y ser vices. The human resource is the most important resource because only human resources can be developed and improved in a way that makes them capable of leadership’s succession. No other resource is capable of being the boss! Therefore, managers must always strive to motivate their employees. Always Strive to Motivate Your Employees Even though managers understand, explicitly, that employees’ work for them, managers do not necessarily understand, implicitly, that employees working for them are a capital resource to be exploited. Capital generically defined is any form of wealth used to create more wealth. Imagine a large accounting firm that employs 250 CPA’s. Imagine each of those CPA’s has 15 years on average of work experience. That accounting firm would be considered by many to have a wealth of talent (human capital) even though most of those CPA’s would probably not be owners of the business. For the business to sur vive managers must exploit this rich pool of human talent by what is called “charge hours.” The firm will charge to the client an hourly rate three or four times the rate that

firm pays a CPA working on the client’s case. For example, a $25 per hour entry-level CPA salary would translate into $75 to $100 per hour billed to a client, depending on the complexity of the assignment. Moreover, these accountants expect that owners and managers will exploit their talents in some way to achieve something. However, it is not safe for a manager to assume that all these 250 CPA’s would be motivated simply because they receive a regular paycheck. Even though these CPA’s are getting regular salaries, there still needs to be emotional personal reasons (intrinsic) that inspire them to do the best job they can do. There also needs to be external rewards (extrinsic) that inspire the ones that seek approval, recognition or tangible things from others that memorializes a public record of a “job-well-done.” Even though much is known today about intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, managers need to create systems of rewards suitable for the people reporting to them. The art in managing motivation is getting people to do excellent work on their own—with little coercion from the boss—by enhancing their desires to do a great job. For this reason, all successful managers need to be skilled communicators. Communication,Communication, Communication Lee Froschheiser argues that in business leaders need to preach “communication, communication,

communication.” He expresses the idea that strong, effective leaders have mastered the “six basic functions of management: leading, planning, organizing, staffing, controlling and communicating.” In addition, leaders are disciplined people with good values who empower employees. Also, communication is the “golden thread” tying all the management functions together. It is impossible for a manager to function without communication competency. In the MCM planning is a blueprint for future actions needed to achieve goals. Organizing is a determination as to who will do what and why. Leading is when top management share their vision and then shapes culture to achieve that vision. Controlling is systematically gauging the organization’s actual proximity to the established plans and goals and then making adjustments in areas of weakness. Imagine trying to accomplish any of these functions without goal directed communications. For example, no matter how brilliantly a plan is conceived it still must be communicated to be carried out successfully. In fact, most plans, no matter how well conceived, when they fail they fail somewhere in the communication channels. For this reason, it is easy to see why the management functions are impossible to carry out when effective communication is absent. This is why Drucker realized in the work of the manager managers must motivate and communicate.

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Conclusion Managers must figure out how to use resources, prudently, to keep people motivated who have no expectation of operating the business. This is a continual process. Managers, therefore, should always strive to inspire their employee’s to do a great job on their own with little coercion from the boss. Employees are breathing thinking feeling human beings who are also considered a capital resource available to a firm for exploitation. Talented people are always in short supply. Furthermore, it is the human resource that is the only resource capable of being developed for leadership’s succession. Present-day managers must develop communication competency because it is impossible to carr y out the management functions of planning, leading, organizing, and controlling without it. Froschheiser eloquently described communication as the most important key to success in business leadership; Peter F. Drucker argued the importance of communication 54 years earlier. Without excellent communication skills no manager can function; goals will not be achieved; owners will needlessly bare an additional risk of failure. SV

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Reginald L. Bell is a tenured associate professor in the college of business at Prairie View A&M University. Bell received his Ph.D. in Business Education from the University of Missouri at Columbia. He is an active member of the Association for Business Communication, and serves on its Publications Board. Bell has more than four dozen articles published in peer reviewed journals. His research has appeared in the Business Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business and Leadership: Research, Practice and Teaching, Journal of College Teaching and Learning, Academy of Educational Leadership Journal, Academy of Marketing Studies Journal, Super vision Magazine, Southwestern Business Administration Journal, and The Journal of Leadership, Accountability, and Ethics. Bell, along with Jeanette S. Martin, is coauthor of “B2B Managerial Communication,” a graduate level textbook by Pearson Higher Education, with an “in stock” date scheduled for January, 2013.

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