What Managers Really Do

Henry Mintzberg, who is the Cleghorn professor of management studies at McGill University and well-known management scholar, points out that managers work on three planes. These are:

1. "Basically, managing is about influencing action. Management is about helping organizations and units to get things done, which means action. Sometimes managers manage actions directly. They fight fires. They manage projects. They negotiate contracts.
2. One step removed, they manage people. Managers deal with people who take the action, so they motivate them and they build teams and they enhance the culture and train them and do things to get people to take more effective actions.
3. And two steps removed from that, managers manage information to drive people to take actions - through budgets and objectives and delegating tasks and designing organization structure and all those sorts of things."