Canadian Government Executive - Volume 25 - Issue 02

I n recent years, leadership has been pro- nounced more important than mere man- agement – the key to personal and organi- zational success. In his latest book, McGill University Professor and provocateur Henry Mintzberg takes issue, calling it a “fable” that has been bad for management and worse for leadership. “The fashionable depiction sees leaders as do- ing the right things while managers do things right. This may sound right, until you try to do the right things without doing them right,” he notes in Bedtime Stories for Managers. Mintzberg has always celebrated good manag- ers, people who know what’s happening in their organization. Here he points to John Cleghorn, who, when CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada, was known for calling to the office when he stumbled on an ATM that wasn’t working well. It might be considered by some micromanagement. But Mint- zberg calls it leading by example – engaged man- agement practised well. “So let’s get past leadership dissociated from management, to recognize these are two sides of the same job. Haven’t we had enough of leading by remote control, disconnected from everything except the ‘big picture’? In truth, the big picture had to be painted with the little brushstrokes of grounded experience,” he says. “You may have heard that we are over-managed and under-led. Now it’s the opposite; we have too much lofty leadership and not enough manage- ment.” This is Mintzberg’s twentieth book. He has the same number of honorary degrees and for many years was touted as Canada’s management guru, although in recent years Roger Martin, ex-dean of the Rotman School of Management, tends to join him on such lists. His books vary – some are high- ly academic; others are more accessible. He even wrote Simply Managing to spread more widely the more theoretical ideas in a previous book, Managing. Unlike management experts who fo- cus intently on business, Mintzberg from the days of his 1960s PhD thesis – turned into his first book, The Nature of Management – has included public managers in his studies, and one book was exclu- sively on them, Managing Publicly. The latest is highly accessible, quite pungent and funny – although he says it may be his most serious. It’s a collection of short blog posts on im- portant themes he has covered over the years. He compares what he calls “lofty leadership” with “engaging management.” Lofty leaders tend to be treated as more important than folks who de- velop products and deliver services, send strategy down the hierarchy, and allocate resources. “Lead- ership is thrust upon those who thrust their will on others,” he notes about that model. By contrast, the five elements of engaging man- agement are: • Managers are important to the extent that they help other people be important. • An effective organization is an interacting net- work, not a vertical hierarchy. Effective manag- ers work throughout; they don’t sit at the top. • Out of the network emerges strategies, as en- gaged people solve little problems that can grow into big strategies. • To manage is to connect naturally with human beings. Managing thus means engaging, based on judgment, rooted in context. • Leadership is a sacred trust earned from the re- spect of others. He warns us to beware of the romance of lead- ership – putting ordinary mortals on a pedestal. “Beware of metaphors that glorify,” he adds, such as the comparison to orchestra conductors bring- ing everyone into harmony. Managers are regular human beings. “Successful managers are flawed – everyone is flawed – but their particular flaws are not fatal under the circumstances. Reasonable hu- man beings find ways to live with one another’s reasonable flaws,” he observes. But the lists we see of the attributes of managers are fatally flawed, he insists. They are never com- plete, and if they were, it would be impossible to be that person. He studied many lists and came up with 52 qualities. But the attributes can be wrong or be carried out in bad ways. For example, no- body would argue against the notion that manag- Bedtime Stories for Managers By Henry Mintzberg Berrett-Koehler, 190 pages, $25.95 42 / Canadian Government Executive // April/May 2019 The Leader’s Bookshelf By Harvey Schachter Bedtime Stories for Managers