HOW EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVES APPROACH THEIR JOBS

 The very nature of executive jobs requires a complex and subtle approach to planning, organizing, staffing, and so forth. The approach needs to take into account the uncertainty involved, as well as the diversity and volume of potentially relevant information. It must also come to grips with the difficult human environment; it must somehow help executives get things done despite their dependency on a large number of people, many of whom are not their subordinates.

An examination of effective general managers suggests that they have found just such an approach, a central part of which might be usefully thought of as "agenda setting" and "network building."

To understand why effective GMs behave as they do, it is essential first to recognize the types of challenges and dilemmas found in most of their jobs, the two most fundamental of which are:

1. Figuring out what to do despite uncertainty, great diversity, and an enormous amount of potentially relevant information.
2. Getting things done through a large and diverse set of people despite having little direct control over most of them.

The severity of these challenges in complex organizations is much greater than most non-executives would suspect. And the implications for the traditional management functions of planning, staffing, organizing, directing and controlling are powerful. Research of effective general managers indicates that a central part of their approach is “agenda setting” and “network building”.

EXECUTION: GETTING NETWORKS TO IMPLEMENT AGENDAS

After they have largely developed their networks and agendas, effective GMs tend to shift their attention toward using the networks to implement their agendas. In doing so they marshal their interpersonal skills, budgetary resources and information and information to help persuade these people. Under other circumstances, they will use resources available to them to negotiate a trade. And occasionally, they even resort to intimidation and coercion.

Effective GMs also often use their networks to exert indirect influence on people, including people who are not a part of that network. In some cases, GMs will convince one person who is in their network to get a second, who is not, to take some needed action. More indirectly still, GMs will sometimes approach a number of different people, requesting them to take actions that would then shape events that influence other individuals. Perhaps the most common example of indirect influence involves staging an event of some sort. In a typical case, the GM would set up a meeting or meetings and influence others through the selection of participants, the choice of an agenda, and often by his own participation.

Unlike the case of direct influence, GMs achieve much of their more indirect influence through symbolic methods. That is, they use meetings, architecture, language, stories about the organization, time, and space as symbols in order to get some message across indirectly.

All effective GMs seem to get things done this way, but the best performers do so more than others and with greater skill. That is, the better performers tend to mobilize more people to get more things done, and do so using a wider range of influence tactics. "Excellent" performers ask, encourage, cajole, praise, reward, demand, manipulate, and generally motivate others with great skill in face-to-face situations. They also rely more heavily on indirect influence than the "good" managers, who tend to rely on a more narrow range of influence techniques and apply them with less finesse.⁶

HOW THE JOB DETERMINES BEHAVIOR

Most of the visible patterns in daily behavior seem to be direct consequences of the way GMs approach their job, and thus consequences of the nature of the job itself and the type of people involved. More specifically, some of these patterns seem to derive from the approach taken to agenda setting, others from network building, others from how they tend to use networks to implement agendas, and still others from the approach in general.

Spending most of the time with others (pattern 1) seems to be a natural consequence of the GM's overall approach to the job and the central role the network of relationships plays. As we saw earlier, GMs develop a network of relationships with those the job makes them dependent on and then use that network to help create, implement, and update an organizational agenda. As such, the whole approach to the job involves inter-acting with people. Hence it should not be surprising to find that on a daily basis, GMs spend most of their time with others.

Likewise, because the network tends to include all those the GM is dependent on, it is hardly surprising to find the GM spending time with many besides a boss and direct subordinates (pattern 2). And because the agenda tends to include items related to all the long-, medium-, and short-run responsibilities associated with the job, it is to be expected that the breadth of topics covered in daily conversations might be very wide (pattern 3).

A few of the other patterns seem to be a direct consequence of the agenda-setting approach employed by GMs. As we saw earlier, agenda setting involves gathering information on a continuous basis from network members, usually by asking questions. Major agenda-setting decisions are often invisible, they occur in the GM’s mind, created by the information in hand.

Network building involves the use of a wide range of interpersonal tactics. Since humor and nonwork discussions can be used as effective tools for building relationships and maintaining them under stressful conditions, these tools are used frequently. Since maintaining relationships requires that one deal with issues that other people feel are important (regardless of their centrality to the business) it is also not surprising to find the GMs spending time on substantive issues that seem unimportant to us and them.

The best performers are particularly adept at grasping and taking advantage of each item in the random succession of time and issue fragments that crowd [their] day[s]. And central to their ability to do so are their networks and agendas. The agendas allow the GMs to react in an opportunistic (and highly efficient) way to the flow of events around them, yet knowing that they are doing so within some broader and more rational framework. The networks allow terse (and very efficient) conversations to happen; without them, such short yet meaningful conversations would be impossible. Together, the agenda and networks allow the GMs to achieve the efficiency they need to cope with very demanding jobs in fewer than 60 hours per week (pattern 12), through daily behavior patterns that on the surface can look "unmanagerial."

WHAT SHOULD TOP MANAGERS DO?

Some of the most important implications of all this include the following:

1. At the start, putting someone in a GM job who does not know the business or the people involved, because he is a success­ful "professional manager," is probably very risky. Unless the business is easy to learn, it would be very difficult for an individual to learn enough, fast enough, to develop a good agenda. And unless it is a small situation with few people involved, it would be difficult to build a strong network fast enough to implement the agenda.

Especially for large and complex businesses, this condition suggests that "growing" one's own executives should have a high priority. Many companies today say that developing their own executives is important, but in light of the booming executive search business, one has to conclude that either they are not trying very hard or that their efforts simply are not succeeding.

2.   Management training courses, both in universities and in corporations, probably overemphasize formal tools, unambiguous problems, and situations that deal simplistically with human relationships.

Some of the time-management programs, currently in vogue, are a good example of the problem here. Based on simplistic conceptions about the nature of managerial work, these programs instruct managers to stop letting people and problems "interrupt" their daily work. They often tell potential executives that short and disjointed conversations are ineffective. They advise that one should discipline oneself not to let "irrelevant" people and topics get on one's schedule. In other words, they advise people to behave differently from the effective executives in this study. Seminars on "How to Run Meetings" are probably just as bad.

Another example of inappropriate courses is university-based executive training programs that emphasize formal quantita­tive tools. These programs are based, at least implicitly, on the assumption that such tools are central to effective performance. All evidence suggests that while they are sometimes relevant, they are hardly central.

3.   People who are new in general management jobs can probably be gotten up to speed more effectively than is the norm today. Initially, a new GM usually needs to spend consider-able time collecting information, establishing relationships, select­ing a basic direction for his or her area of responsibilities, and developing a supporting organization. During the first three to six months, demands from superiors to accomplish specific tasks, or to work on pet projects, can often be counterproduc­tive. Indeed, anything that significantly diverts attention away from agenda setting and network building can prove to be counterproductive.

In a more positive sense, those who oversee GMs can probably be most helpful initially if they are sensitive to where the new executive is likely to have problems and help him or her in those areas. Such areas are often quite predictable. For example, if people have spent their careers going up the ladder in one function and have been promoted into the general manager's job in an autonomous division (a common occurrence, especially in manufacturing organizations), they will probably have prob­lems with agenda setting because of a lack of detailed knowledge about the other functions in the division.

On the other hand, if people have spent most of their early careers in professional, staff, or assistant-to jobs and are promoted into a GM's job where they suddenly have responsibility for hundreds or thousands of people (not an unusual occurrence in professional organizations), they will probably have great difficulty at first building a network. They don't have many relationships to begin with and they are not used to spending time developing a large network.

In either case, a GM's boss can be a helpful coach and can arrange activities that foster instead of retard the types of actions the new executive should be taking.

4.   Finally, the formal planning systems within which many GMs must operate probably hinder effective performance.

A good planning system should help a GM create an intelligent agenda and a strong network that can implement it. That is, it should encourage the GM to think strategically, to consider both the long and short term, and, regardless of the time frame, to take into account financial, product / market, and organiza­tional issues. Furthermore, it should be a flexible tool that the executive can use to help build a network. It should give the GM leeway and options, so that, depending on what kind of environment among subordinates is desired, he or she can use the planning system to help achieve the goals.

Unfortunately, most of the planning systems used by corporations do nothing of the sort. Instead, they impose a rigid “number crunching” requirement on GMs that often does not require much strategic or long-range thinking in agenda setting and which can make network building and maintenance needlessly difficult by creating unnecessary stress among people. Indeed, some systems seem to do nothing but generate paper, often a lot of it, and distract executives from doing those things that are really important.

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