As a new manager, you may be surprised at the number of things that you have to do each day. No longer can you just concentrate on your own job or one task at a time. The management theorist Frederick Mintzberg described a manager's job as being "characterized by pace, interruptions, brevity, variety, and fragmentation of activities."
As a manager, you will coordinate and control the work of your team, and so it is inevitable that you will use your interpersonal skills to communicate and negotiate with others. You will also be reacting decisively to unplanned events. In order to make appropriate decisions as a manager, you will need to gather all of the information that you need. You may also need to pass relevant details on to others.
Being expected to complete such a variety of activities may seem difficult at first, but in reality you play different roles in most areas of your life. At any one time, you may be fulfilling the roles of child, sibling, spouse, parent, friend, colleague, boss, subordinate, and citizen.
The three main manager roles involve the following activities:
Making Decisions – Managers must decide how to make the best use of the resources available, and negotiate for the resources that they need. Managers may have to make decisions about what changes should be made, and they often have to react to unplanned events.
Gathering and Distributing Information – Managers have to identify and gather all of the necessary information that they need. Much of this information may also have to be passed on to others.
Using Interpersonal Skills – Managers need to interact closely with people inside and outside of the organization. As leaders, they must direct their teams to meet organizational objectives. They may also have to represent their department or their company to the external world.
But what is involved in these different management roles? You may find it useful to assess your experiences against each of these management roles. Consider the following examples:
Making Decisions – "I had to make a call on how to deal with the latest influx of work. It was tough, because I had to prioritize a number of different projects, and also decide who should do what and when. In the end, I had to negotiate for more staff."
Gathering and Distributing Information – "When I was looking at changing the customer care system, I had to speak to a number of colleagues, customers, and external suppliers, to find out what my options were. Then I had to create a report to be distributed to the Board."
Using Interpersonal Skills – "A huge part of my job is communication. I have to interact with colleagues about managing workloads, and keep my team up-to-date by communicating strategy effectively. It can be tough."
You will not fill all of these roles every day, or even every week, but over time you will find that you are involved in most of them. If any areas are missing, consider whether or not this is due to the nature of your particular job. For example, you may have little opportunity to deal with people outside of the company. If this is the case, you should seek ways to extend your experience in that direction.
So you can see that the many different roles that you play and interruptions that you receive during the day are not in fact a distraction from your job, but an important part of it. However, having so many fragmented activities can lead to frustration if you feel that you have not done all that you have hoped to do.
The following activities may help you to appreciate what you achieve each day:
annotate your diary to see what was done and what was planned
keep a log of your daily activities for one week
discuss your frustrations with your mentor
compare notes with other managers
A management role can be very different from your previous technical or functional roles. There will be many more demands made by other people, and your time will be split between a greater variety of activities. A manager's job can seem very fragmented at times. It may not be so easy to cross off your list of completed tasks. You need to learn to look at your job in a slightly different way. This will help you to appreciate all that you are achieving from day to day.