Harold Koontz (1909-1984) expanded upon this in his definition:

“Management is an art of getting things done through and with the people in formally organized groups. It is an art of creating an environment in which people can perform and individuals can co-operate towards attainment of group goals”.

These definitions share two common themes: a focus on work and a focus on people.

This is often referred to as the “hard” side and “soft” side of management, and most people emphasize one a little more than the other.

Both of these are essential, though.

The defining feature of a manager is that you are accountable for the work of other people.

Five Functions of Management

To further clarify what this term means, consider the traditional “five functions of management”.  While first identified by Henri Fayol (1841-1925) in the Industrial Revolution, they have been revised and updated over the years and still define the core work of a manager.

Planning
This is the job of looking ahead, anticipating problems, creating strategies, and acquiring resources.  A manager needs to have their eyes on the horizon and ensure their team has a plan that extends beyond today.

Organizing
With strategies defined, the task is now to mobilize and coordinate people to effectively utilize the available material and financial resources.  This includes ensuring that structure and roles are clear, communication rhythms are intentional, and processes are streamlined.

Staffing
Simply put, this role is about ensuring that enough of the right people are in the right roles.  A manager plays a vital role in all the key aspects of the employee experience, from hiring and onboarding to growth and development, all the way to their final day.

Leading
An unskilled manager relies on rewards and punishments to motivate their people, but the best managers act as leaders who motivate and inspire others to accomplish shared goals.  They build trusting relationships, communicate purpose, model values and ethics, and empower others to do their best work.

Controlling
Every manager needs to find a way to ensure high-quality work is being done.  This is not about “controlling” people, but about clarifying what success looks like and finding ways to reliably achieve excellence.  Every team wants to win, and it is the manager’s role to make sure everyone knows what the score is and to coach them towards success.  It’s not about barking orders and getting everyone to do what you say; it’s about feedback and accountability that helps people grow and achieve mastery.

After all these years, these functions still provide the foundation of managerial work.  If you’re a new manager, you may want to memorize them.

There’s a problem, though:  For many new managers, these functions don’t necessarily take up the entirety of their 40 hours in a week.

Many, especially those in a small company, will still contribute directly to the work somehow.  They’ll act as individual contributors for a certain percentage of their time, while expected to fulfill their management duties with the rest.  They are often referred to as “working managers”.

The challenge here is that the urgent nature of technical work can easily take priority over one’s management duties.  As a result, many managers don’t dedicate enough time and energy to managing vs. doing.  While jumping in wherever we’re needed and putting out fires makes us feel important, it isn’t our core work.

We need to ensure that the Five Functions actually get some prime real estate on our calendars.

Once you have this cemented, let’s go a little further.

While the five functions are a helpful start to clarifying your new roles, there are at least 3 additional focuses that I often see neglected.

1. Culture Management

While it’s vital to form strong 1:1 relationships with our team, it isn’t enough.  We need to be thinking about all the relationships and dynamics on the team.

It’s the interactions that take place among everyone that ultimately shapes the culture of your team.  It’s great if your team trusts you, but if they don’t also trust their teammates, they will remain leader-dependent and never fully develop.

As managers, our job is to monitor and actively work at building this healthy team culture.  Two quick litmus tests for this include:

1. Your team is able to accomplish its goals. A healthy culture supports performance and innovation.  This includes the ability to learn from failure and adapt quickly to changing circumstances.
2. Your team members are thriving. A healthy culture supports healthy people.  If your team is burnt out, irritable, and no longer enjoying work, you have a culture issue.

Culture is influenced by every aspect of your team – what you do, what you say, how people interact, how you make decisions, what you believe to be true, what you celebrate, what you discipline, and even the design of your physical (or virtual) working spaces.

Managing culture is complex work.  Naomi Stanford likens it to redirecting the flow of a powerful river.  You can put a dam in place, but you can never predict with complete accuracy what the water will do in response.  You have to monitor the effects, learn from it, and then adapt to keep everything flowing in the right direction.  It is an ongoing process.

You’re never done managing culture.  But if you can get it right, a healthy culture is one of the strongest drivers of performance and engagement.

2. Power Management

In most organizations, management means power and privilege.  This is unfortunate.

Rather than seeing management as an essential series of roles in a team, we made it about a position in a hierarchy.  We started handing it out like a reward for tenure or performance, rather than allowing the people with the right strengths to play the roles.

We need to clear this up.

Management is not status, it’s service.

It is not accumulating power, but empowering others.

Your team doesn’t exist to serve you.  You exist to serve them.

To adapt a phrase from Aaron Dignan, author of Brave New Work, the question you need to ask is, “What’s stopping my team from doing the best work of their lives?”

Whether this is a broken tool, a broken process, or a broken relationship, your job is to identify it, call it out, and work with your team to find a solution.

Don’t let the trappings of power – the reserved parking spots and the nicer offices – lead you to a place of entitlement and superiority.

As managers, we aren’t inherently more valuable than others; we’re just playing different roles.

People in your organization will naturally try to increase your responsibility level and lean on you to make more and more decisions.  This may make you feel powerful, but it’s something we need to resist.

We have to actively work at minimizing the power imbalance between ourselves and our teams to ensure that everyone feels a high degree of ownership over the work.

Mismanaged power in a team can erode trust, stunt the growth of your team, and diminish the psychological safety you need to do your best work.

Others won’t manage these power dynamics for you.  That’s your job.

Management is not status, it’s service. It is not accumulating power, but empowering others.Your team doesn’t exist to serve you. You exist to serve them. Share on X

3. Management management

There is probably a better title for this, but what I’m getting at is that we need to manage how management happens on our team.

In other words, the five functions need to be present, but it’s our job to determine how they’re present, and even in whom they’re present.

Here’s something we often don’t tell new managers:  You don’t have to carry all the functions of management on your own.

In fact, it would be better if you didn’t.

When it comes to fulfilling the necessary roles, you have three options:

1. Distribute the roles among people in your team who are well-suited to them. If someone is a natural planner, let them own the planning cycles for your team.  If they’re great at leading groups, let them facilitate your team meetings.
2. Design processes that decentralize management functions away from any one person. For example, rather than making all the major decisions on a team, introduce a few decision-making processes that help teams come to collective resolutions even when you’re not around.
3. Fulfill the roles yourself. Chances are that you’re really good at some aspects of management.  It’s ok to keep these hats on your own head.  Just be careful that you’re not creating an environment where people are overly dependent on you to do their work.

If you do this right, you’ll find that both the work and the people are being managed well, but it’s no longer the result of one person’s actions.

Interestingly, even Henri Fayol wrote that the functions of management were not meant to simply live in one person, but that they were to be spread throughout the individuals in an organization.

This is an important point to remember: Management is a collaborative effort.

The best managers recognize that their work cannot be done from a top-down, authoritarian, or paternalistic approach.

Ultimately, the end goal of every successful manager is to create a self-managing team.

Not only is this a more sustainable approach to management, but you’ll unlock all kinds of performance by tapping into your team’s intrinsic motivators like autonomy, mastery, growth, recognition, and achievement.

Ultimately, the end goal of every successful manager is to create a self-managing team. Share on X

Bottom line

Management is a big job.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the new responsibilities to carry and the new skills to hone.  Just take a breath.  You won’t ace this role right away.  You’ll make plenty of mistakes (especially on the people side of things), but if you’re intentional with your own development and can build genuine, trusting relationships with your people, you have the potential to radically enhance both the wellbeing and performance of your team.