The Five Minds of a Manager
Reprint: R0311C
Managers are told: Be global and be local. Collaborate and compete. Change, perpetually, and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. To be effective, managers need to consider the juxtapositions in order to arrive at a deep integration of these seemingly contradictory concerns. That means they must focus not only on what they have to accomplish but also on how they have to think.
When the authors, respectively the director of the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter in the U.K. and the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, set out to develop a masters program for practicing managers, they saw that they could not rely on the usual MBA educational structure, which divides the management world into discrete business functions such as marketing and accounting. They needed an educational structure that would encourage synthesis rather than separation. Managing, they determined, involves five tasks, each with its own mind-set: managing the self (the reflective mind-set); managing organizations (the analytic mind-set); managing context (the worldly mind-set); managing relationships (the collaborative mind-set); and managing change (the action mind-set). The program is built on the exploration and integration of those five aspects of the managerial mind. The authors say it has proved powerful in the classroom and insightful in practice.
Imagine the mind-sets as threads and the manager as weaver. Effective performance means weaving each mind-set over and under the others to create a fine, sturdy cloth.
Does your management job seem impossible? If so, that’s not surprising. Your many roles are so often contradictory. Be global, and be local, you’re told. Collaborate, and compete. Change perpetually, and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. How can you possibly reconcile all this? No one can.
But you can triumph over managerial obstacles, despite conflicting expectations, if you focus less on what you should do and more on how you should think. Successful managers think their way through their jobs, using five different mind-sets that allow them to deal adeptly with the world around them:
The key to your managerial effectiveness? Regularly access all five mind-sets, not in any particular order, but by cycling through each as needed. And don’t go it alone. When you collaborate with colleagues by interweaving your collective mind-sets, you—and your organization—will excel.
The Idea in Practice
Managing effectively encompasses five basic tasks, each with its own mind-set:
Without reflection, management is mindless. Events make sense only when you stop and think about what they mean, how they connect, what patterns they reveal. Reflection puts events into new and clear perspective. As you look in, you can better see out, perceiving familiar things in unfamiliar ways—a product as a service, a customer as a partner. As you look back—at what worked and what did not—you see ahead to what your organization should become.
You analyze most effectively when you go beyond the superficial—just running the numbers. Instead, you drill into richer sources of data, including your and others’ underlying values and biases. What data and assumptions are they using? Breaking up complex phenomena into component parts helps you see problems in new ways, moving your organization toward action and change.
When you see the world through the eyes of other cultures, other industries, other companies, you better understand the diverse contexts in which your organization operates. That requires getting out of the office and spending time where products are produced, customers served, environments threatened. Shell Oil exemplifies a worldly mind-set. It extracts oil and brings its products to markets without violating local rights or disrupting local environments.
You manage most effectively when you manage not individuals but the relationships among them. You’re creating the conditions—the structures and attitudes—that encourage teamwork. You’re managing from inside, throughout your organization—not from the top. You’re not running the show—unless absolutely necessary.
Managers have a bias for action. Your challenge, then, is to mobilize your and others’ energies around what needs to change—while sustaining what must stay the same. An action mind-set is not about “whipping the horses into a frenzy.” Instead, survey the situation, determine your teams’ capabilities and your organization’s needs, and help everyone move in the right direction.
The chief executive of a major Canadian company complained recently that he can’t get his engineers to think like managers. It’s a common complaint, but behind it lies an uncommonly important question: What does it mean to think like a manager?
Sadly, little attention has been paid to that question in recent years. Most of us have become so enamored of “leadership” that “management” has been pushed into the background. Nobody aspires to being a good manager anymore; everybody wants to be a great leader. But the separation of management from leadership is dangerous. Just as management without leadership encourages an uninspired style, which deadens activities, leadership without management encourages a disconnected style, which promotes hubris. And we all know the destructive power of hubris in organizations. So let’s get back to plain old management.
The problem, of course, is that plain old management is complicated and confusing. Be global, managers are told, and be local. Collaborate, and compete. Change, perpetually, and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. How is anyone supposed to reconcile all this? The fact is, no one can. To be effective, managers need to face the juxtapositions in order to arrive at a deep integration of these seemingly contradictory concerns. That means they must focus not only on what they have to accomplish but also on how they have to think. Managers need various “mind-sets.”
Helping managers appreciate that was the challenge we set for ourselves in the mid-1990s when we began to develop a new master’s program for practicing managers. We knew we could not rely on the usual structure of MBA education, which divides the management world into the discrete business functions of marketing, finance, accounting, and so on. Our intention was to educate managers who were coming out of these narrow silos; why push them back in? We needed a new structure that encouraged synthesis rather than separation. What we came up with—a structure based on the five aspects of the managerial mind—has proved not only powerful in the classroom but insightful in practice, as we hope to demonstrate in this article. We’ll first explain how we came up with the five managerial mind-sets, then we’ll discuss each in some depth before concluding with the case for interweaving the five.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, headquartered in Geneva, has a management development concern. It worries that it may be drifting too far toward a fast-action culture. It knows that it must act quickly in responding to disasters everywhere—earthquakes and wars, floods and famines—but it also sees the need to engage in the slower, more delicate task of building a capacity for action that is careful, thoughtful, and tailored to local conditions and needs.
Many business organizations face a similar problem—they know how to execute, but they are not so adept at stepping back to reflect on their situations. Others face the opposite predicament: They get so mired in thinking about their problems that they can’t get things done fast enough. We all know bureaucracies that are great at planning and organizing but slow to respond to market forces, just as we’re all acquainted with the nimble companies that react to every stimulus, but sloppily, and have to be constantly fixing things. And then, of course, there are those that suffer from both afflictions—for example, firms whose marketing departments are absorbed with grand positioning statements while their sales forces chase every possible deal.
Those two aspects establish the bounds of management: Everything that every effective manager does is sandwiched between action on the ground and reflection in the abstract. Action without reflection is thoughtless; reflection without action is passive. Every manager has to find a way to combine these two mind-sets—to function at the point where reflective thinking meets practical doing.
But action and reflection about what? One obvious answer is: about collaboration, about getting things done cooperatively with other people—in negotiations, for example, where a manager cannot act alone. Another answer is that action, reflection, and collaboration have to be rooted in a deep appreciation of reality in all its facets. We call this mind-set worldly, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “experienced in life, sophisticated, practical.” Finally, action, reflection, and collaboration, as well as worldliness, must subscribe to a certain rationality or logic; they rely on an analytic mind-set, too.
So we have five sets of the managerial mind, five ways in which managers interpret and deal with the world around them. Each has a dominant subject, or target, of its own. For reflection, the subject is the self; there can be no insight without self-knowledge. Collaboration takes the subject beyond the self, into the manager’s network of relationships. Analysis goes a step beyond that, to the organization; organizations depend on the systematic decomposition of activities, and that’s what analysis is all about. Beyond the organization lies what we consider the subject of the worldly mind-set, namely context—the worlds around the organization. Finally, the action mind-set pulls everything together through the process of change—in self, relationships, organization, and context.
The practice of managing, then, involves five perspectives, which correspond to the five modules of our program:
If you are a manager, this is your world!
Let us make clear several characteristics of this set of sets. First, we make no claim that our framework is either scientific or comprehensive. It simply has proved useful in our work with managers, including in our master’s program. (For more on the program, see the sidebar “Mind-Sets for Management Development.”) Second, we ask you to consider each of these managerial mind-sets as an attitude, a frame of mind that opens new vistas. Unless you get into a reflective frame of mind, for example, you cannot open yourself to new ideas. You might not even notice such ideas in the first place without a worldly frame of mind. And, of course, you cannot appreciate the buzz, the vistas, and the opportunities of actions unless you engage in them.
In 1996, when we founded the International Masters Program in Practicing Management with colleagues from around the world, we developed the managerial mind-sets as a new way to structure management education and development. Managers are sent to the IMPM by their companies, preferably in groups of four or five. They stay on the job, coming into our classrooms for five modules of two weeks each, one for each of the mind-sets, over a period of 16 months.
We open with a module on the reflective mind-set. The module is located at Lancaster University in the reflective atmosphere of northern England—the nearby hills and lakes inspire reflection on the purpose of life and work. Then it is on to McGill University in Montreal, where the grid-like regularity of the city reflects the energy and order of the analytic mind-set. The worldly mind-set on context comes alive at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, where new technologies jostle ancient traditions on the crowded streets. Then comes the collaborative mind-set, hosted by faculty in Japan, where collaboration has been the key to managerial innovations, and Korea, where alliances and partnerships have become the basis for business growth. Last is the action mind-set module, located at Insead in France, where emerging trends from around the world convert into lessons for managerial action.
So our locations not only teach the mind-sets but also encourage the participating managers to live them. And so have we, in the very conception of the program.
Our approach to management development is fundamentally reflective. We believe managers need to step back from the pressures of their jobs and reflect thoughtfully on their experiences. We as faculty members bring concepts; the participants bring experience. Learning occurs where these meet—in individual heads, small groups, and all together. Our 50-50 rule says that half the classroom time should be turned over to the participants, on their agendas.
The program is fully collaborative all around. There is no lead school; much of the organizational responsibility is distributed. Likewise, the faculty’s relationship with the participants is collaborative. And faculty members work closely with the participating companies, which over the past eight years have included Alcan, BT, EDF Group and Gaz de France, Fujitsu, the International Red Cross Federation, LG, Lufthansa, Matsushita, Motorola, Royal Bank of Canada, and Zeneca.
We think of our setting as being especially worldly, because the participating managers and faculty host their colleagues at home, in their own cultures, and are guests abroad. We also believe that the program’s reflective orientation allows us to probe into analysis more deeply than in regular education and work.
Finally, our own purpose is action: We seek fundamental change in management education worldwide—to help change business schools into true schools of management.
Third, a word on our word “mind-sets.” We do not use it to set any manager’s mind. All of us have had more than enough of that. Rather, we use the word in the spirit of a fortune one of us happened to pull out of a Chinese cookie recently: “Get your mind set. Confidence will lead you on.” We ask you to get your mind set around five key ideas. Then, not just confidence but coherence can lead you on. Think, too, of these mind-sets as mind-sights—perspectives. But be aware that, improperly used, they can also be mine sites. Too much of any of them—obsessive analyzing or compulsive collaborating, for instance—and the mind-set can blow up in your face.
Managing Self:
Managers who are sent off to development courses these days often find themselves being welcomed to “boot camp.” This is no country club, they are warned; you’ll have to work hard. But this is wrongheaded. While managers certainly don’t need a country club atmosphere for development, neither do they need boot camp. Most managers we know already live boot camp every day. Besides, in real boot camps, soldiers learn to march and obey, not to stop and think. These days, what managers desperately need is to stop and think, to step back and reflect thoughtfully on their experiences. Indeed, in his book Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky makes the interesting point that events, or “happenings,” become experience only after they have been reflected upon thoughtfully: “Most people do not accumulate a body of experience. Most people go through life undergoing a series of happenings, which pass through their systems undigested. Happenings become experiences when they are digested, when they are reflected on, related to general patterns, and synthesized.”
Unless the meaning is understood, managing is mindless. Hence we take reflection to be that space suspended between experience and explanation, where the mind makes the connections. Imagine yourself in a meeting when someone suddenly erupts with a personal rant. You’re tempted to ignore or dismiss the outburst—you’ve heard, after all, that the person is having problems at home. But why not use it to reflect on your own reaction—whether embarrassment, anger, or frustration—and so recognize some comparable feelings in yourself? Your own reaction now becomes a learning experience for you: You have opened a space for imagination, between your experience and your explanation. It can make all the difference.
Organizations may not need “mirror people,” who see in everything only reflections of their own behavior. But neither do they need “window people,” who cannot see beyond the images in front of them. They need managers who see both ways—in a sense, ones who look out the window at dawn, to see through their own reflections to the awakening world outside. “Reflect” in Latin means to refold, which suggests that attention turns inward so that it can be turned outward. This means going beyond introspection. It means looking in so that you can better see out in order to perceive a familiar thing in a different way—a product as a service, maybe, or a customer as a partner. Does that not describe the thinking of the really successful managers, the Andy Groves of the world? Compare such people with the Messiers and Lays, who dazzle with great mergers and grand strategies before burning out their companies.
These days, what managers desperately need is to stop and think—to step back and reflect thoughtfully on their experiences.
Likewise, reflective managers are able to see behind in order to look ahead. Successful “visions” are not immaculately conceived; they are painted, stroke by stroke, out of the experiences of the past. Reflective managers, in other words, have a healthy respect for history—not just the grand history of deals and disasters but also the everyday history of all the little actions that make organizations work. Consider in this regard Kofi Annan’s deep personal understanding of the United Nations, a comprehension that has been the source of his ability to help move that complex body to a different and better place. You must appreciate the past if you wish to use the present to get to a better future.
Managing Organizations:
Literally, analysis means to “let loose” (from the Greek ana, meaning “up” and lyein, meaning “loosen”). Analysis loosens up complex phenomena by breaking them into component parts—by decomposing them.
Analysis happens everywhere—in context (industry analysis), with relationships (360-degree assessments), and so on. But it is especially related to organization. You simply can’t get organized without analysis, especially in a large company. Good analysis provides a language for organizing; it allows people to share an understanding of what is driving their efforts; it provides measures for performance. And organizational structure itself is fundamentally analytic—it is a means of decomposition to establish the division of labor. Just look at any organization chart, with all the boxes neatly lined up.
Picture the modern manager in an office in a tall building, looking down on the grid of the city below and across at the offices of companies in other buildings. From this perspective, the manager does not see individual people so much as systems of organization, power, and communication. Turning around, that manager is surrounded by the plush paraphernalia of his or her own company, the fruits of many people’s tireless work on structures and systems and techniques. All of this represents analysis in the conventional sense: order and decomposition. How is such a manager to escape the analytic mind-set?
We prefer a different question: How is the manager to get truly inside the analytic mind-set, beyond the superficialities of obvious analysis, into the essential meanings of structures and systems? The key to analyzing effectively, in our view, is to get beyond conventional approaches in order to appreciate how analysis works and what effect it has on the organization.
Consider three related tasks, one simple, one complicated, one complex. Building a pleasure boat can be relatively straightforward—it’s about such things as the ratio of displacement to length. Building an aircraft carrier is far more complicated, involving the coordination of all kinds of subsystems and supply networks. Yet even here the component parts can be readily understood and the necessary behaviors made rather predictable. But a decision on whether or not to deploy that aircraft carrier can be truly complex: Who is to say with any certainty what is the right thing to do, or even what is the best thing under the circumstances?
Making that kind of complex decision means standing above shallow analysis and easy technique—just running the numbers—and going deeper into the analytic mind-set. You have to take into account soft data, including the values underlying such choices. Deep analysis does not seek to simplify complex decisions, but to sustain the complexity while maintaining the organization’s capacity to take action. That was the great power of Winston Churchill’s rhetoric during World War II. His simple expressions captured the complexity that was Great Britain and the war in which it was engaged.
We have come across examples of deep analysis from managers participating in our own program who were being forced into obvious decisions by shallow analyses: Close the plant, speed up a slow project. After studying the analytic mind-set during the second module of our program, they went back to their jobs and probed more deeply. They analyzed the analyses of others—where these people were coming from, what data and assumptions they were using. They dug out other sorts of information that didn’t make it into the conventional analyses and found limitations in the techniques used. Most important, they recognized biases in their own thinking. As a result, they saw things differently, encouraged others to change course, and helped resolve problems. Was this analysis or reflection? It was reflective analysis.
The problem for many managers today, as well as the business schools that train them, is not a lack of analysis but too much of it—at least, too much conventional analysis. This is exemplified by that popular metaphor in finance of the tennis player who watches the scoreboard while missing the ball (much like the marketer who studies the crowd while missing the sale). The trick in the analytic mind-set is to appreciate scores and crowds while watching the ball.
Managing Context:
We live on a globe that from a distance looks pretty uniform. “Globalization” sees the world from a distance, assuming and encouraging a certain homogeneity of behavior. Is that what we want from our managers?
A closer look reveals something rather different. Far from being uniform, this world is made up of all kinds of worlds. Should we not, then, be encouraging our managers to be more worldly, more experienced in life, in both sophisticated and practical ways? In other words, should we not be getting into worlds beyond our own—into other people’s circumstances, habits, cultures—so that we can better know our own world? To paraphrase T.S. Eliot’s famous words, should we not explore ceaselessly in order to return home and know the place for the first time? That to us is the worldly mind-set.
Being worldly does not require global coverage, just as global coverage does not a worldly mind-set make. Indeed, global coverage does not even ensure a global perspective, given that the managers of so many “global” companies are rooted in the culture of the headquarters’ country. But there are companies that seem to be reasonably global as well as worldly—a Shell, perhaps. Shell has, of course, long covered the globe. But because of social pressures, including a headquarters that has always had to work across two cultures (Dutch and British), it has struck us in personal contacts as rather worldly. By this we mean that the company tailors and blends its parts across the world, socially and environmentally as well as economically. It must find and extract oil without violating the rights of the people under whose territories the oil sits, and it has to refine and sell that oil in ways that are respectful of the local environment. That may seem clear enough today, but think about what companies like Shell went through to get there.
Be global, managers are told, and be local. Change and maintain order. How is anyone supposed to reconcile all this? The fact is, no one can.
We conclude from this that while global managers may spend a lot of time in the air, and not just literally, they become worldly when their feet are planted firmly on the ground of eclectic experience. That means getting out of their offices, beyond the towers, to spend time where products are produced, customers served, and environments threatened. (For a comparison of the global and the worldly worldviews, see the exhibit “From Global to Worldly.”)
From Global to Worldly
Of course, shifting from a global to a worldly perspective is not easy. In James Clavell’s novel Shogun, a Japanese woman tells her British lover, who is perplexed by the strange world of seventeenth-century Japan into which he has fallen, “It’s all so simple, Anjin-san. Just change your concept of the world.” Just!
But maybe it’s not quite as hard as it seems. One way to begin (as in the novel) is through immersion in a strange context: Get into someone else’s world as a mirror to your own. That is why we hold our program’s module on the worldly mind-set in India: For all but the Indian managers, India is not just another world, but, in a sense, otherworldly. Being there, especially among fellow managers from Indian companies, takes the non-Indian participants past the nice abstractions of economic, political, and social differences, down onto the streets, where these differences come alive.
“How can you possibly drive in this traffic?” an American marketing manager from Lufthansa, shaken up during her ride from the airport, asked an Indian professor. He replied, “I just join the flow.” Learning can begin! That is not chaos on the streets of India, but another kind of logic. When you realize it, you have become that much more worldly.
We ask the participants in our program, after they go back to work between sessions, to write reflection papers on what they’ve learned at the modules. After the India module, a Russian manager from the Red Cross, with his own share of third-world experiences, wrote about seeing a pile of tires with a huge black cross on it: “Black Cross: The Clinic for Tires” read the sign. He was struck by a symbol so familiar to him used in such a radically different context. He wrote: “Once again India [has reminded me] how interdependent, similar, and different at the same time are our worlds.” This is the worldly mind-set in action: seeing differently out to reflect differently in. We might say that the worldly mind-set puts the reflective one into context.
In our view, to manage context is to manage on the edges, between the organization and the various worlds that surround it—cultures, industries, companies. What Ray Raphael has written about “Edges,” in his book by that title, is germane to every manager:
Many of the most interesting things, say the biologists, happen on the Edges—on the interface between the woods and the field, the land and the sea. There, living organisms encounter dynamic conditions that give rise to untold variety.…
Variety, perhaps, but there is tension as well. The flora of the meadows, for example, as they approach the woodlands, find themselves coping with increasingly unfavorable conditions: the sunlight they need might be lacking, and the soil no longer feels right. There is also the problem of competition with alien species of trees and shrubs. The Edges, in short, might abound with life, but each living form must fight for its own.
No wonder managers must be worldly. They have to mediate those wide zones where organization meets context—not just, for example, “customers” acting in “markets,” however “differentiated,” but all those particular people in particular places buying and using products in their own particular ways.
Managing Relationships:
It need hardly be said that managing is about working with people—not just as bosses and subordinates but, more important, as colleagues and partners. Yet despite all the rhetoric about collaboration, in the West, at least, we often take a narrow view. Thanks to the influence of economic theory, we see people as independent actors, detachable human “resources” or “assets” that can be moved around, bought and sold, combined, and “downsized.” That is not the collaborative mind-set.
If you picture yourself on top of a network, looking down on it, then you are out of it. How can you possibly manage its relationships that way?
In fact, our own original definition of the collaborative mind-set got a jolt when our Japanese colleagues began to design the program’s fourth module. It had been called Managing People. But they pointed out that a truly collaborative mind-set does not involve managing people so much as the relationships among people, in teams and projects as well as across divisions and alliances. Getting into a truly collaborative mind-set means getting beyond empowerment—a word implying that the people who know the work best must somehow receive the blessing of their managers to do it—and into commitment. It also means getting away from the currently popular heroic style of managing and moving toward a more engaging style.
Engaging managers listen more than they talk; they get out of their offices to see and feel more than they remain in them to sit and figure. By being worldly themselves, they foster collaboration among others. And they do less controlling, thus allowing other people to be in greater control of their own work. If “I deem, so that you do” is the implicit motto of the heroic manager, then for the engaging manager it is “We dream, so that we do.” Our Japanese colleagues call this “leadership in the background”—it lets as many ordinary people as possible lead. (For a comparison of heroic and engaging management, see the exhibit “Two Ways to Manage.”)
Two Ways to Manage
When John Kotter was asked if the members of the Harvard Business School class of 1974, whose careers he followed in his book The New Rules, were team players, he replied, “I think it fair to say that these people want to create the team and lead it to some glory as opposed to being a member of a team that’s being driven by somebody else.” That is not the collaborative mind-set. Having to run the team may be necessary at times—although we suspect it’s needed far less often than most people think—but it hardly represents a collaborative point of view, nor does it foster teamwork. Leaders don’t do most of the things that their organizations get done; they do not even make them get done. Rather, they help to establish the structures, conditions, and attitudes through which things get done. And that requires a collaborative mind-set.
We talk a great deal about networks these days, as well as teams, task forces, alliances, and knowledge work. Yet we still picture managers on “top.” Well, then, picture yourself on top of a network, looking down on it. That puts you out of it; how can you possibly manage its relationships that way? To be in a collaborative mind-set means to be inside, involved, to manage throughout. But it has a more profound meaning, too—to get management beyond managers, to distribute it so that responsibility flows naturally to whoever can take the initiative and pull things together. Think of self-managing teams, of skunk works; indeed, think of who “manages” the World Wide Web.
Managing Change:
Imagine your organization as a chariot pulled by wild horses. (That may be easy for you to do!) These horses represent the emotions, aspirations, and motives of all the people in the organization. Holding a steady course requires just as much skill as steering around to a new direction.
Philosophers from Plato to Vivekenanda have used this metaphor to describe the need to harness emotional energy; it works well for management, too. An action mind-set, especially at senior levels, is not about whipping the horses into a frenzy, careening hither and yon. It is about developing a sensitive awareness of the terrain and of what the team is capable of doing in it and thereby helping to set and maintain direction, coaxing everyone along.
Action, and especially change, need no introduction, of course. Everybody today understands them and the need for them. That’s the problem.
There is now an overwhelming emphasis on action at the expense of reflection. The Red Cross Federation is unusual, not in experiencing this problem, but in being aware of it. In addition, people are obsessed with change these days. We are told, relentlessly, that we live in times of great upheaval, that everything is changing, so we had better be in a constant state of alert. Change or else.
Well, then, look around. What do you see that has changed recently? Your clothing? (Your grandparents wore cotton and wool; they too buttoned buttons.) Your car? (It uses the basic technology of the Model T.) The airplane you’re flying in? (That technology is newer: the first commercial jet aircraft took flight in 1952.) Your telephone? (That changed—about ten years ago. Unless, of course, you are not using a cellular phone.)
Our point is not that nothing is changing. No, something is always changing. Right now it is information technology. But many other things are not changing at all—and these we don’t notice (like buttons). We tend to focus on what is changing and conclude that everything is. That is hardly a reflective mind-set, and it is detrimental as well to the action mind-set. We have to sober up to the reality that change is not pervasive, and that the phenomenon of change is not new. If the reflective mind-set has to respect history, then the action mind-set could use a little humility.
Change has no meaning without continuity. There is a name for everything changing all the time: anarchy. No one wants to live with that, certainly no organization that wishes to survive. Businesses are judged by the products they sell and the services they render, not the changes they make. So change cannot be managed without continuity. Accordingly, the trick in the action mind-set is to mobilize energy around those things that need changing, while being careful to maintain the rest. And make no mistake about it, managing continuity is no easier than managing change. Remember those wild horses.
The dominant view of managing change is Cartesian: Action results from deliberate strategies, carefully planned, that unfold as systematically managed sequences of decisions. That is the analytic mind-set, not the action one. Monsanto went into genetically engineered agriculture with that approach, with its strategy all worked out in advance. With control of seed varieties and certain pesticides and fertilizers, it could bring an entire ecosystem to the market. And it had the research capacity and presence worldwide to do it. So it set about a series of brilliantly conceived acquisitions and effectively positioned the company to be the Microsoft of agribusiness. But the farmers and consumers weren’t there—they were more enthusiastic about continuity at that point—and the plan collapsed.
Change, to be successful, cannot follow some mechanistic schedule of steps, of formulation followed by implementation. Action and reflection have to blend in a natural flow. And that has to include collaboration. Satish Kumar, the director of the Schumacher Institute in the United Kingdom, put it nicely in the title of his latest book, You Are Therefore I Am: A Declaration of Dependence. We had better be reflectively collaborative, as well as analytically worldly, if we wish to accomplish effective change.
Of course, energized action is necessary too, but that doesn’t mean being hyperactive or fiddling around endlessly with structure. It means remaining curious, alert, experimental. Changing is a learning process, and so is maintaining course. We may think of stasis as the norm and change as driven, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Active members of an organization may resist change imposed on them because they understand that the change would be dysfunctional. And they in turn may engage in “silent change” of their own, continually re-creating operations for better performance.
Clearly, these five mind-sets do not represent hard-and-fast categories. We need distinct labels for them, but they obviously overlap, and they are more than mere words. They are more than metaphors too, but a metaphor can help us understand how they come together.
Imagine the mind-sets as threads and the manager as weaver. Effective performance means weaving each mind-set over and under the others to create a fine, sturdy cloth. You analyze, then you act. But that does not work as expected, so you reflect. You act some more, then find yourself blocked, realizing that you cannot do it alone. You have to collaborate. But to do that, you have to get into the world of others. Then more analysis follows, to articulate the new insights. Now you act again—and so it goes, as the cloth of your effort forms.
But one piece of cloth is not enough. An organization is a collective entity that achieves common purpose when the cloths of its various managers are sewn together into useful garments—when the organization’s managers collaborate to combine their reflective actions in analytic, worldly ways.
We have been emphasizing the need for all managers to get deeply into all five mind-sets. But many managers naturally tilt to one or another, depending on their situations and personal inclinations. Some people are more reflective than others, some more action oriented, some more analytic, and so on. Finance and marketing have their share of calculating managers (lots of analysis), salespeople can sometimes be a little too worldly, those from HR a little too enthusiastic about collaboration. So the weaving often has to be collaborative, too, like the sewing, as managers come to understand one another and combine their strengths.
Companies have been quite concerned about seamlessness in recent years. Yet we all appreciate seams that are nicely sewn, just as we appreciate mind-sets that are nicely combined. Effective organizations tailor handsome results out of the woven mind-sets of their managers.
Jonathan Gosling is the director of the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter in Exeter, England.
Henry Mintzberg is the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management at the University of McGill. He is the author of, most recently, Rebalancing Society: Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, and Center.
The Five Minds of a Manager
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