The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact
The article I read was The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact. Before I even started reading this article I knew this article was going to truly distinguish between what we think managers do or how they behave versus how they really behave. The article started off talking about how we think managers basically just give their job to other people to do and if one of their factories were burning down they would call someone to do the dirty work and not really take care of the problem themselves. Then the article goes into talking about four folklores about the manager’s job and follows each one with a true fact. The first folklore is that managers are reflective, systematic and a planner. This just means that the manager does things in a reflective manner, meaning they give you a task and you talk about how you did the task and how you may have done it better and that they work at a rather slow pace. The actual fact is that managers actually dislike reflective activities and work at “unrelenting pace”. Studies were done that showed managers receiving a ton of mail and skimming through it and picking out what they thought would be the most important mail. Also managers are making themselves available for subordinates to give them external information but many subordinates fail to give that information directly to the manager. The second folklore was that “the effective manager has no regular duties to perform. Meaning that they just sit back and are only useful when they are being called for something. The fact is actually that managers perform a number of regular duties. A lot of companies cannot simply hire and employee for every single task that needs to be done, so in the absence of the employee often requires a manager substitution. It is also important to maintain a relationship with customers so managers talk with