What Managers Actually Do
Management is getting work done through others — coordinating people and resources toward goals. A century of study compressed it into two complementary maps.
Fayol's four functions — the job described as a cycle:
- Planning: setting goals and choosing the path — the function that looks forward.
- Organizing: arranging people, tasks, and authority so the plan can happen.
- Leading: motivating, communicating, resolving — the function done through people.
- Controlling: measuring results against the plan and correcting — the function that looks back and closes the loop.
The cycle: plan → organize → lead → control → plan again.
Mintzberg's ten roles — the job described from a stopwatch study of real managers, whose days turned out to be fragmented bursts, not stately cycles. The roles cluster in three families: interpersonal (figurehead, leader, liaison), informational (monitor, disseminator, spokesperson), and decisional (entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, negotiator).
Katz's skills explain why the job changes with altitude: technical skill (doing the work) dominates at the bottom, conceptual skill (seeing the whole system) dominates at the top, and human skill matters everywhere, at every level, always. Promoting the best technician into management fails exactly when this substitution is ignored — the new job needs the skills the old job never exercised.
Levels stack the same functions differently: first-line managers live in daily operations, middle managers translate strategy into programs, and top managers set direction and face the environment. Effectiveness (doing the right things) and efficiency (doing things right) are graded at every level — Drucker's warning is that nothing is as useless as doing efficiently what should not be done at all.
Two maps of the same job
| Map | Built from | The job appears as |
|---|---|---|
| Fayol's four functions | Logical analysis | An orderly repeating cycle |
| Mintzberg's ten roles | Stopwatch studies of real managers | Fragmented episodes, constant interruption |
Tip: Hold both maps at once: Fayol tells you what the work must accomplish; Mintzberg tells you what the day will actually feel like. Neither alone survives contact with a Monday.