Peter Drucker did more than anybody to turn management into a profession. He praised managers not just as engines of economic progress but as guardians of the liberal order. “Management is the alternative to tyranny,” he once said, speaking with the authority of somebody who fled his native Vienna in the 1930s, “and our only guarantee against it.” He also turned management into an exciting intellectual discipline, discovering compelling ideas in Japan as well as America, the voluntary sector as well as the public sector, history books as well as business manuals. One book on Drucker dubbed him “the man who invented management.”
Given all this, it was striking to hear a speaker at the Global Peter Drucker Forum, which is held in the guru’s hometown every November, declare that “nobody wants to be a manager anymore.” Johnny Taylor, the CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management, said that one of the most striking results of the group’s surveys is that younger people don’t want to become managers. “In the past everyone wanted to manage people. That was a sign of moving up.” No longer.
The pressure on managers is so relentless that “quiet quitting” has evolved from a Covid-era buzzword to a way of life. Some 50% to 75% of managers suffer from low morale or burnout, according to one survey. A quarter of managers think of leaving their job “most or all of the time” because of the stress of managing people, according to another. Younger workers talk about “conscious unbossing” — that is, rejecting management jobs for easier options.
Why the anti-management revolution? Taylor’s panel toyed with several explanations. One is that companies are not offering potential managers enough rewards in pay and perks. In the past managers received not just a bump in pay but a bigger office and a company car. Now they toil alongside their underlings in open plan offices. Another is that companies are not very good at recruiting managers — they recruit engineers because they are good at engineering or journalists because they are good at journalism and then promote them into managerial roles for which they have received no preparation. No wonder some flounder.
These explanations only go so far. Companies have not stopped rewarding managers with higher pay and perks in a fit of absence of mind. They have taken a conscious decision to “democratize management.” Companies have been turning engineers or writers into general managers since companies have first been a thing. John Stuart Mill was a successful general manager at the East India Company as well as a leading philosopher.
To answer the question, we need to dig deeper into changing attitudes, particularly attitudes to management and authority. Management no longer has the charisma that it once had. The greatest businessman of the 1950s, Alfred Sloan, was celebrated above all as a manager, as a man who took an established company and galvanized it by introducing a managerial innovation, the multi-divisional firm. This reverence for management survived into the 1990s, when Jack Welch at General Electric Co. and Percy Barnevik at Asea Brown Boveri Ltd. were admired for their corporate engineering.
Today’s business heroes are lionized, first and foremost, as entrepreneurs, people who created organizations out of nothing, and second, as technical geniuses — Steve Jobs as a great designer, Mark Zuckerberg as a great coder and Elon Musk as a great engineer. It is as if they built their companies as extensions of their technical genius rather than by the sweat of their brow. Ambitious young people want to make their names by founding companies or becoming first-rate engineers or, if they are in creative industries, burnishing their brands. Becoming a manager means reducing your own chances of becoming a star as well as lumbering yourself with other people’s problems.
The management theory industry that Drucker did so much to build has also contributed to the decline in management’s status. One reason for this is a paradox: Leading management thinkers have made their living by bad-mouthing management, calling for re-engineering functions, delaying corporations and, in other ways, treating middle managers in the same way that Stalin treated the kulaks. The other reason is over-exuberance. At best, business schools and consultancies have lent their name to management fads that proved to be oversold or even counterproductive. At worst, they have engaged in scandalous behavior, like Harvard Business School’s laudatory case studies on Enron before its ugly implosion, and McKinsey’s advice to Purdue Pharma on how to “turbocharge” Oxycontin’s sales by targeting vulnerable populations.
The biggest reason why people are wary of becoming managers, though, is that management is becoming more difficult. Some of the difficulties come from the top. Senior managers have simultaneously hogged more of the rewards of corporate success while failing in their job of setting clear objectives. CEOs frequently send mixed messages as they struggle with rapidly changing economic and political environments, leaving their subordinates to find their way through the resulting fog. The tech industry has gone from puffing DEI to groveling before Trump, from over-exuberant hiring to over-enthusiastic firing. At the same time CEOs expect their managers to do more with less, increasing spans of control from five-to-ten people to ten-to-fifteen, in the name of “leanness,” “flexibility” or whatever cost-cutting cliché is in vogue.
Some of the difficulties come from the pace of technological change. Managers not only have to master ever-changing technologies faster than their often more tech-savvy junior employees. They have to learn how to manage machines as well as employees. The AI revolution will probably encourage senior managers to expect their juniors to do even more with less administrative support.
Other difficulties come from the people they must manage. Managers have to navigate a field of landmines marked race, sex, gender and plus. Linda Hill, an HBS professor, mentioned that managing diversity can be difficult but corporations tend to treat it as a magic potion. Companies have also empowered employees with more tools to make complaints about their managers, fashioning whistles for people to blow, complaints systems for them to use and advocacy groups for them to run. Managers consequently live in fear of receiving complaints from the people in their charge, particularly younger ones fresh from university, and then being reprimanded by their superiors, or by the algorithms that increasingly take the role of superiors.
Can anything be done to make management great again? One answer is for companies to rebuild the old system of pay and perks, perhaps with a company E-bike taking the place of a company car and sabbaticals doing some of the work of pay increases. Come back, organization man, all is forgiven! At the very least, senior managers should be wary of asking middle managers to cope with yet more underlings on the grounds that AI can do all the grunt work.
Another answer is the opposite: Push ahead with the delayering revolution, distributing managerial functions as widely as possible. Some of the world’s most fashionable companies, such as the Chinese white-goods maker Haier Smart Home Co. Ltd., pride themselves on self-managing teams with workers sometimes managing teams, sometimes being managed, and, if they are members of more than one team, managing one day and not the next. But the first of these solutions will take some time to implement, and the second treats management as a game of pass the parcel rather than a valuable function in its own right. Many companies may well dither between the two options, thereby perpetuating today’s unsatisfactory status quo.
Perhaps the simplest solution in the short term is for us all to be a bit kinder to our managers. The next time you are forced to undergo a performance review or engage in one of the many other rituals that today’s corporations impose on us, remember one thing: Your manager is not enjoying the experience any more than you are.
This report is auto generated from the Bloomberg news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.