The Myth Of The Perfect Manager

We have established that there are four roles of management; each of them is necessary and together they are sufficient for good management. If you (P)roduce results – i.e., satisfy the needs of your clients for which your organization exists – and you (A)dminister, you’ll have an effective and efficient organization in the short run; if you (E)ntrepreneur and (I)ntegrate, your organization will be effective and efficient in the long run. If you do all four, the organization will be profitable – if that is how you measure your success – both in the short and the long run. If you’re not in the for-profit business, then you will achieve whatever short- and long-term results you’re looking for: Service, political survival, whatever.

So far, so good. Now the bad news. It’s not so simple.

While one manager may excel at planning (E for P), another may excel in organizing (A for P), a third in motivating (I for E or P), and so on. But never do you find a manager who excels at all four roles – in other words, a perfect (PAEI) manager. He or she doesn’t exist.

Why not? This question reminds me of a joke:

A preacher, in his sermon one day, said,

“There is no such thing as a perfect man. I can prove it to you. Anyone who has ever known a perfect man, please stand up.”

Nobody stood up.

“Anyone who has ever known a perfect woman, please stand up,” the preacher said.

One demure little woman stood up.

“Did you really know an absolutely perfect woman?” the preacher asked, amazed.

“I didn’t know her personally,” the old woman replied, “but I have heard a great deal about her. She was my husband’s late first wife.”

If someone is “perfect,” she must be dead. And the truth is, she was never perfect. We have simply forgotten all her deficiencies.

In one of his books, the guru Osho writes that he concluded that people believed he was dead.

“Why?” he was asked.

“Because they are only saying good things about me!”

The impossible dream

In other words, one big reason that the perfect, all-encompassing (PAEI) manager does not exist is that nothing is ever perfect when it is subject to change – or, to put it more bluntly, is alive. Nothing is perfect because nothing is static. There is a lifecycle to everything. One does not parent a baby the same way one would parent a 40- year-old son, obviously. Treating a baby as if it were an adult would physically endanger him; babying a 40-year-old would psychologically destroy him. The parenting style has to change as our children change; life does not allow us to stay in one place. We change, either for the better or for the worse. And we do not necessarily change perfectly to reflect the needs that we must respond to.

There is no perfect parent, no perfect leader, and for that matter no perfect flower. Something may be perfect for the moment or, to paraphrase Andy Warhol, at some point in our lives we might each achieve our fifteen minutes of perfection. But conditions change, and the functional synchronization of what we do with what must be done cannot remain perfect forever. It may seem contradictory to say that everyone is a good leader and no one is a good leader, but it actually makes sense in the following context: Everyone is a good leader (in some situations), and no one is a good leader (forever, under all conditions).

The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form.

—Stanley J. Randall

Peter Drucker has recognized the complexity of the managerial task.

“A peculiar characteristic of top management is that it requires a diversity of capabilities and, above all, temperaments,” he writes. I will add, in italics, my interpretations of the roles he points out.

“It requires the capacity to analyze, to think, to weigh alternatives (A), and to harmonize dissent (I). But it also requires the capacity for quick and decisive action (P), for boldness and for intuitive courage (E). It requires being at home with abstract ideas and concepts (E), calculations and figures (A). It also requires perception of people, human awareness, empathy, and an altogether lively interest and respect for people (I). Some tasks demand that a man work... alone (P). Others are tasks of representation and ceremonial outside tasks, that require enjoyment of crowds and protocol (such as the task of a politician) (EI).”

“The top management tasks,” Drucker continues, “require at least four different kinds of human being.” Drucker identifies them as “the thought man” (A), “the action man” (P), “the people man” (I), and “the front man” (E). These are, of course, analogous to the styles of the (PAEI) model.

Although Drucker was referring only to top management, I believe that all management positions within an organization require all four roles, although the balance of the roles shifts as you move through an organization. Top management in America, for example, must exercise a lot of the (E) role. But the (I) role, in American companies, is often consigned to the Human Resources department, where it is neglected, because HR managers are inundated with (A)dministrative tasks and record-keeping that not only keeps them too busy to concentrate on (I)ntegrating, but also undermine their credibility as (I)ntegrators.

Meanwhile, (P)roduction is delegated all the way down to the workers or the people on the line, the (P)-eons. They are not asked for their opinions – no (E) – and if they try to (I)ntegrate they might be seen as threatening management’s authority by trying to unionize. Yet, at any level, managers must perform all four roles simultaneously and with the same degree of perfection. This makes the textbook manager a necessity – and an impossibility – at all managerial levels. For example, a foreperson needs to be knowledgeable (P); to have administrative capabilities (A); to be flexible, adaptive, and innovative (E); and to relate well to people (I). But how many forepersons actually have all of these qualifications? According to Drucker, “Those four temperaments are almost never found in the same person.”

Four roles in eternal conflict

Why not? Because – and here is the second reason why no manager can be perfect – the managerial roles undermine each others performance at a point in time.

Although Drucker concluded that more than one style is necessary to manage any organization, he did not go beyond that thought to analyze how the different styles might interact. And that is the gap I am trying to fill here.

Let us look more closely at the incompatibility of roles. We all know managers who are brilliant at conceptualizing plans and ideas but not very good at monitoring the details of implementation; or who are sensitive, empathic, and good at (I)n­te­gration, but just can’t seem to make hard decisions.

The explanation is simple: The four roles are not mutually exclusive, but they are incompatible in the short run and thus mutually inhibitive: In other words, the ability to excel at one of the (PAEI) roles is likely to impede one’s ability to perform another.

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

—Will Rogers

For example, (P)roducing and (E)ntrepreneuring are incompatible. (P) and (E) are in conflict because (P) requires short-term feedback, whereas (E) takes time to develop and looks to the long term for feedback.

How many times have you said, “I’m working so hard, I have no time to think.” In other words, moving the rock, or satisfying present demands, is so overwhelming that you have no time to think about future opportunities. But while you’ve been sweating, pushing that rock out of your path, someone else may have built a big highway close by. So (P) actually endangers (E), because if you work very hard, day and night, focusing on short-run results, it is difficult if not impossible to also stay aware of the changes that are coming your way. Your mind is like a camera. You can either focus on the close-up view, rendering the long view out of focus, or the opposite.

I have met many (E)ntrepreneurs who were lucky enough to be fired from their former jobs, where they were busy (P)-ing. If they had stayed put, they would never have started anything new.

Conversely, (E) threatens (P): (E)ntrepreneuring means change, and that threatens the (P) role. People in (P)roduction are forever complaining to the engineering department, “If you guys don’t stop changing things, we’ll never get anything done!” At some point, you have to freeze the planning so you can proceed with the doing.