Manager as sales leader. As the boss, the new managers felt their primary responsibility was to provide “sales leadership”; the manager “drives the business.” Because they were in the sales function, that translated to “brings in the sales”:
I’ll be the sales leader. I’ve got to absolutely keep coming up with the big sales ideas. You don’t become the sales manager until you can handle the customer. I’ve matured my skills so that I hope I can negotiate better from the sheer number of customers I’ve dealt with.
The job is 80 percent sales. I love sales. I’ve got to know the products and help my people build an approach to sales. I have to give them specific ideas and suggestions on how to sell and I’ve got to run effective meetings that impart the necessary information and motivate them [the salespeople] to sell the product.
My priority is to drive the business, bring in the revenue, no matter what it takes.
In short, most managers contended that sales leadership was their “ultimate responsibility.” They felt confident that their future subordinates, superiors, and customers held the same assumption:
My boss pays me for making my quota and for customer satisfaction.
The bottom line is that he [the boss] expects me to make the numbers.
My role is to make them [subordinates] rich … give them accounts, product training, and sales skills. Some want it handed to them, some want to work for it. Most think it best that I leave them alone and let them perform.
The customer is always right; I’ve got to make it [what the customer wants] happen yesterday.
The customer comes to me to make the tough decisions and exceptions that my people can’t.
Three pivotal responsibilities of the sales leader come out in the new managers’ descriptions of their role.4 Their first obligation is to “provide opportunity”; that is, to distribute accounts, clients, or quotas. Besides providing opportunity, they are expected to provide sales ideas efficiently and promptly, information about what would sell, and tricks of the trade on how to sell:
My people know that time is money. They want me to give them the goods [information] with as little intrusion as possible.
My reps want me to be responsive. They come to me because they are having difficulty with deciding what the next step should be, to strategize and see if I can use my expertise or clout to help them follow through.
The final responsibility of the sales leader they stressed was medium- and long-term planning:
It’s my job to pay attention to the strategic horizon for our territory. I have to have the two-year plan at least, some sense of where the customer needs to be. Every good marketeer has a vision, just like every good businessman will have one that he can’t totally articulate, but he has in mind a picture of where this customer ought to be going.
I set the goals for the territory after analyzing and developing a strategy for our segment. . . . A lot of them[subordinates] have trouble thinking about what our customer should be doing. They’ll think about what a customer is doing and I have to judge if they are doing the right thing.
The managers believed their subordinates would evaluate managerial performance primarily by the opportunities and sales ideas they provided, but their superiors would place more weight on planning.
In discussing sales leadership, the new managers showed some appreciation for the distinction between being a doer and being a manager. Just as they emphasized formal authority, they saw agenda setting as a managerial prerogative. It was their right as boss to set critical parameters within which their subordinates would work, specifically to distribute accounts and set quotas. They also relished their new planning responsibilities—caring about the long term; they liked “doing strategy.” Again, as boss it was their job to set the direction for their unit. Moreover, the new managers understood that in fulfilling their new roles, they might have to run interference among the people with whom they had to work. They acknowledged that their subordinates and superiors might have different priorities. But as we see, they focused on only a subset of their agenda-setting responsibilities, those relating to the financial and business arenas, not the organization or people.
Building Networks
Manager as supervisor. The new managers generally defined their new positions by their responsibilities, not their relationships. Starting out as managers, they did not appreciate the distinction between being primarily responsible for people rather than the task. For although they had identified some of their newly acquired responsibilities, they had little sense of those they were supposed to give up, specifically, direct responsibility for the technical task.
Still, almost all the managers mentioned the people management responsibilities of their new positions. By “people,” however, they meant subordinates by and large, not superiors, peers, or other principals outside the organization. Notice also that in speaking of their subordinates, they mentioned almost exclusively their salespeople. Even those who were general managers and had subordinates in different functions—sales, administration, and operations—displayed this bias. As we have seen, for the new managers, managing subordinates mainly meant exercising sales leadership. And sales leadership in turn meant their agenda-setting obligations specifically for financial and business matters.
Clearly then, the new managers were not attuned to their network-building responsibilities. They understood that they were responsible for supervising their salespeople, but they focused on the more formal and administrative aspects of managing people, which many labeled “personnel,” such as staffing and completing performance appraisals. They fretted that their personnel responsibilities would be inordinately demanding of their time and energy. Most managers, asked to define managerial responsibilities, did indeed comment on the need to motivate the work force. 5 A few even mentioned the manager’s role in “creating the right atmosphere” or “leading the team” in the organization. They could not, however, describe in much detail what they saw as their responsibilities in these areas. They simply mentioned them. They became visibly excited and often expounded in detail, though, about what they hoped to accomplish in the sales leadership and decision-making arenas.
Manager as administrator. We have seen that the new managers concentrated mainly on their new rights and privileges. Reluctantly, they accepted one of the duties that they identified as coming with authority, and that was administration. They defined administration as routine communication activities such as paperwork and exchange of information. The administrator’s role was associated with their more negative images of the manager’s job. They were quite vocal about their concerns. Their administrative responsibilities seemed to be constraints that interfered with their autonomy and stole precious time from more important responsibilities:
Managers are bureaucrats, paper shufflers, parasites who get in the way.
My worst manager was just an administrator. He spent all his time in his office with the door shut, pushing paper.
I never want to think of myself as a manager. If I ever do, I’ll lose my edge. You’re in a field marketing job, not a staff job. So you’re really riveted toward getting the marketing stuff done; everything else is overhead to you.
When they were feeling more magnanimous, the new managers defined administration as a secondary, yet essential, managerial function. They referred to it as a necessary evil: “A manager’s job is to drive the business while staying within company policies and procedures. “
The new managers saw their administrative responsibilities as serving two purposes. They were the organization’s way of ensuring that business was conducted in accordance with company and legal requirements. The securities firm managers were more sensitive to the administrative role than those in the computer company: “We deal with money and are very tightly regulated. ” They acknowledged that the branch manager was considered the key to a brokerage house’s effort at compliance, because he or she was in the best position to monitor brokers. 6 The administrative procedures protected them as well as the company from inequities and misconduct:
When a company is fairly big, you have to create a paper trail.
There is a structure and set of ground rules on how to operate—rules that you know as a rep. But soon I’ll be on the other side of the desk. I’ll have to be more objective and less creative. I’ll have to follow some structure. You’re trying to create an environment of uniformity not only among the people in your branch but across the division and company.
The manual puts everything on the manager’s shoulders. I get fired if one of the brokers is a crook and I don’t catch it. To protect my hide I’ve got to follow the procedures.
As some of the new managers mentioned, the administrative procedures were the organization’s way of continually collecting and updating information about what was happening in the field and the marketplace. The managers expected that their administrative responsibilities would mean a lot to their superiors and be considered intrusive by their subordinates and customers. The latter two constituencies would expect the manager to “buffer them from bureaucratic red tape. “
Manager as politician. All the new managers were uneasy about managing relationships with superiors and peers, especially about meeting objectives the boss gave them. They felt the best way to please the boss was to produce results, specifically by meeting the sales quotas for their territories. Producing results translated into providing sales leadership. Very few of them mentioned the need to devote time and attention to building a cooperative relationship with the boss or to negotiate with him or her about an appropriate agenda for their unit. They saw the boss’s agenda as an imposed one, with which they simply had to live.
The new managers had very little to say about managing peer relations, and that reflected a rather cynical point of view. For many, managing these relationships fell under their administrative role, filling out the often tedious paperwork that peers in other functional areas might request. Networking was tolerated as a necessary evil, “keeping the administrative monkey off [your] back”: “If you know the right people, you can get things done. You won’t be held up by silly rules and procedures.” This was a chore at which they hoped to spend little time.
With some disdain, almost all expressed the need to manage office politics. Many spoke of the problems peers could create for you, if they wanted to. Some recited tales of peers obstructing and even sabotaging each other’s efforts. Those who had witnessed such events spoke of the need to behave diplomatically and make no unnecessary enemies. This tactic often meant not sharing with a peer what they honestly thought about their ideas or requests and, for some, doing a favor for a peer even when they “had nothing to gain personally.” But as with superior relationships, few talked about proactively managing peer relationships. Only a handful seemed to appreciate the advantages in actively building trust, credibility, and cooperative relationships with peers. And even they seemed to feel such activities were a luxury.
Summary of New Managers’ Initial Expectations
For all the new managers, the decision to pursue a managerial career had been a very thoughtful one. Before starting the new position, each had systematically thought about and discussed with various people what their job responsibilities would be. Still, their expectations of a manager’s job were incomplete and simplistic. Admittedly, they recognized many of the managerial functions and some of the tensions inherent in the managerial position (such as those between sales leadership and administrative responsibilities). They did not, however, appreciate the full range of demands that would be made on them, and the ambiguities and inconsistencies. For them, the managerial role was mainly one of formal authority and managing the task, not the people. One new manager admitted, with some chagrin, that after a year on the job his initial image of the job was of being “the lead salesperson with the final authority and accountability. “7 Why did they not fully recognize the people management activities, especially supervising and coordinating others’ efforts—the duty that researchers and experienced practitioners define as the basic distinction between being an individual contributor and a manager?8
The managers’ initial expectations were partly influenced by information gleaned during their selection and promotion. Many took hints from conversation with their soon-to-be bosses and human resource personnel, and from reviews of practices in evaluating managerial performance and of compensation. (To protect confidentiality of the research sites, we do not present the exact text of the job descriptions.) Almost all descriptions they read or heard explicitly referred to the management responsibilities they would inherit. The information the managers gathered from these sources, though, usually emphasized end results rather than the actions they would need to take. The latter interested them most. As others have reported, formal job descriptions often consist of general exhortations about what management is, with little guidance on how a manager should perform his or her work. 9
Instead, the managers’ expectations were profoundly shaped by their motivation to become managers and by past work experience. In their initial conception of what it meant to be a manager, they emphasized the manager’s rights and privileges instead of the duties. It was the rights and privileges—the authority—that had attracted them to management. As we will see in Chapter 2, the new managers were also reluctant to give up the doer role, with which they were comfortable and from which they had derived much personal esteem. The managers conceived of the managerial role as doing more of what they had been doing all along, only now they would have more power, control, and accountability.
Moreover, like most of us, the managers relied heavily upon past experience to make sense of their new position. 10 As individual contributors, they had worked closely with managers who held the very positions in which they would soon find themselves. The average new manager had been a producer for eight years and had reported to five managers. One confidently stated that he had seen it all. But, as we know from extensive research, experience can saddle individuals with a myopic view of their current circumstances. The managers’ experience was an imperfect lens with which to make sense of their new position. They had experienced the managerial role only from the perspective of an individual contributor; their identity was still that of producer, not manager.
That the new managers had suffered few disappointments or setbacks in their careers appeared to prejudice their understanding of what being a manager meant. The cliché “success can be blinding” fits here. The managers had been star producers; in fact, they had been promoted to management mostly as a reward for outstanding performance. It was through the eyes of a star producer who had worked with bosses “awful and superb” that they came initially to define the role of manager. Because of their considerable technical expertise and high motivation, they depended less than the average salesperson on their sales managers for support and guidance. One manager said he “had succeeded in spite of most of [his] managers.” Isolated by this star status, the new managers had limited first-hand opportunities to observe their managers handling the interpersonal difficulties that can arise in working with less proficient subordinates. And because they had been successful they had encountered relatively few difficulties or conflicts with superiors or peers. Researchers have found too that people learn more from their failures than their successes. 11 We’re inclined to take the time to reflect on ourselves and our situation only when adversity strikes. Until they had to choose whether or not to pursue a managerial career, the new managers had little incentive to take a hard look at what their own managers did.
The new managers were in for major surprises. One lamented at the end of his first month that he had “taken the job under false pretenses.” They would have to reconcile their expectations with the realities of managerial work, with the constituencies they would work with: subordinates, superiors, and peers.
From “Becoming a Manager – Mastery of a New Identity” by Linda A. Hill, 1992
Managing IA's 