6 - Self-view and managerial ideals meet reality: managerial work in practice

Summary

We have so far addressed people's expectations of managerial work and what they want to accomplish as a manager. This has mainly been about how managers understand themselves and their leadership. In this chapter, we take a closer look at the managerial work by examining what happens to people in managerial jobs in practice. What happens to the aspirations and claims to work with strategy and to listen to and communicate with co-workers to make them feel good and develop? As we will see, it is not necessarily the case that the managers’ views of themselves and what they do in their work – their identity claims and leadership ideals – are matched by what they actually work with. Although many managers want to work with overall questions, influence culture and boost co-workers by listening to and engaging in dialogue with them, they are faced with problems and challenges in their daily life which make these ambitions difficult to achieve. Complications which arise can make it difficult to work as planned, and sometimes the manager and/or others feel that they are failing in their management.

The chapter is structured in two comprehensive sections. The first describes the problem of working as change agent, strategist and networker, the leadership roles we described in Chapter 4. The second section describes problems associated with the role of being someone who understands human nature and likes people, described in Chapter 5. We begin with a discussion of the problem of exercising the strategic role and point to the difficulties managers face in maintaining a coherent view of what they do, not least because they do not always receive confirmation from other people for the strategic and/or authentic elements of the managerial identity. Here we also discuss how managers are exposed and vulnerable – to complexities and contradictory demands. We then discuss problems in practising the role of someone who understands and likes people in relation to the fact that many see themselves as natural and authentic managers. Here, too, we discover that ideals and self-view are not always clearly expressed in practice – the latter is determined by a multitude of circumstances. Demands from the environment – including demands from senior managers and the organizational machinery for an effective administration – frequently collide with the individual's leadership interests.