November 25, 2014: So you are a manager. What do you manage?

When a person becomes an engineer, she knows what she is engineering.  She is an industrial engineer, a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, a chemical engineer.  Many (possibly most) managers do not have a degree in management.  So you're an architect who is a manager, or a graphic artist or teacher who is a manager.  What do you manage?  What does the word even mean?

To answer the question, we have to step back from the situation at hand and consider your workplace.  Look around you.  Is the computer on the desk yours?  Do the people on your team work for you?  Do their paychecks come from your bank account?  What, in your immediate work environment, belongs to you?  A quick inventory of mine shows a desk drawer full of fun size Snickers and some pictures of my family on the cubicle wall.  That's all.  And yet I'm a manager.

So who owns the things I'm managing?  My company does.  But can a company own itself?  No.  Every company is owned, in the end, by people.  These people are called shareholders if the company is public, owners or investors if it is private.  These people own the company, and by extension, "my" work computer, the employment of "my" team, "my" cubicle, "my" company car.

Now, what am I managing?  I am managing the resources of the company's owners.  My job, then, is to manage these resources (they could be paintbrushes or software experts or race cars or teddy bears) on behalf of the owners.  Why do they entrust me with their money and resources?  Because they believe I can provide a return on their investment because of my expertise.  That's my value-add.

Managers (every single one of us) are not managing teams or projects or anything else that we touch every day.  We are managing the company owners' resources.  It is our responsibility to do our best to return value to them - that is what they pay us for, after all.  A hedge fund manager is very close to this idea.  Is the manager of your local TGI Friday's aware of it?

It is important to note that company owners don't always know what they want.  Do they want to show growth quarter-over-quarter?  Year-over-year?  Are they in it for the long term?  The answers to these questions will come through the executive management team and trickle down. I worked at a wholly-owned US subsidiary of a Japanese company that was part of a huge conglomerate.  To trace ownership back to a person, I'd need to trace my management chain up 4 levels to the CEO, then to the board of directors of the Japanese company, then to the board of directors of the conglomerate, and then back to millions and millions of shareholders.

Somewhere along the line, the message came to the US subsidiary that we needed to make our revenue projections every fiscal half.  My team was an integral part of recognizing revenue for my company: we did the last $100K worth of work that allowed the company to recognize $20M in revenue.  So my job as a manager was to get my technical team the resources they needed to move their work forward so the company could recognize revenue on time and meet shareholder expectations.

This longer and wider view of the manager's role is vital to planning and successfully executing our jobs as managers.  Should I send my lead person out for training if the training may not pay off for a year?  Or should I manage for the short term, and keep him available for today's work?  Even if I have approval to hire another person for my team, is that in the best interests of the company's shareholders?  Or will it be a waste of their money?  I have found that keeping these questions in mind helps me to avoid making decisions that will cause pain later.  If I see a reduction in force coming, and someone transfers out of my team, I won't replace him even if I have authorization.  I'll inform my boss of what I am doing and why, and then when the RIF comes, I will need to make 1 less very hard decision.  In the mean time, I've saved the shareholders money.  If it looks like we're going to be engaged with a certain customer for a long time, I'll invest a year of being very tight with manpower so I can send them to training and reap the benefits of that training long term.

So take a few minutes to write down the goals your company's owners want you to achieve.  If you don't know, as your supervisor.  If she doesn't know, ask someone else.  Someone has to know, and the more people who do know, the better your company will operate.