In 2003, the Harvard Business Review posted an article on the five minds of management, which has been considered a classic management article ever since. In this article, we will discuss the same in a simplified manner. To begin with, management is an art. It is an attitude and personality style rather than a position. A manager must be a leader as well as be good at managing people, tasks, and resources. The problem arises when leadership and management are separated. Management without leadership encourages an uninspired management style and makes day-to-day activities lifeless. The other one, leadership without management, which has been making the headlines in recent times, is far more dangerous. It promotes a disconnected management style, which affects everyone in the team and causes unnecessary pride or unhealthy confidence. This can be disastrous to an organisation.
Hence, management is a hard place to be without innovation, an open mind to learn, and experience in managing people. A manager needs several minds to be effective in management. While globalisation has been forcing companies to make their managers think globally, the management of team members makes them think locally. Balancing both is hard and stressful for managers. For this reason, managerial mindsets are important in the current world.
The reason behind the importance of developing the five managerial mindsets.
The world has become faster with the advent of the internet and globalisation. Due to this, companies and organisations have come face-to-face with a dilemma. They must act and make decisions at lightning speed, without which they risk being outmanoeuvred by other companies. The fast-paced IT and BT industries are an example of this. Every day it seems, there is a new discovery, a better solution to which businesses can quickly adapt and leverage their resources.
The Red Cross Foundation is also facing this management dilemma. While there is war, famine, and natural disasters that are always keeping them busy on the frontlines, making decisions is a hard choice. They have to make quick decisions to save lives. However, they also have to think slowly and reflect on their decisions so that they are well thought out and well planned. This dilemma is ever-present in every organisation and company where management is required to make decisions. This is why every manager must learn to balance both aspects in making a decision. Thinking fast and slow is the most important trait of an administrator. This is where the five managerial mindsets come in.
The Five Managerial Mindsets
1. Managing self - The Reflective Mindset
2. Managing organisations - The Analytical Mindset
3. Managing context - The Worldly Mindset
4. Managing relationships - The Collaborative Mindset
5. Managing Change - The Action Mindset
1. The Reflective Mindset
Managing oneself is the foundational managerial trait. Without self-understanding, management is devoid of any interest and becomes an everyday task. In today's world, managers skim through their daily tasks without spending any time reflecting on the work they are doing. They are mindlessly swimming through their tasks throughout their career. Everything that happens at work is just an occurrence, not an experience. For a happening to become an experience, one must sit back and reflect upon the incident. This needs thoughtful introspection and an open mind. This is clearly discussed by Saul Alinsky in his book Rules for Radicals. Unless a happening becomes digested through introspection and becomes an experience, management is mindless and without any merit. This kind of management is not fulfilling and soon becomes a lifeless repetition of events.
For example, if you are in a meeting and suddenly someone erupts with their personal rant, you might ignore their emotional outburst altogether. You might've heard that they are having a rough time, and this might be a result of that. However, if you use that opportunity to reflect on your own reactions or feelings, you will find your unexplored inner life and issues that you have neglected thus far. Hence, it makes a difference in your life through reflection.
However, organisations do need only such "mirror people" who see their own reflections in everything that happens around them. They also don't need window people who cannot see beyond anything that they see. But organisations need those who can do both. They need managers who can see what is in front of them and reflect upon the situation. And in this way, they can make personal changes as well as help their team members in some way. This can also enable them professionally to see opportunities in challenges and unexplored markets and services through introspection. Thus, reflective managers can paint their visions stroke by stroke through their past experiences.
2. The Analytical Mindset
Analysis happens everywhere. Whether it is personal or in an organisation, you cannot get organised without analysis. It is the measurement of efforts and their results. From the structure of a company to its people and their work patterns, everything is organised through careful analysis. While it might be harder to recognise this in other organisations, if you look at your own organisation, you will notice different teams working in harmony to achieve a sole goal. However, there is a lure of surface-level analysis that poses a threat to deep analysis. For example, if you have to build a small boat, all you need to know is some simple expressions like the length of the boat and the ratio of displacement to length.
This requires little analysis but more experience and leaves room for error. However, this changes when you are required to build an aircraft carrier. As it is one of the most complex projects you may ever undertake, there is no room for shallow analysis. Every simple aspect of the design, manufacturing, and deployment must be thoroughly researched and analysed multiple times before you commence the building of an aircraft carrier. Even then, its deployment must go through endless analysis before it gets to float in the sea. It is the same with organisations. Managers confuse shallow analysis with the deep analysis that is needed to get complex work done. Complex projects are not about mere numbers, but a far deeper analysis.
A deeper analysis requires you to dig through your sources, their backgrounds, biases, limitations, and reasons behind their results before you make them your own. Often, analysing the analysis of others sheds light on our own biases and gives fresh perspectives. It helps us see things from different angles. When you combine such analysis with your reflection, it becomes reflective analysis. The overabundance of conventional analysis in recent years has forced most managers to accept them without reflection or a deeper analysis tailored to their specific situation. To put it simply, managers who use conventional analysis without reflection and deep personal analysis are like a marketer who is obsessed with studying the crowd while missing the sale.
3. The Global Mindset
Globalisation has recently entered the category of commonly used words. Companies stress their managers' ability to think globally as well as locally. They want managers to change and also maintain order. However, no one can reconcile these two different worlds. In fact, global and worldly mindsets are different from each other. While most professors think that globalisation is something that is converging everyone around the globe into a common culture and way of thinking, nothing can be further from the truth. Globalisation has merely connected different cultures and allowed us to trade and live together.
Indeed, local cultural differences are ever-present and people from different countries still experience culture shock and are amazed at the lifestyles as they travel and mingle with the local cultures. For example, someone from the west finds Indian roads and traffic overwhelming and otherworldly, though traffic, vehicles, and driving patterns work the same way as ever in all countries. The case is the same in the business world. While a product or service is used or traded in the same way, the local culture plays a pivotal role in business.
Just because you are managing a global company doesn't mean you can make a one-size-fits-for-all solution and expect every customer across the world to be satisfied with your product. Intimately knowing your target market can only increase your management tactics. You can even apply this to your staff who are located in various cultures across the world. Considering their backgrounds and motivations can help you understand your team and work well with them.
4. The Collaborative Mindset
Managing relationships Management is working with people. It is not just a collaboration between professionals as an authority figure like a boss or a manager and a subordinate, but a collaboration between colleagues and partners. More often than not, companies look at professionals as independent entities or as resources that can be bought, sold, combined, moved around, and downsized. They view employees as mere assets, which is not what a collaborative mindset is about. In the collaborative mindset, managers view everyone as important human beings that make up the structure of the company and hold its integrity together through their work.
The collaborative mindset is not about intimidating people but about managing relationships among people. It is not about showcasing your authority by getting your employees to ask for permission for the work they are doing, but about giving them the freedom to do it and being committed to it. It means moving away from a heroic management style towards an engaging management style. A heroic management style looks down on employees as subordinates who follow orders and is at the bottom of a hierarchical system where managers and bosses are at the top. It is a system where decisions are made at the top and then passed down to their subordinates to follow in their product manufacturing process or service.
An engaging management style, on the other hand, treats everyone as an equal. Here, decisions are innovated out of the system and spread across the system. There is no hierarchy, and there is a reward system for everyone who contributes more to the company. Here, a team wants to get ahead together with their own efforts and vision rather than follow someone else's path mindlessly. Distributing responsibility and initiative among the team members gets you far ahead of sitting at the top as a glorified authoritative figure.
5. The Action Mindset
From ancient times, philosophers have used the analogy of horses and chariots to communicate their views on personal development, team building, and several other philosophical subjects. In this context, managers must view their organisations as chariots pulled by horses. The horses represent the values, emotions, and aspirations of all the people in your organisation. To keep them on track, you must first understand their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the terrain they will be riding on. You must also avoid their emotional triggers. Threatening or whipping the horses will only damage the smoothness and length of your journey. Changing the direction takes as much effort as keeping the course steady. Especially in the current world where change is the only constant you can be certain of, being sensitive to every aspect of your people is critical.
As something is always changing around us, we tend to focus on what is changing and conclude that everything is changing. Such a mindset is the result of the lack of a reflective mindset. It is OK to acknowledge change, but it is not OK to always be looking for constant change. That state of change is called anarchy, which no one wants to be a reality. In such an environment, no organisation can thrive. It is not the changes that are used to judge an organisation, but its businesses and services. Even then, maintaining continuity is no less difficult than making change.
For a change to be successful, a detailed scheduled plan derived from deep analysis is not the only critical element. It has to include the above-mentioned elements included in it as well. Above all, it needs a natural flow that connects everyone involved in the company's business model. It cannot neglect the end users, the buying decision-makers. To be successful, change needs action, reflection, implementation, collaboration, and deep analysis. Both maintaining order and managing change are learning processes. It needs curiosity from managers to be effective.
Conclusion
Finally, all five mindsets are not exclusive or separate from the others. To be effective, a manager must be willing to experiment with all five as they overlap and depend on each other. To be effective, a manager must be willing to work with them and tailor them to their specific needs. You have to move back and forth multiple times so that you get to a tried and true conclusion for your specific managerial problem. Analyse, act, reflect, collaborate, and repeat. These steps can also be more or less natural for different managers. While some are more of the reflective type, others are more action-oriented or collaborative. The key is in balancing all five mindsets rather than sticking to one or two of them.
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