Point of View from Michael Gerber

The work of the Entrepreneurial Manager falls into three categories:

• entrepreneurial work;
• managerial work; and
• technical work.

Every manager must learn the differences among these three, and the role each must play in the organization if they are to lead a balanced and productive existence.  In short, each and every manager must learn to discriminate between the appropriate type of work to be done at any one moment, as well as to formulate an ideal relationship among the three forms of work in order to become an effective manager.

Some managers find it virtually impossible to envision anything other than the job at hand.  Work beckons them wherever they look.  Work is a drug that transfixes them to the workbench, to the computer, to the cell phone, to the people in their organization, to the customer, to the internet, to endless meetings with staff.  In short, most managers are fixated at the technician’s level, despite the fact that they supposedly left that work behind when they first became a manager.  Are you a manager like that?  Do you find yourself stepping in to do the technician’s work continually out of a belief that no one will ever do it as well as you?  Do you realize as you do this the price you are paying for your compulsion to hold on to the technician’s role, despite the fact that you have already elected to move out of it?

If a manager’s fixation is to do the work of the technician, there is only one path to take.  Stop.  Do no technical work at all.  When the phone rings, have someone else answer it.  When the software breaks down, have someone else fix it.  When a customer comes in, have someone else take care of them.

Then, there are the managers who just love to manage.  They think of themselves as people persons’.  You know them.  They spend an inordinate amount of their time talking to their people or anyone who will listen.  They are forever in meetings, behind closed doors, conferring in serious tones about the personal challenges and opportunities their people are either failing to address, or if they are addressing them, failing to appreciate.  They would have us all believe their insights and passion for the human condition, is what management is all about.  It is not.  Managers do not manage people, people manage themselves.

So you see, discrimination is the process of choice.  To choose, one must have standards.  To have standards, one must have a vision.  And to have a vision, one must rise above one's own job, department or business.  One must have the ability to focus one’s attention and see the bigger picture at all times.  This is the mindset and work of the Entrepreneurial Manager.

Adapted from author Michael Gerber “The E-Myth Manager: Why Management Doesn’t Work and What to Do About It”.