Management is not a universal tool

"Managers can manage anything!" is untrue. Management is not a thing that you can go on a course, and then when you've completed that course you can just always do it, forever, in any context¹.

Why is it untrue?

It's untrue because it paints management as too abstract an activity. It imagines a world where management is about interacting with some abstract version of the organisation, represented in all necessary detail by the org chart, KPIs, financial reports, etc. To exaggerate it even more: All a manager needs is a stopwatch and a clipboard.

It's not that analysis and reporting and measuring is not useful or important. The mistake is to assume that this is the entire picture you need to be a good manager.

Managenent is not something that can be done from a corner office! At Toyota they say that a manager should wash their hands three times a day (because they have literally got their hands dirty, by going down to the factory floor). Work is not done in an abstract system. Work is done by real, specific people in a real, specific contxt. To make sense of any facts and figures, you need to go and see this for yourself, to have the proper context in which to understand what the numbers are really telling you.

Because these specifics of work and people matter, no two management roles are the same. Management is a thing that has to be learned anew each time you change context. It's perhaps best to think of management as an ongoing way of engaging with a particular kind of work rather than as fixed body of knowledge.

If you're managing a team at an incubator programme you need to be willing to find out something about how incubator programmes work in order to do your job effectively. How does recruitment and selection for the programme work? Which kinds of support have the biggest impact on the cohorts? What’s always a bit chaotic, and what’s generally plain sailing? This is in much the same way that if you were in a role delivering incubator programmes, there would almost certainly be some expectation that you would learn some things about that as part of your onboarding. Similarly if you're managing a team that does injection moulding of car parts, you need to be willing to go on a continual learning journey about plastics and presses and re-grind and dust. You don't need to become an expert, but you need to know enough to ask helpful questions of someone who is an expert. You need to know enough to frame problems for people in a meaningful way.

In other words, there is a particular body of knowledge and experience in managing a particualr kind of work - in the same way as there is for doing a particular kind of work.

It's OK to hire people who have not previously done, or managed, the kind of work your organisation does. It's OK (more than OK!) for people to be learning as part of their day-to-day work. But it's important to see and acknowledge that managers are learning too, and not just generalist 'management' skills, but specific knowledge relating to the work being done.

1. This is one of the assumptions behind the traditional MBA - or to the movement of leadership roles in a Cabinet Reshuffle.