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Sunday, June 21, 2009
Leadership roles according to Henry Mintzberg
First of all, let us know about the background of Henry Mintzberg before understanding and scrutinizing his theory about Leadership Roles.
Henry Mintzberg is an internationally renowned academic and author on business and management. He is currently the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he has been teaching since 1968, after earning his Master's degree in Management and Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1965 and 1968 respectively. His undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering was from McGill University. From 1991 to 1999, he was a visiting professor at INSEAD.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Mintzberg)
Henry Mintzberg writes prolifically on the topics of management and business strategy, with more than 150 articles and fifteen books to his name. His seminal book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (Mintzberg 1994), criticizes some of the practices of strategic planning today and is considered required reading for anyone who seriously wants to consider taking on a strategy-making role within their organization.
He recently published a book entitled Managers Not MBAs (Mintzberg 2004) which outlines what he believes to be wrong with management education today. Rather controversially, Mintzberg claims that prestigious graduate management schools like Harvard Business School and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania are obsessed with numbers and that their overzealous attempts to make management a science are damaging the discipline of management. Mintzberg advocates more emphasis on post graduate programs that educate practicing managers (rather than students with little real world experience) by relying upon action learning and insights from their own problems and experiences.
(http://www.impm.org/ and http://www.CoachingOurselves.com/)
Managers undertake activities to achieve the objectives of the organization. Mintzberg (1994) notes a number of different and sometimes conflicting views of the manager's role. He finds that it is a curiosity of the management literature that its best-known writers all seem to emphasize one particular part of the manager’s job to the exclusion of the others. Together, perhaps, they cover all the parts, but even that does not describe the whole job of managing. Mintzberg's role typology is frequently used in studies of managerial work.
Describing the manager's work has been an ongoing pursuit of researchers and practitioners. The manager's work is characterized by brevity, variety, and fragmentation of tasks, a preference for action (as opposed to reflection), and a preference for verbal communication over formal reports. Managers in organizations are continuously confronted by an array of ambiguous data and vaguely felt stimuli which they must somehow order, explicate and imbue with meaning before they decide on how to respond. Kotter (1999) identified two main roles for executives: agenda setting and network building. While agenda setting is concerned with figuring out what to do despite uncertainty and an enormous amount of potentially relevant information, network building is concerned with getting things done through a large and diverse group of people despite having little direct control over most of them.
A number of models describing the manager's work have been proposed including functional descriptions such as planning, organizing, directing, controlling, coordinating, and innovating. Similarly, frameworks based on the methods used to accomplish these functions, for example, Mintzberg's role typology, have been proposed.
According to Mintzberg (1990), the manager's job can be described in terms of various roles:
1. Informational Roles.
By virtue of interpersonal contacts, both with subordinates and with a network of contacts, the manager emerges as the nerve center of the organizational unit. The manager may not know everything but typically knows more than subordinates do.
Processing information is a key part of the manager's job. As monitor, the manager is perpetually scanning the environment for information, interrogating liaison contacts and subordinates, and receiving unsolicited information, much of it as a result of the network of personal contacts. As a disseminator, the manager passes some privileged information directly to subordinates, who would otherwise have no access to it. As spokesperson, the manager sends some information to people outside the unit.
2. Decisional Roles.
Information is not an end in itself; it is the basic input to decision making. The manager plays the major role in a unit's decision-making system. As its formal authority, only the manager can commit the unit to important new courses of action; and as its nerve center, only the manager has full and current information to make the set of decisions that determines the unit's strategy. As entrepreneur, the manager seeks to improve the unit, to adapt it to changing conditions in the environment. As disturbance handler, the manager responds to pressures from situations. As resource allocater, the manager is responsible for deciding who will get what. As negotiator, the manager commits organizational resources in real time.
3. Interpersonal Roles.
As figurehead, every manager must perform some ceremonial duties. As leader, managers are responsible for the work of the people of their unit. As liaison, the manager makes contacts outside the vertical chain of command.
Leadership roles according to CSC
Changes in both information technology and competition continue to amend the role of the information systems executive. CSC (1996) has recommended six new IS leadership roles which are requisite to carry out IS’s future agenda: chief architect, change leader, product developer, technology provocateur, coach and chief operating strategist. Although these roles were created by the CSC consultancy firm without any scientific approach, they seem very well modified for scientific investigation into IS leadership roles. People who fill these roles do not necessarily head up new departments or processes, but they exert influence and provide leadership across the organizational structure. When Stephens et al. (1992) selected CIOs for observation, they applied the following criteria:
• Highest ranking information technology executive
• Reports no more than two levels from CEO, i.e., either reports to the CEO or reports to one of the CEO's direct reports
• Areas of responsibility include information systems, computer operations, telecommunications, office automation, end-user computing/information center
• Responsibility for strategic planning of information resources.
As originally envisaged, the chief information officer’s accountability would include all corporate information, not just information on computers. Traditionally, however, the focus of the CIO's job was primarily information technology. This engross a number of roles including strategic information system roles, the most critical of these being strategic information systems planning, strategic management through partaking in top management planning teams, strategic alignment of business and information systems plans, and interpretation of external IT success stories for potential applicability for the organization. In addition to strategic planning, the CIO's errands also include a number of tactical IT roles. These include architecture planning, development, and management; fostering relationships between the information systems department and including the superiors, functional units/line managers, vendors and end users; and technology champion - gaining support and commitment of top management during the execution of new technology.
The Six IS Leadership Roles
1. Chief architect. The chief architect designs future possibilities for the business. The primary work of the chief architect is to design and evolve the IT infrastructure so that it will expand the range of future possibilities for the business, not define specific business outcomes. The infrastructure should provide not just today's technical services, such as networking, databases and desktop operating systems, but an increasing range of business-level services, such as workflow, portfolio management, scheduling, and specific business components or objects.
2. Change leader. The change leader orchestrates resources to achieve optimal implementation of the future. The essential role of the change leader is to orchestrate all those resources that will be needed to execute the change program. This includes providing new IT tools, but it also involves putting in the place teams of people who can redesign roles, jobs and workflow, who can change beliefs about the company and the work people do, and who understand human nature and can develop incentive systems to coax people into new and different behaviors.
3. Product developer. The product developer helps define the company’s place in the emerging digital economy. For example, a product developer might recognize the potential for performing key business processes (perhaps order fulfillment, purchasing or delivering customer support) over electronic linkages such as the Internet. The product developer must "sell" the idea to a business partner, and together they can set up and evaluate business experiments, which are initially operated out of IS. Whether the new methods are adopted or not, the company will learn from the experiments and so move closer to commercial success in emerging digital markets.
4. Technology provocateur. The technology provocateur embeds IT into the business strategy. The technology provocateur works with senior business executives to bring IT and realities of the IT marketplace to bear on the formation of strategy for the business. The technology provocateur is a senior business executive who understands both the business and IT at a deep enough level to integrate the two perspectives in discussions about the future course of the business. Technology provocateurs have a wealth of experience in IS disciplines, so they understand at a fundamental level the capabilities of IT and how IT impacts the business.
5. Coach. The coach teaches people to acquire the skill sets they will need for the future. Coaches have to basic responsibilities: teaching people how to learn, so that they can become self-sufficient, and providing team leaders with staff able to do the IT-related work of the business. A mechanism that assists both is the center of excellence - a small group of people with a particular competence or skill, with a coach responsible for their growth and development. Coaches are solid practitioners of the competence that they will be coaching, but need not be the best at it in the company.
6. Chief operating strategist. The chief operating strategist invents the future with senior management. The chief operating strategist is the top IS executive who is focused on the future agenda of the IS organization. The strategist has parallel responsibilities related to helping the business design the future, and then delivering it. The most important, and least understood, parts of the role have to do with the interpretation of new technologies and the IT marketplace, and the bringing of this understanding into the development of the digital business strategy for the organization.
I realized that being a manager or a leader in undeniably a crucial duty.Each manager must possess appropriate values which will contribute for the attainment of the desired goals. Therefore, leadership roles must be observed and practiced. These roles are requisites for a good management of an organization.If it is exercised by leaders or managers a fruitful and better outcome will be the aftermath.
