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What is a Manager? An essential question for management education -

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 MEDSYM13245

WHAT IS A MANAGER?
AN ESSENTIAL QUESTION FOR MANAGEMENT EDUCATION

Abstract :

Considering the way it is implemented today, managerial education can be seen as a mirror
reflecting to the students (or to the managers) the image of what or who they should be. Four
years ago, a team of French researchers were asked to lead an inquiry around the question
“What is a manager ?”, and to measure the consequences of the answers to such a question in
educational processes. This symposium aims at presenting how three French researchers
consider this question, with different, sometimes diverging points of view. The probable
common point of these presentations is that all of them are based on critical approaches of
management as it is taught in the French educational system. Among multiple and often
complex methodological considerations, each participant chose his own way, to provide
his/her answers to the question “what is a manager?”.

Symposium format : Presenter symposium

Key words : Management education, manager.

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WHAT IS A MANAGER?
AN ESSENTIAL QUESTION FOR MANAGEMENT EDUCATION

Chair :
Jérôme MERIC
Maître de Conférences,
CERMAT - Institut d’Administration des Entreprises (IAE) de Tours,
50, Avenue Jean Portalis
BP 0607
37206 Tours Cedex 03
FRANCE
Tel : 33 2 47 36 10 36
Fax : 33 2 47 36 10 11
e-mail : meric@droit.univ-tours.fr
Website : www.iae.droit.univ-tours.fr

Presenters :
Pierre KLETZ
Maître de Conférences,
CERMAT - Institut d’Administration des Entreprises (IAE) de Tours,
50, Avenue Jean Portalis
BP 0607
37206 Tours Cedex 03
FRANCE
Tel : 33 2 47 36 11 43
Fax : 33 2 47 36 10 11
e-mail : kletz@droit.univ-tours.fr
Website : www.iae.droit.univ-tours.fr

Yvon PESQUEUX
Professeur titulaire de la Chaire "Développement des Systèmes d'Organisation", CNAM
(Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Métiers)
292 rue Saint Martin
75 141 Paris Cédex 03
FRANCE
tel : 33 1 40 27 21 63
Fax : 33 1 40 27 26 24
e-mail : pesqueux@cnam.fr
Website : www.cnam.fr/depts/te/dso

Andréu SOLE
Professeur, Groupe HEC (Hautes Etudes Commerciales)
1, rue de la Libération
78351 Jouy en Josas
FRANCE
Tel : 33 1 39 67 72 50
Fax : 33 1 39 67 70 86
e-mail: sole@hec.fr

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Website: www.hec.fr

Discussants :

Eric CORNUEL
Director General, EFMD (European Foundation for Management Development)
Rue Gachard, 88
1050 BRUXELLES
BELGIQUE
Tel : 32 2 629 08 10
Fax : 32 2 629 08 11
e-mail : cornuel@efmd.be
Website : www.efmd.be

Henry MINTZBERG
Professor
Mac Gill University
Faculty of Management
1001 Sherbrooke St. West
MONTREAL QUEBEC
CANADA H3A 1G5
Tel : (514) 398 4017
Fax : (514) 398 3876
e-mail : mintzber@management.mcgill.ca
Website : www.management.mcgill.ca

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WHAT IS A MANAGER?
A SHORT OVERVIEW

Considering the way it is implemented today, managerial education can be seen as a mirror
reflecting to students (or to managers) the image of what or who they should be. Getting into
this process, students build a very stable image of what hey ought to become. The global
educational system, including syllabuses, seminars, internships, textbooks and so on tend to
fix such a “self ideal”. This self-validating mirror hinders any shape of self-criticism. As a
result, this vicious circle may have dramatic consequences on managers’ personal and
organizational life. For instance, managers may :
- reduce themselves to a particular role, defined through their experience, education,
managerial fashion, etc.
- adopt only one point of view to consider organizational situations ;
- look for solutions before trying to identify problems and /or analyze the situations they
have to deal with ;
- explain (through already made patterns) what they are doing or living instead of trying to
understand it.
Those consequences may also be purely behavioral. Students graduated from French
“Grandes Ecoles de Commerce” and from Universities are generally described as “arrogant”,
“excessively self-confident”, “rigid”, “disdainful”, “not adapted to new situations”, etc…We
assume such a phenomenon not to be exclusively French (see, for instance, Skinner and
Sasser, 1977).
Four years ago, a team of French researchers (among whom A. SOLE and myself) were asked
to lead an inquiry around the question “What is a manager ?”, and to measure the
consequences of the answers to such a question in educational processes. Our research led of
course to partial results, as far as the question is extremely wide. Does it mean that we should
have restricted it to one or several precise ones? We do not think so. To keep it constantly in
mind should be a “moral” obligation for educators.

This symposium aims at presenting how three French researchers consider this question, with
different, sometimes diverging points of view. The probable common point of these
presentations is that all of them are based on critical approaches of management as it is taught

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in the French educational system. After having presented the main question that gave rise to
this symposium project, we will enter the details of each presentation and the interest of the
questions they arouse concerning management education.

Interest to academy, especially MED members

During a management control seminar,I was dealing with pricing in relation with costing and
marketing concerns. A student asked me why I was considering marketing matters in a
management control session. The first answer that came to my mind was : “Think global. A
lack in global thinking is lethal for organizations today”. If I had answered in such a way, I
would have adopted an attitude I cannot approve today. The problem clearly was the
compartmentalizing of disciplines in our managerial education programs. This could induce a
series of clichés in students’ minds. Nevertheless, answering “think global” would have been
no more than a cliché, too.
Management educators get caught into their own trap. To eliminate what they consider to be a
“cliché”, a “beaten track”, they often find no other way than proposing a new cliché, a new
beaten track. In such a way, they avoid any type of embarrassing questions. Even worse : is
not our ideal to have an answer to any question that may be asked ? As K. Popper showed it
considering psychoanalysis, a discipline which can explain everything (or provide an answer
to any question) is no longer a science. As management is considered as a science (aren’t we
working in an “academy” ?), managerial education programs tend to prove the opposite. This
lack of humility finds its “spitting image” in students’ behaviors. As we already told it in the
introduction, students getting out from managerial educational programs get a bad reputation.
The role of an academy division like MED is to improve management education practices.
Such a process requires, for instance, to raise questions that may lead to self criticism and
than, to improved practices.
One of these uncomfortable questions is “What is a manager ?”. It seems that professors, and
also many authors in management science try to avoid it. Why trying to do so ? Our
hypothesis is that the self-validating mirror we can provide to students is particularly
comforting. We could identify many reasons for that, namely :
- reducing managers to a list of roles preserve them from feeling responsible for problems
that do not belong to their attributions ;
- adopting only one point of view may extremely simplify complex organizational
situations ;

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- giving solutions instead of identifying problems gives the comforting impression that you
can manage any situation that could occur ;
- explaining (through already made patterns) what you are living instead of trying to
understand hinders any fundamental interrogation on what you are doing or what you are
to do ;
- waiting for “relevant” information prevents from (bad) decision.
All that has to do with responsibility. When you reduce your job to a specific role, when you
adopt only one point of view, when you pick solutions out of your already made tool box,
when already made patterns legitimate your action, why should you feel responsible for what
you are doing or what you have done ? Of course, this statement is based on extreme cases.
When we say so, we think about the arguments developed by persons involved in the French
contaminated blood affair, namely : “We had to act as managers. Our mission was to provide
blood to hospitals. That is what we have done”. No matter whether this blood was
contaminated or not. In France, such a reaction had a great impact in the society. Being a
manager is not only being responsible for the organization, it is also having civic
responsibilities (in a global sense). Western contractual culture may be a reason for such a
compartmentalization of responsibilities, but managerial education has also to be taken into
account, in so far as the way it works does not incite (or even hinders) self-criticism.
Getting conscious of such a problem may come from individuals. Of course, we have met
students or managers who try to understand the role they take in society. But, for many others,
introspection is seen as useless or even dangerous, arguing that it hinders any shape of action.
So, is managerial education to comfort or to destabilize managers and/or students ? The
answer we propose is based on etymology. To educate comes from Latin “ex ducere”, which
means “to lead out from…”. When educating students, our role does not consist in
conditioning them to a generic way of thinking. On the contrary, it is to help them to find their
own way. In our sense, to educate means to lead pupils off the beaten track, and to accompany
them while they are trying to find their own ways. In the French managerial education system,
the equivalent of “education”, “formation” is far more ambiguous. “Formation” has to do
with “shaping”, “pre-conditioning”. Isn’t “education” the contrary of “formation” ? In other
words, is not “education” to be considered as “deformation” ? The role of professors does not
only consist in technical teaching. It also consists in developing self-criticism, the sense of
responsibility, that is to say any type of tool that could help anyone to find his/her own way.
With students and/ore managers who have been put on the beaten track, we can assume that
an “education” process has to begin with destabilization.

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Has business ethics to do anything with our approach ? We do not think so. Business ethics
can be integrated into managerial education programs without inducing any self-questioning.
It is so based on practical methods as accounting teaching (see Hoffman & Mills Moore,
1989), though it deals with general responsibilities of managers. A “personal ethics code” is
often considered as one more tool in the managers’ toolbox. Moreover, the recent
development of “ethics charters” enriches the corpus of management rules and procedures,
instead of calling for an individual reflection upon managerial and civic responsibilities.

“What is a manager ?” – an ambiguous question?

Management literature often considers the idea of “manager” as self-evident. When the
question is asked, it is often understood as “What does a manager do ?” or “What should a
manager do ?”. This is perhaps one way (among others) to consider such an interrogation, let
us say, the empirical and prescriptive ways (respectively). Just to quote the main authors in
this domain, P. Drucker (1954), A. Zaleznick (1966) H. Mintzberg (1973) have developed
experience and/or theory based theses to answer this question. The observation of managers
gives information on what they do, and this approach found brilliant examples in management
literature. By the way, its great success should not prevent researchers from adopting other
points of view: theoretical, historical, anthropological, etc.

What is a “manager” ? Our symposium is an attempt to answer this naive and fundamental
question. Let us precise that we have considered the word “manager” according to its largest
meaning, that is to say that we included the notions of “leader”, “entrepreneur”, “coach” etc.
Ideas and debates are so tangled that we tend to forget an evident thing : the word “manager”
is firstly a label. “Manager” is a means to denote a person, a way for individuals to identify
which group they belong to, to identify themselves. This label - it is one of its particularities -
tends to spread worldwide : it is used in New York, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo,
Singapore, Algiers.... If we assumed that language is a reflection of reality, we would be sure
that such a label denotes the reality of a role, of a function, of a hierarchical position, of a
power, of a set of competencies. The globalization of this label would give evidence that this
role, this function, this power, those competencies are getting universal.

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A “Manager” : just a word, or a strong idea ?

This question may also call for considering the relation between language and reality. This
debate fixed around the question of language, it seems necessary to base our reflection on
Saussure’s works (1972). This author founded structural linguistics, more precisely the
distinction between “significans” and “signification” : language is like a paper sheet. On one
side, there is the “significans” (the material side : signs, sounds...), on the other one, there is
the “signification” (the immaterial dimension : concepts, ideas...). The relation between both
aspects of language is purely arbitrary. A first way to answer the question “what is a
manager” would consist in reconstituting the history of the word (the “significans”)
“manager”. The second way to answer the question would consist in taking the concept (the
“signification”) into consideration. The question “what is a manager ?” becomes : “what does
“manager” signify ?”

A Manager : construction or reality ?

Here remains the question of reality, more precisely the relation between “signification” and
reality. Synthetically speaking, we can say that two epistemological positions are to be
presented :
- the realistic position (we are referring to realism as a philosophical conception of Man and
the World) supposes that “signification” reflects reality, that an idea is a representation, say a
mirror of reality ;
- the constructivist position (another conception of Man and the World) on the contrary,
considers that reality is “constructed” by “significations”, that reality is produced by our
ideas.
If a “manager” is not a reality that can be clearly pointed out, analyzed and observed, what is
it ? It is an idea. Here is, very simply expressed, another answer to our question. Honoré de
Balzac, a famous French novelist, tried to describe what he called “the Human Comedy”. To
do so, he invented, created a large scale of characters. To the evidence that a “manager” is a
label applied to the reality of particular roles, hierarchical positions and competencies, we can
oppose the global assumption that “manager” is a word denoting an idea, more precisely a
character from the “Human Comedy”.

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Among these multiple and often complex methodological considerations, each participant
chose his own way, to provide their answers to the question “what is a manager?”.
Jérôme Méric,
Maître de Conférences
University of Tours

The points of view from our participants

The participants who accepted to take part to this project are all involved in management
education in France. Their practice and their research often leads them to consider the
founding question “what is a manager?”

Pierre Kletz is Maître de Conférences at the University of Tours (IAE). His latest
investigations deal with the status, the role and the carrier of graduate managers in both public
and private organizations. The results he drawn from this research lead him to the considering
the question: “are managers (as they are supposed to be in French educational programs)
adaptable to non-profit organizations?”. The answers he provides are based on both
empirical and theoretical studies.

Yvon Pesqueux is Full Professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM).
The CNAM was created after the French Revolution to develop continuing education for
professionals. It is still the main function of this institution. Yvon Pesqueux, as the chair of
the Organizational Science Department, focuses on the problems of business ethics, especially
applied to governance situations. In this context, he considers the nature of managerial work
as an essential topic. His contribution, based on both teaching experience and research,
arouses the problem of educational content. If a manager is considered first as a technician,
management education should focus on technical matters, but if managers are more than
technicians (for instance, responsible people), technical content is far from being sufficient.
“Managers are people who should both think and act”.

Andréu Solé is Professor at HEC (Hautes Etudes Commerciales). His main research object is
“managers”, as they act, feel and think. Starting his research from decision theories, he finally
realized that considering managers as decision-makers is only an image of what managers are.

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He defends the idea that managers are “jailed” by all the images that can be projected over
them. This phenomenon being strengthened by a management education essentially based on
success stories, he comes to ask the question : “Aren’t managers ordinary people ?”. That is
why he recommends to insert testimonies from “ordinary people” (and certainly not only
super-humans) in educational processes.

The discussants for this symposium will be Henry Mintzberg and Eric Cornuel. Henry
Mintzberg happens to be the major reference for each of the presenters, for all the thoughts he
could provide on this topic. His participation sounded essential to us. Eric Cornuel is General
Director of the European Foundation for Management Development. His experience and his
strong involvement in management education processes led him to consider the question
“what is a manager” as essential. The strategic analysis he made of management education
systems in Europe (see attached contribution) clearly shows that business schools will have to
consider seriously such questions to remain on the main market. His insightful method and his
experience of other educational systems should allow to enrich the “French” approach
presented by the participants, and to evaluate their consequences in more global terms.

Sessions format

Presenter symposium

Duration : 120 minutes

Main outline :
Introductive speech (J. Méric) 10 minutes
Presentation by P. Kletz 15 minutes
Comments by the discussants and questions 15 minutes
Presentation by Y. Pesqueux 15 minutes
Comments by the discussants and questions 15 minutes
Presentation by A. Solé 15 minutes
Comments by the discussants and questions 15 minutes
Main debate and synthesis by H. Minzberg and E. Cornuel 2O minutes

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PRESENTATIONS

(contributions must be asked for to authors directly)

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