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Inside a Manager's Day: Mintzberg's Ten Managerial Roles
Principles of Management · Chapter 1: Foundations of Management and the Modern ManagerSection 1.3 · lesson 3 of 11714 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
What managers were actually observed doing, and how to name it.
- Explain what observation revealed about managerial work
- Describe the 10 roles and their 3 groups
- Show why the roles form one integrated job
- Identify the roles at work in a described situation
Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,928 words). Read along, or search it.
Foundations of Management and the Modern Manager
Inside a Manager's Day: Mintzberg's Ten Managerial Roles
What does a manager actually do all day? The question sounds simple, and for a long time almost nobody checked. Early management writing described what a manager should do, in the abstract. This section looks at research that watched managers at work instead. We see what that observation revealed about managerial work. It was brief, fragmented, and mostly spoken. Then we meet the ten managerial roles that came out of it, sorted into three groups. We see why those roles form one integrated job, rather than ten separate duties. And we finish with a practical use. Auditing where a manager's time actually goes. By the end, you should be able to read a described situation, and name the roles at work in it.
Mintzberg, 1973
Watching Managers Instead of Prescribing to Them
Most early management writing described what a manager should do. Plan, organize, direct, and control. It did so in the abstract, with little direct observation of what managers actually spent their time on. In a nineteen seventy-three study, the researcher Henry Mintzberg took a different approach. He directly observed a small sample of chief executives at work, and tracked their activity in detail. Who they spoke with, for how long, through what medium, and about what. He did not ask them to describe their jobs. And he did not rely on job descriptions written by someone else. That methodological choice also shapes how the findings should be read. This is a study of what a particular small group of senior managers was observed doing. It is not a universal law of management. Later research has both extended it and qualified it, across other levels and settings. Even so, it remains one of the most influential accounts of what managerial work looks like, day to day.
What He Found
Brief, Fragmented and Spoken
What Mintzberg found about the character of the work was, at the time, somewhat surprising. The expected image was a reflective planner, spending long, uninterrupted stretches thinking through strategy. The observed pattern was the opposite. Brevity, and fragmentation. Activities were numerous and short. Half of the observed activities in his sample lasted nine minutes or less. Interruption was not an occasional annoyance. It was close to the normal condition of the job. The managers also showed a strong preference for verbal, live information. Conversations, phone calls, and meetings. They preferred these over written reports, even when a report contained the same information. The reason is that live exchange carries immediacy and nuance, which a report delivered later does not. Put together, these findings describe a real gap. On one side is the textbook manager, a systematic planner. On the other is a person whose day is built from many brief, varied, often unplanned exchanges.
A Composite Day
One Day, Many Short Blocks
To make that concrete, picture a composite manager's day at a manufacturer, from eight in the morning to six in the evening. It opens with an email scan, then a budget call, then a walk around the floor. A vendor drops in. There is a staff meeting, and then a client call. Then comes a crisis: a shipment problem nobody planned for. After that, a report review, conversations in the hallway, and wrap-up notes at the end of the day. That is ten distinct activities in a single working day. And few of them run longer than roughly twenty minutes. That is the signature of fragmentation that Mintzberg's observation identified. The crisis deserves a second look. It was not on the calendar, and it displaced whatever had been scheduled in its place. Nothing about this day is unusual. That is exactly the point.
Figure 1.3.2
The Roles as Connected Clusters
From this observation, Mintzberg organized what managers actually do into ten roles, grouped into three families. A role, in this framework, is an organized set of behaviors associated with a position. It is not a personality trait. And it is not something a manager chooses to perform or skip. Every manager performs all ten roles to some degree. What shifts, with level, function, and situation, is the emphasis. The three families are interpersonal, informational, and decisional. There are three interpersonal roles: figurehead, leader, and liaison. There are three informational roles: monitor, disseminator, and spokesperson. And there are four decisional roles: entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator. Read the groups as connected clusters, not as ten independent items. The interpersonal roles generate the access that feeds the informational roles. The informational roles supply what the decisional roles act on.
Interpersonal Roles
Roles That Come With the Position
The interpersonal roles arise directly from the formal authority and status attached to a management position. They govern the manager's relationships with people. The figurehead role covers ceremonial and symbolic duties, carried out because of position rather than expertise. Representing the unit at an event, signing a formal document, or greeting a visiting client. Greeting a visiting inspector on a site tour is a typical example. This role is most prominent at the top. The leader role covers directing and motivating subordinates. That includes hiring, training, and shaping how people approach their work. Coaching a struggling employee toward a performance goal is the leader role, and it is most prominent at the frontline. The liaison role covers a network of contacts outside the manager's direct chain of command. Peers in other departments, and external partners. Information and favors flow through that network in both directions. Maintaining a standing relationship with a counterpart department head is classic liaison work, most prominent in the middle. It is tempting to dismiss these roles as soft, or merely ceremonial. The next group shows why that would be a mistake.
Informational Roles
The Manager as Information Hub
The informational roles follow from the network the interpersonal roles build. That network places the manager at the center of a web of contacts, which makes her a natural hub for information. The monitor role covers continuously scanning the environment, inside and outside the unit, for relevant information. Conversation, observation, reports, and the liaison network all feed it. Reading incoming performance reports and industry news each morning is monitoring, and it is most prominent at the top. The disseminator role passes gathered information inward, to subordinates who would otherwise lack access to it. Explaining the reasoning behind a new policy at a shift meeting is dissemination, most prominent at the frontline. The spokesperson role passes information outward. It represents the unit's position to people outside it. Those people include senior management, other departments, and the public. Representing the department at a cross-functional review is spokesperson work, most prominent in the middle. So the monitor brings information in, the disseminator passes it inward to the team, and the spokesperson carries it out.
Decisional Roles
Turning Access and Information Into Choices
The decisional roles use the access and information built through the other two groups to make choices. The entrepreneur role covers initiating change deliberately. Launching a project or an improvement on the manager's own initiative. The key word is initiative. It is not a response to a forced event. Proposing and piloting a new scheduling approach, unprompted, is entrepreneurial, and most prominent in the middle. The disturbance handler role is the opposite. It covers unexpected problems the manager did not choose, and cannot ignore. A conflict, a breakdown, a crisis. Responding immediately to an equipment failure mid-shift is the frontline example. The resource allocator role decides where the unit's money, time, personnel, and equipment go. That includes the manager's own time, which Mintzberg treated as a resource under allocation in its own right. Deciding which of three projects gets the remaining budget is allocation at the top. The negotiator role represents the unit in bargaining with others, such as a union, a supplier, or another department. What makes it negotiation is that the outcome commits the unit's resources. Bargaining with a key supplier over contract terms is the top-level example.
An Integrated Whole
One Job, Not Separate Duties
Mintzberg was explicit that the ten roles are not ten separable duties. They cannot be assigned away one by one, leaving the job intact. He described them as an integrated whole. Follow one chain to see why. Cut a manager off from the liaison role, and she loses external information. That starves the monitor role, which now has less to scan. That in turn leaves the disturbance handler and resource allocator roles working on stale or incomplete information. The roles feed one another in sequence. Interpersonal access produces information, and information enables decisions. This has a practical consequence. A manager cannot simply delegate away the roles she finds least comfortable. Doing so weakens the very roles that depend on them. The networking that feels optional may be exactly what keeps her decisions well informed.
Where The Weight Falls
Role Emphasis Shifts by Level and Function
The emphasis on each role varies systematically, by level and by function. It connects directly to the levels covered earlier in this chapter. For a frontline manager, the disturbance handler and leader roles tend to dominate the day. That fits the short time horizon and close supervision described for the frontline in subchapter one point one. For a top manager, the figurehead, spokesperson, resource allocator, and negotiator roles are typically heaviest. That fits the external relationships and long time horizon at that level. Function matters as well, even at the same seniority. A manager in a customer-facing sales role typically carries a heavier liaison and negotiator load. A manager running an internal operations function of similar seniority looks different. Her disturbance handler and resource allocator roles may dominate instead. So two managers of the same seniority can have very different role profiles, and both can be doing the job correctly.
Complements, Not Rivals
Functions Describe Purpose; Roles Describe Form
The next chapter introduces an older framework, the four management functions. Planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. It is worth being clear now about how the two frameworks relate, so they are not mistaken for rivals. The four functions describe the purpose of managerial work. What management is ultimately for. They are stated at a level of abstraction that does not depend on observing any particular manager's day. Mintzberg's ten roles describe the observed form that work takes, when it is actually carried out. That is the fragmented, interruption-driven, largely verbal activity this section has described. One example shows how they fit together. A single fifteen-minute conversation might serve the planning function. At the same moment, it is carried out through the leader and disseminator roles. The frameworks answer different questions about the same underlying activity. They do not disagree about it.
Diagnosing Your Time
Renata Reviews Her Own Calendar
The role framework has a direct practical use. It gives a manager a vocabulary for auditing her own time. Review a week of activity, tag each block with the role it represents, and compare the pattern with what your level and function predict. Renata managed a customer operations department of forty people. For months she had felt she was working harder than ever, while making less visible progress on the improvements she was hired to lead. At a colleague's suggestion, she tagged a full month of her calendar and email by Mintzberg role, rather than by topic. The pattern was unmistakable. Nearly half her time fell under the disturbance handler role. Escalated customer complaints, staffing gaps, system outages. Almost all of it unplanned, and none of it schedulable in advance. Leader and informational roles made up most of the rest. The entrepreneur role, the deliberate work of improving how the department operated, took less than an hour in the entire month. She had not lost the ability to do that work. Nothing about her skill or her priorities had changed. The disturbance handler role, unpredictable and impossible to defer, had simply expanded to fill the time available. It crowded out a role that needed uninterrupted attention, attention she had stopped protecting. That is a specific diagnosis, not a vague sense of being too busy. The crowded-out role is the one that drives improvement.
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