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Managers are required to interact with a number of people during a workweek. They host receptions, take clients and customers to dinner, meet with business prospects and partners, conduct hiring and performance interviews, and form alliances, friendships, and personal relationships with many others. Studies have shown that such relationships are the richest source of information for managers because of their immediate and personal nature. The conversations may be formal or informal, within meetings, or simply “walking around” the organization and talking to colleagues and the people they supervise.
Three of a manager’s roles arise directly from formal authority and involve basic interpersonal relationships. Those roles are associated with expectations—others' expectations of the manager, and those they hold for themselves.
IN CONTEXT
When Sergio Marchionne took over the Chrysler company in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the once great auto manufacturer was in bankruptcy, teetering on the verge of extinction. Marchionne formed new relationships with the United Auto Workers, reorganized the senior management of the company, and—perhaps, most importantly—convinced the U.S. federal government to guarantee a series of bank loans that would make the company solvent again. The company found itself once again on firm footing and with an improved brand, due in large measure to Marchionne’s leadership skills. As a figurehead, he inspired his workforce and other stakeholders to have more confidence in the company. As a leader, he negotiated a new contract with the union. As a liaison, he won the government’s support. In 2018, the company merged with Fiat to form Fiat Chrysler. Marchionne resigned for health reasons and died soon afterwards, but his legacy is that Fiat Chrysler is still one of the biggest auto manufacturers in the world.
Managers are required to gather, collate, analyze, store, and disseminate many kinds of information. In doing so, they become information resource centers, often storing huge amounts of information in their heads, moving quickly from the role of gatherer to the role of disseminator in minutes. Although many business organizations install large, expensive management information systems to perform many of those functions, nothing can match the speed and intuitive power of a well-trained manager’s brain for information processing. Not surprisingly, most managers prefer it that way.
As monitors, managers are constantly scanning the environment for information, talking with liaison contacts and employees, and receiving information, much of it because of their network of personal contacts. A good portion of this information arrives in verbal form, often as gossip, hearsay, and speculation.
In the disseminator role, managers pass privileged information directly to employees, who might otherwise have no access to it. Managers must decide not only who should receive such information, but how much of it, how often, and in what form. Increasingly, managers are being asked to decide whether employees, peers, customers, business partners, and others should have direct access to information without having to contact the manager directly.
In the spokesperson role, managers send information to people outside of their organizations: An executive makes a speech to lobby for an organizational cause, or a supervisor suggests a product modification to a supplier. Increasingly, managers are also being asked to deal with representatives of the news media, providing both factual and opinion-based responses that will be printed or broadcast to vast unseen audiences, often directly or with little editing. The risks in such circumstances are enormous, but so too are the potential rewards in terms of brand recognition, public image, and organizational visibility.
IN CONTEXT
Imagine the frightening situation where your product has harmed or even killed someone. As the representative addressing the media, you must have extraordinary communication skills to appease stakeholders and restore confidence in your product. There is a great risk of saying the wrong thing or, worse, getting caught on a “hot mic,” being heard saying something that is supposed to be private.
In 1982, Johnson & Johnson managed a crisis where a still unknown person tampered with their product, introducing cyanide to a number of bottles of Tylenol and causing several deaths in the Chicago area. The company handled the crisis by immediately communicating that they were taking extreme measures to recall all bottles of the product and introducing new safety features which are now the norm. Though the circumstances are still tragic, the company restored confidence in the product and is now used as a case study of the right way to manage a crisis. Notably, this was not just a matter of “saying the right thing,” but backing it up with actions.
Ultimately, managers are charged with the responsibility of making decisions on behalf of both the organization and the stakeholders with an interest in it. Such decisions are often made under circumstances of high ambiguity and with inadequate information. Often, the other two managerial roles—interpersonal and informational—will assist a manager in making difficult decisions in which outcomes are not clear and interests are often conflicting.
In the role of entrepreneur, managers seek to improve their businesses, adapt to changing market conditions, and react to opportunities as they present themselves. Managers who take a longer-term view of their responsibilities are among the first to realize that they will need to reinvent themselves, their product and service lines, their marketing strategies, and their ways of doing business as older methods become obsolete and competitors gain advantage.
While the entrepreneur role describes managers who initiate change, the disturbance or crisis handler role depicts managers who must involuntarily react to conditions. Crises can arise because bad managers let circumstances deteriorate or spin out of control, but just as often, good managers find themselves in the midst of a crisis that they could not have anticipated but must react to just the same.
The third decisional role of resource allocator involves managers making decisions about who gets what, how much, when, and why. Resources, including funding, equipment, human labor, office or production space, and even the boss’s time, are all limited, and demand inevitably outstrips supply. Managers must make sensible decisions about such matters while still retaining, motivating, and developing the best of their employees.
The final decisional role is that of negotiator. Managers spend considerable amounts of time in negotiations: over budget allocations, labor and collective bargaining agreements, and other formal dispute resolutions. During a week, managers will often make dozens of decisions that are the result of brief but important negotiations between and among employees, customers and clients, suppliers, and others with whom managers must deal.
Management communication is a central discipline in the study of communication and corporate reputation. An understanding of language and its inherent powers, combined with the skill to speak, write, listen, and form interpersonal relationships, will determine whether companies succeed or fail and whether they are rewarded or penalized for their reputations.
At the midpoint of the 20th century, Peter Drucker wrote, “Managers have to learn to know language, to understand what words are and what they mean. Perhaps most important, they have to acquire respect for language as [our] most precious gift and heritage. The manager must understand the meaning of the old definition of rhetoric as ‘the art which draws men’s hearts to the love of true knowledge.’”
Later, Eccles and Nohria reframed Drucker’s view to offer a perspective of management that few others have seen: “To see management in its proper light, managers need first to take language seriously.” In particular, they argue, a coherent view of management must focus on three issues: the use of rhetoric to achieve a manager’s goals, the shaping of a managerial identity, and taking action to achieve the goals of the organizations that employ us. Above all, they say, “the essence of what management is all about [is] the effective use of language to get things done.” One of the things managers get done is the creation, management, and monitoring of corporate reputation.
The job of becoming a competent, effective manager thus becomes one of understanding language and action. It also involves finding ways to shape how others see and think of you in your role as a manager. Many noted researchers have examined the important relationship between communication and action within large and complex organizations and conclude that the two are inseparable. Without the right words, used in the right way, it is unlikely that the right reputations develop. “Words do matter,” write Eccles and Nohria. “They matter very much. Without words, we have no way of expressing strategic concepts, structural forms, or designs for performance measurement systems.” Language, they conclude, “is too important to managers to be taken for granted or, even worse, abused.”
So, if language is a manager’s key to corporate reputation management, the next question is obvious: How good are managers at using language? Managers’ ability to act—to hire a talented workforce, to change an organization’s reputation, to launch a new product line—depends entirely on how effectively they use management communication, both as a speaker and as a listener. Managers’ effectiveness as speakers and writers will determine how well they are able to manage the firm’s reputation. And their effectiveness as listeners will determine how well they understand and respond to others and can change the organization in response to their feedback.
We will now examine the role management communication plays in corporate reputation formation, management, and change, and the position occupied by rhetoric in the life of business organizations. This chapter will focus on the skills, abilities, and competencies for using language, attempting to influence others, and responding to the requirements of peers, superiors, stakeholders, and the organization in which managers and employees work.
Management communication is about the movement of information and the skills that facilitate it—speaking, writing, listening, and processes of critical thinking. It’s also about understanding who your organization is (identity), who others think your organization is (reputation), and the contributions individuals can make to the success of their business, considering their organization’s existing reputation. It is also about confidence—the knowledge that one can speak and write well, listen with great skill as others speak, and both seek out and provide the feedback essential to creating, managing, or changing their organization’s reputation.
At the heart of all managerial roles is communication. We will now examine the roles of writing and speaking in the role of management, as well as other specific applications and challenges managers face as they play their role in the creation, maintenance, and change of corporate reputation.
Source: THIS TUTORIAL HAS BEEN ADAPTED FROM OPENSTAX "ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR". ACCESS FOR FREE AT OPENSTAX.ORG/BOOKS/ORGANIZATIONAL-BEHAVIOR/PAGES/1-INTRODUCTION. LICENSE: CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 4.0 INTERNATIONAL.
