A MANAGER''S TIME

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15

A MANAGER'S TIME

HOW DO MANAGERS CREATE THE
TIME FOR LEARNING?
At one of our recent Leadership and Mastery programs, I talked to a
manager who was born and raised in India, and who has worked in
both United States and Japanese firms. She said that when a person in
a Japanese firm sits quietly, no one will come and interrupt. It is
assumed that the person is thinking. On the other hand, when the
person is up and moving about, coworkers feel free to interrupt.
"Isn't it interesting," she said, "that it is exactly the opposite in
American firms? In America, we assume that when a person is sitting
quietly they aren't doing anything very important."
How can we expect people to learn when they have little time to
think and reflect, individually and collaboratively? I know of few
managers who do not complain of not having enough time. Indeed,
most of the managers with whom I have worked struggle unceasingly to
get the time for quiet reflection. Could this be a cultural norm that we
take for granted—the incessant "busyness" of our daily lives?
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Donald Schon, in his book The Reflective
Practitioner,
points out that
the drive for instant action appears to come from public school

classroom learning, where teachers are bound by a bureaucratic or-
ganization that discourages time to reflect. "If the teacher must
somehow manage the work of thirty students in a classroom, how
can she really listen to any one of them?" Thus, in the schoolroom,
learning becomes synonymous with absorbing information dished
out by an "expert," and everyone, both student and teacher, moves
as quickly as possible so as to absorb as much as possible.
1

In an organization, the manager is the "expert." If there is no
authority figure to turn to, then successful professionals (according
to Schon) must develop the capacity to work in continuous cycles of
pausing to develop hypotheses, acting, and pausing to reflect on the
results. Schon calls this "reflection-in-action" and talks about it as a
characteristic of professionals who are successful learners. "Phrases
like 'thinking on your feet,' 'keeping your wits about you,' and
'learning by doing,' " he wrote, "suggest not only that we can think
about doing but that we can think about doing something while doing
it."

But many American managers are too busy running to "think on
their feet." For most of us our internal pictures about the nature of
our work say that activity is good, that a manager's job is to keep
things moving. Hanover's Bill O'Brien calls this the "chain gang"
model of management: "Most managers seem to think of themselves
like the boss of the chain gang: 'the speed of the boss sets the speed of
the gang.' "

It is easy to blame this incessant activity and lack of time for
reflection on organizational pressures but research is beginning to

suggest otherwise. We have conducted numerous experiments, as
part of research in developing managerial microworlds (Chapter 17), to
study managers' learning habits. Surprisingly, these experiments show
that even when there is ample time for reflection and the facility for
retrieving all manner of relevant information (in the form of a
computer-based simulation, in which the managers play out their real-
life roles), most managers do not reflect carefully on their actions.
Typically, managers in the experiments adopt a strategy, then as soon
as the strategy starts to run into problems, they switch to another
strategy, then to another and another. In a simulated four-year
exercise, managers may run through three to six different strategies,
without once examining why a strategy seems to be failing or
articulating specifically what they hope to accomplish through a

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change
in strategy.
2

Apparently, the "ready, fire, aim" atmosphere
of
American corporations has been fully assimilated and internalized by
those who live in that atmosphere.

Learning takes time. When an individual is managing mental
models, for example, it takes considerable time to surface assump-
tions, examine their consistency and accuracy, and see how different
models can be knit together into more systemic perspectives on im-

portant problems.

The management of time and attention is an area where top man-
agement has a significant influence, not by edict but by example. For
instance, O'Brien simply doesn't schedule short meetings. "If it isn't a
subject that is worthy of an hour, it shouldn't be on my calendar." In a
well-designed organization, the only issues that should reach a senior
manager's atteufion^should be complex, dilemma-like "divergent"
issues. These are the issues that require the thought and experience of
the most senior people, in addition to the input of less experienced
people. If top managers are handling twenty problems in a workday,
either they are spending too much time on "convergent" problems that
should be dealt with more locally in the organization, or they are
giving insufficient time to complex problems. Either way, it is a sign
that management work is being handled poorly. "It's a big year for
me," O'Brien adds, "if I make twelve decisions. I may pick someone
to report directly to me. I may set a direction. But my job is not
consumed with making many decisions. It is consumed with
identifying important issues the organization must address in the
future, helping others sort through decisions they must make, and the
overarching tasks of organizational design" (see Chapter 18 on the
design functions of leadership).

The principle is simple to say and understand, but it's not the way
most organizations operate. Instead, people at the top continually
make decisions on issues such as how to run a promotion—as op-
posed to why they need to run promotions at all. Or they discuss
how to make a sale to a particular customer—instead of inquiring
about how their products serve the customers' expressed and latent
needs in general.

On the other hand, as the basic learning disciplines start to become
assimilated into an organization, a different view of managerial work
will develop. Action will still be critical, but incisive action will not be
confused with incessant activity. There will be time for reflection,
conceptualizing, and examining complex issues.

No one knows how much time managers in future organizations

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will spend reflecting, modeling, and designing learner processes. But it
will be a great deal more than was spent in the past. Ed Simon at
Herman Miller has asked his management team to commit 25 percent of
their work time to what he calls "learning the work of organizational
architects." During the past year, the team has devoted itself to
mastering the "reflection and inquiry" skills integral to the discipline of
"mental models," and applying these skills to their most strategic
issues. He said that this time commitment is necessary because
although there is much to be learned about the "new work" of
managers and leaders, "We know enough that we can get started."

One useful starting point for all managers is to look at their time for
thinking. If it isn't adequate, why not? Are work pressures keeping us
from taking the time, or, to some degree, are we doing it to ourselves?
Either way, where is the leverage for change? For some people, it may
involve changing personal habits. Others may need to soften or deflect
the organization's demands for incessant "busyness." The way each of
us and each of our close colleagues go about managing our own time

will say a good deal about our commitment to learning.