LECTURE 1, PART 1 – MANAGING PEOPLE
IN ORGANIZATIONS
OPENING, THINKING, CONTEXTUALIZING
https://study.sagepub.com/managingandorganizations6e
Managing & managerialism
Making sense of managing as a coherent set of assumptions, concepts,
values, & practices that constitute a way of viewing reality
Managing entails sensemaking and framing
Managerialism
A claim to special expertise premised on managerial rationality characterizing
organizations
Is that you can think that you can manage people based on rationalism
o I know how to make money so I know how to manage is, but that’s not
all that you need
MAKING SENSE OF MANAGING (P. 6 FF)
We can differentiate managing as a practice, as something that we do, from
organizations as goal-oriented collectives, entities in which we are organized
Management is the process of communicating, coordinating and
accomplishing action in the pursuit of organizational objectives
o Why you do all this => modern perspective of management
o You need the people skills & take other things into consideration
Many different people to manage (stakeholders)
Managing collaborative relationships with stakeholders, technologies & other
artefacts
Both within & between organizations
Managing more or less considerate relationships with those employed as well
as with those encountered as suppliers, customers, communities, and so on
Management => NOT A NEUTRAL ACTIVITY !
Not just considered in terms of its capacity to deliver objective gains in
productivity/efficiency
=> ALSO SOCIO-POLITICAL ACTIVITY,
Which implies the need to adhere to societal, political and ethical
responsibilities
This is called sensemaking
Past 40 years => the predominant sense of what an organization should be has
been modelled on lean & efficient private sector organizations that are profit
oriented
In such organizations, top management teams strive to set a common frame so
that organizational members, customers, suppliers, investors, and so on, can
make common sense of the organization – what it is and what it does
Back in the d ay: make money
,Sense-making
=> Sensemaking is the process through which individuals & groups give meaning to
something, especially to explain novel, unexpected or confusing events
Everyone has different information & experience
o People will interpretate you in a different way
Your beliefs are cause maps that you impose on the world, after
which you ‘see’ what you have already imposed
Sense-making in a capitalist system
Making sense of profit orientation?
Does it make sense to you?
The art of making sense of your work
o Proud to working for Apple, Google or another ‘hip’ company
Dare to challenge the narrative of selling company!
o Projection of an image that may not be reality
Dare to challenge the narrative of your manager!
Role of a manger is to make sense
You can be critical with that => sustainability, profit, responsibility
o Bv be good for sustainability, but we create our stuff in Bangladesh =>
makes no sense
IT IS A SKILL/ TOOL THAT YOU NEED AS A MANAGER, but be critical with it
Sense-making
We are constantly making sense, revising past rationalizations in the light of new
information, knowledge & events not previously available
o Breaking experience of events into blocks of sense
Meaning is constructed in an ongoing process in which past experience informs
the present (Maitlis and Christianson, 2014).
o Everyone has a different reality
EXPLAINED
- Ongoing: always making sense (never stop doing so)
o Sense of what you are experiencing
- Retrospective: constantly reviewing sense in terms of additional sense data
o Make sense of smth as it is elapsing
- Plausible: never perfect, more proivisional snes
o Sense is good enough
- Images: representations of things to navigate our way
- Rationalize: rationalize things that are confusing
- People: people do sensemaking
- Doing: do things through thining & action
o When doing different than thining
VIDEO
Making sense & creating structure out of the unknow
o Make a map
, Some things are unseen or unnoticed
o Shifting markets, technology, politics, culture, climate change
Sensemaking = turning thought into action
o A tool to tackle issues: safety, operations, functional teamwork
Draw a map => better find a solution
o Share the map with other people
o Show the same map
o Map can change over time
To simplfy things
o Why are you doing this for the company?
Sense-making – be critical
Stuff happens: George W. Bush & Donald Rumsfeld and the Iraq War
We know where they are [Iraq's weapons of mass destruction]. They're in the area
around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat (Donald
Rumsfeld, 2011)
VIDEO:
Be critical about what leaders are telling you
It is crazy to bring democracy to the middle east, but in the video was
convincing because he made sense
o That’s why you need to be critical
Steve Jobs Introducing The iPhone At MacWorld 2007
Managing in a complex world
A ‘one size fits all’ management approach will not work.
Contemporary managers can no longer rely on hierarchy & nominal roles to
manage people
o They have to make sense
Managing has become an increasingly difficult, political & challenging endeavour
People work in complex organizations that are embedded in contexts
inscribed by complex networks
Managers should have understanding of (human) complexity
o Consider many variables
o Cannot just say: ‘do it’
^ Mean messages of this chapter
Sensemaking & framing
To make sense = ander woord voor to frame
Things changes
Manager needs to connect frames
Managers manage through processes of:
Sense making
o What’s going on
o Popular for leadership
Sense giving
o Frame others’ perceptions to accord with the sense you are making
Sense breaking
o Disrupt existing flows of sensemaking & sensegiving
, A key part of the managers’ role is
To ‘frame’ the sense that others have of the roles that they play in the
organization
As social realities of business & organizations change, the different sense &
framing is required
Much of managing is discursive: issuing orders, making suggestions, framing
actions in order to accomplish objectives
Managing & Framing
The sense you make => never made in isolation
=> Focus on more things & connect the dots
Made through language & concepts you use
Through many cues that prompt you to make sense
o Experience, what other say they thing is happening, likely stories that
you are familiar with that seem to fit the pattern that appears to be
forming
People will not use these cues in a uniform way, because they are individuals and, as
a result, people can make wildly different sense of the same set of cues
=> Cue people in similar processes of patterns making to fit clues and cues together and to
make common meaning out of them
FRAME
Framing
=> Decide on what is relevant from the infinite number of stimuli, behavioral cues,
sense data & information that surround us
Framing is a term that comes from film making: a director frames a shot by including
some detail and omitting other elements
Bv director frame things and leave things out
A frame defines what is relevant
All managing involves framing: separating that which deserves focus from that
which does not.
One thing that managers do all the time is to differentiate between the
relevant & the irrelevant
Framing involves the creation of devices that assign meaning to
organizational situations (Fairhurst, 1993)
Framing entails the ideational use of metaphors, repetition of stories, the citing
of traditions, the articulation of slogans & the material creation of artefacts to
highlight or contrast a particular organizational issue (Deetz et al., 2000)
o Bv frame argument and repeat things you say (strategy)
o Framing = powerful game
Framing – sense-breaking & sense-giving
Framing is what leaders do, especially when they are seeking to reframe in the
case of organizational change (Fairhurst and Sarr, 1996)
o Framing is what everybody does (not only leaders)
