Transitions at Work

D. Quinn Mills is the Alfred J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He consults with major corporations and teaches at Harvard on subjects of leadership, strategy, and financial investments.

Mills taught at MIT’s Sloan School of Management between 1968 and 1975, and he supplemented his MIT teaching by spending several years in Washington, DC, assisting various government agencies. He is a Fellow of The National Academy of Human Resources and a member of the Panel of Thought Leaders of the Peter Drucker Foundation.

Dr. Mills earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, both in economics, and received his undergraduate degree from Ohio Wesleyan University.

This adapted excerpt from Mills’ Principles of Management considers the transition from individual contributor to manager:

Moving from Individual Contributor to Manager

This is something all managers must do—give up doing the work themselves. Sometimes the work is tiring and dangerous or unpleasant (as for example on a construction job, or in a manufacturing plant, or cleaning hotel rooms) so that when an individual contributor becomes a manager, he or she is glad to be free of the necessity to do the work.

But other times, work is enjoyable, especially for a person who is good at it (as for example for a salesperson, or a professor, or an attorney, or a skilled worker in many trades) and when a person becomes a manager he or she is often reluctant to give up being an individual contributor.

In fact, for people who greatly enjoy the work itself, the transition from individual contributor to manager is difficult—sometimes it is even unsuccessful.

Such a manager (who longs for the work he used to do as an individual contributor) continually leaves managerial tasks undone to return to the work; either because she is a perfectionist and can do the work better than the people she is managing, and so insists on doing it herself; or because the new manager simply finds management a less rewarding pursuit and prefers an individual contributor’s role….

…The role of managers is to accomplish things through other people. For the most part, managers are not people who actually do the work, but rather supervise, direct and motivate those who perform work. This isn’t to say that managers don’t work—they do managerial tasks, but not the tasks related directly to production or services provided to customers or clients. It is the role of managers to direct individual contributors. This is a basic distinction that needs to be kept always in mind….

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Copyright © 2005-2007 D. Quinn Mills

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