What does management actually DO in their jobs?

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I've worked in IT my whole career. (I'm planning to change careers, but that's beyond the scope of this thread.) And at each job, I've always wondered: What do managers actually do in their jobs? Maybe it's just my left-wing mindset showing itself, but in three of the jobs I had, it didn't seem like management actually DID anything? They constantly talked about being very busy all the time. And yet, they just sat in their offices, grumbled over low numbers, criticized every non-manager they came across (except for brown-nosers), and attended meeting after meeting. And the higher up in management you go, the more true this is. That sounds like Mickey Mouse work to me! Anyone can sit in an office, complain, criticize, and go to meetings. It's not real work at all, like fixing computers, stamping out parts, serving customers, assembling widgets (an accounting term for unspecified manufactured goods), and testing products for quality.

Maybe it's my aspie naivety that causes me to believe this. Maybe it's my left-wing, pro-worker mindset, since I don't consider management/execs to be workers. I see them as a necessary evil at best, and as parasites at worst. But maybe they actually DO something. If so, then what? Input is welcome from everyone, but especially aspies who worked in management at some point.

They spend some of their time wondering what the IT staff does with their time, since they appear to be moving very slowly, and they have a lot of non-work related conversations, and everything takes longer than they say it will, and they give incomprehensible reasons, and they get condescending and snarky when pushed for clearer answers, and requests that seem pretty simple turn into endless discussion of minutia that seems a lot like more like pseudo-intellectual one-upsmanship than like working.

You want them to trust that you know what you're doing, even if they don't understand what you're doing. They want the same thing.

We deal with questions from higher-ups. Questions like, "Why are your people taking so long?", "Why are they so slow?", and "Why can't you do more work with less people?"

We deal with complaints from our people. Complaints like, "There's no place set aside just for me to smoke / pray / nap / nurse my baby!", "My last employer didn't mind if I was late!", "Someone complimented me - that's harassment!"

We deal with vendors who screw up our orders. We deal with salespeople who won't take "No" for an answer. We deal with parents who chew us out for not hiring their children full-time, when their kids haven't even graduated high school yet. We deal with employees' spouses who want hourly reports on the employees, each detailing where they were, who they talked to, and what was said. We deal with a constantly-changing labor force (vacations, sick days, resignations, et cetera) and shifting priorities in determining work schedules and project phases.

To top it all off, we deal with asinine comments like, "What does management actually DO with their jobs? After all, they just seem to sit there all day..."

Maybe if people would make the effort to earn the appropriate college degrees, they could find out first-hand exactly what it is that managers do, instead of whining about their own jobs and griping that managers have it so much better.

Besides, even if we do have it better, it's because we earned it!

Because managers have corner offices and don't work with the rest of staff, it is understandable that you don't know what managers do. Ask away! Often we have private offices because our meetings are confidential, as they deal with new trends or with other employees and personnel records.

Managers DO work hard. In my field, I am EVERYONE's backup. I have to come in when I don't feel like it outside of my work hours. I have to justify my employees' pay, find training opportunities, ensure that their time is being spent wisely, plan out the next part of our projects that THEY don't get to see yet, make contacts for future development and deal with customer complaints. I pitch in and help out with frontline work. And run the place when my CEO is not here. Do I love my job? Yes.

Managertina, I am sure you work hard at your job and maybe that is why most managers I know of are pretty foul people.

The reason I think most people think managers don't do much is what I saw when I worked in maintainence about 10 years ago for one of the major department stores, one that today is threatened of its existence (not Sears, but the other more "fashionable" one)

I don't know if there are so many today, but back then there were a lot of merchandise managers, team leaders, sales managers, support managers, managers in training, HR manager, ..... Then there was the store manager, Mr. P. Mr. P was pretty foul with workers and I don't think very good with customers either, it seemed that most of what he told people was like a scolding.

One thing I would see all these other managers do is walk around with Mr. P when he was out in the store and tell him how wonderful he is, even though he was not very nice to them. Often, if there was a paper or cup on the floor, the other manager would pick it up and "show off" to Mr. P. Of course, when Mr. P wasn't there, the cup would stay on the floor. These other managers were also pretty foul to us regular employees too.

As a cleaner, I could not be like a sales person but often, when doing these walk throughs there would be usually an older person saying "Hello, anyone here, I want to buy this" and then end up putting the clothes or whatever down and walking out because there was not a salesperson in sight. But there were managers everywhere, who maybe could have helped the person but "fluffed Mr. P's ego" instead. And we wonder why that company may go out of business? All of these managers had to possess a college degree to even apply for these positions. Why? You don't need math, chemistry, biology or anything like that and business courses are mean and boring, yet the company requires it.

It would also have helped if these managers knew more about clothes and fashion than they did, being that they worked in a fashion store but we needed new alterations equipment.

Ideally, a person in management ensures the overall job gets done. A supervisor of a cleaning crew not only might clean, but they ensure each person finishes their assigned task in the time required. They also ensure that any concerns or needs are relayed up the chain of command to those who get those issues addressed.

Usually management is seen as incompetent or unnecessary when they are so removed from the job being done that they know little or nothing about how it is done and they start making demands that are unreasonable or impossible to perform because they base their decisions on their ignorance of what's involved.

You certainly can't stereotype management all in one category. It depends on the company their working for and to what what degree they manage. Do they manage a team? A district? A company? I've worked with managers who sometimes have to work 12-14 hour days, 6-7 days a week and they are paid on salary so whatever hours they work they make the same. Management is certainly not easy and I always respect good managers, especially ones who started from the bottom at a company and moved their way up so they truly understand their employees jobs. What I don't respect are young, college grads who are given management titles without much experience working in a field (which happens at some companies) but again you have to take the good with the bad.

The simplest way I can put it is, they organize everyone and everything so that they are achieving the desired goal.

I've read over the responses so far. And I'm tempted to post a radical left-wing, Marxist rant, not unlike the Capitol invasion scenes in this year's "Hunger Games" movie. But I'd like to give management the benefit of doubt; it's not fair that 98% give the rest a bad name (just kidding... I hope).

Still, the reason why I put emphasis on the word "do" in the title, is that managerial work doesn't look and feel like doing something. It's not hands-on work that makes the company what it is. Managers don't handle machinery, they don't talk to customers (except in retail), and they don't have to deal with the stress of losing their jobs. Instead, it's: come in, go to a meeting or two, eat lunch, read a couple of reports, fire someone you don't like, go home. Plus, HR always has your back. (Despite the common impression otherwise, HR is there to help managers, not workers, unless they have enough money to sue.) Even if it's not easy work, they sure make it look easy.

OK OK, here's a little bit of a Marxist rant. With enough training, workers can get by OK without management, although anarchy could become a problem. But management will just be a bunch of suits sitting around without workers to actually do the work.

This feels like the perfect place for this link: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-middle-managers-oath

My last boss was VERY much like the person described in the link. My current boss is the complete opposite

This seems like the perfect opportunity to post this list.

The Hourly Worker's Oath

• I will allow my personal life to intrude on my work life, treating even the least of incidents at home as major disasters requiring my immediate and full attention while at work.
  
  
• I will always have a ready excuse for tardiness - one that management can not disprove, yet that still seems plausible enough to keep them from firing me.
  
  
• I will claim any idea as originally my own if its implementation somehow improves productivity, or even if it just makes someone else happy.
  
  
• I will claim harassment from anyone who compliments me on my appearance, unless he or she is exceptionally good-looking, wealthy, or both.
  
  
• I will consider every intern and new hire as a threat to my employment, until such time as I have determined how to exploit them to my own ends.
  
  
• I will do nothing that I am not directly told to do by my supervisor, nor for which I have received no training from my current employer -- "That's not my job" will become my catchphrase.
  
  
• I will expect to be praised for just showing up.
  
  
• I will immediately "dumb down" whenever somebody from management wants to know why productivity is off, telling them only that I am doing my job in spite of all the hassles I have to put up with.
  
  
• I will impart my vast corporate wisdom on how the company should be run to any and all coworkers within earshot, yet offer no helpful suggestions to management.
  
  
• I will never steal from my employer ... on purpose.
  
  
• I will point out problems for which I have no solutions, and which may not even be problems in the first place.
  
  
• I will slander everybody that gets promoted ahead of me, denegrating their skills and training, and insinuating that they were only 'lucky' or had exchanged sexual favors for their promotion.
  
  
• I will suck up to The Boss at every opportunity, yet express my contempt for him or her whenever my co-workers are the only ones around.
  
  
• I will threaten to quit if things do not go my way, and then claim discrimination when they call my bluff.
  
  
• I will treat the Employees' Handbook and HR's Code of Conduct with the utmost contempt, citing their contents only when it is to my advantage.
  
  
• I will use up all of my sick days on personal recreation, and then complain whenever someone else takes time off for family issues.

I've had very few hourly employees who did not meet most, if not all of these conditions.

I definitely see your point, but, imho, we can't really have one without the other.
Some people just want to carry out their tasks, others want to solve problems others encounter when carrying out said tasks (that's me), and others do all of the organizational stuff that I have no interest in (budgets, long-term goals, analysis of processes, disciplinary issues, requesting resources in more effective ways than I could).

When I worked fast food, my managers did nothing except order supplies and sit on their butts gossiping and field phone calls from people calling off work.
Now? You couldn't pay me enough money to do what my boss does... sitting through meetings with visionaries and having to translate their visions into concrete goals for everyone in our department next year and the year after, while trying to keep us from spending too carelessly but ensure we have things we actually need to do our jobs (supplies or training).

In my time in the technical design & construction industry, I saw a lot of people who knew their stuff (whether drawing or building) who never wanted to move higher in the organization, so management would be some person without any experience in the industry. I always thought those guys that critiqued the managers should've gotten a degree or certificate and taken that job instead.
Until I worked with an engineer who'd been offered a managerial job, he said he liked doing things too much to want to sit in an office and do the background work for others to do what he loved. So, a younger engineer got promoted instead. It took him awhile, but, he eventually became a very good manager, though with not hardly any time to practice his trade anymore, so he'd better stay in management if he's gotten rusty.

I dunno, I'm just maundering right now, sorry...

Aspie 1, if Mr. P. talked to customers he would be giving them a scolding - and this was in retail, actually he did not deal with customers at all. I would have expected the managers to know more about a store, like about clothing, than they did, being that it was a fashion store. There were a lot of them at the time, thought that may have changed today.

My father was a store manager that trained up and coming store managers--when they left they typically got promoted to manage small stores. Not only did he have a college degree, but he served as an officer in the U.S. Army. In High School he lettered in many sports--quite the team player.

Where would the workers get the training to run a store--the store was located in a tourist/agricultural community with one of the worst school systems in the country?

We moved so I could go to a private school. When he left the workers revolted against the new guy and even had the dreaded vote to decide whether to unionize or not.

I feel badly for those of you who have poor managers. I myself am not the most awesome manager. I have executive functioning issues. But I do not pretend perfection or tell my employees perfection is what is expected. I occasionally mention my own errors and viable workarounds if I see someone have a difficulty with something, A good attitude and a willingness to try hard are expected. Because we are a small operation, frontline work is expected, and I deliver programs too. The most important thing a manager can do is to appreciate the quality of work done by their employees, and to be present for them.

I'm a librarian, and by delivering programs, I mean frontline community work. However, libraries are workplaces just the same as others where customer service is a must, and they also present conundrums, especially what with funding decreases.