What Do Leaders Do All Day?

What do top executives actually do all day? Where do they invest their energies, how do they communicate, what are their roles, their key challenges? A new doctoral dissertation from the School of Management at Leipzig affords a rare glimpse behind the scenes. It is not a pretty picture. Most leaders fail to invest enough time in standing in the future.

 A generation ago, in his seminal book "The Nature of Managerial Work," the management thinker Henry Mintzberg revealed the gulf that existed between theory and practice, between fiction and truth about top managers.

Mintzberg showed that the picture of the top manager as general was wrong. Top managers were far from strategists who sit atop the hill and guide their troops in a planned and proactive fashion.

Quite the contrary: Top managers were under constant time pressure, half of their activities lasted barely nine minutes, their work was fragmented.

They did not move according to a plan but were reactive pinballs of circumstances, they had no time for strategic reflection, their decisions were piece-meal, emotional, and micro-political.

That was in 1973. Is it still true today? What has changed since then?

That is where Emilo Matthaei's Ph.D. thesis comes in. Its title "The Nature of Executive Work" shows that Matthaei aims to build on Mintzberg's findings.

Matthaei analyzed 48 work weeks in the schedules of twelve top executives at multinationals with several  10,000 employees.

He found that the leaders of these companies worked an average of 65 hours a week. Three-quarters of that time is constantly booked. Two-thirds are tied up with meetings.

Top executives are alone a mere 14% of their time.

Time pressures have been compounded by more dynamic and global markets, more immediate communication tools, the need to cultivate relationships and build trust in decentralized organizations, and vanishing boundaries between private and professional lives.

Most alarmingly, these pressures exert a downward push on the quality of managerial decision-making. Top managers have (or take) extremely little time to stand in the future and ponder the long-term consequences of their choices.

Last Tuesday, Apple was briefly the company with the highest market value in the world. Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive and co-founder, might serve as a counter-example. He attempts to live in the future every day (see video; if you don't have time to watch, here is the bottom line: Remember that you are going to die).



The onslaught of emails, and especially what might be called the "Cc Syndrome" -- the widespread practice to copy superiors on just about anything that might be remotely relevant to them, might make their direct reports look good, or delegates management responsibility up to the top level, has made life at the C-level only more frantic.

The Cc Syndrome cuts both ways, since CEOs might just as well use it to push their message through the ranks to every single employee and bypass those employees' managers.

Mahatma Gandhi reminded us to "Be the change you wish for in the world." Unless top managers live in the future, who will?

What do you think? Do the findings in "The Nature of Executive Work" reflect your own experience? And how would you shape your ideal day? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. As a roadmap for your own leadership, check out my latest book "Leadership in 100 Days."