# Managing and Performing

## Introduction


### Learning Outcomes

After reading this chapter, you should be able to answer these questions:
1. What do managers do to help organizations achieve top performance?
2. What are the roles that managers play in organizations?
3. What are the characteristics that effective managers display?
Most management textbooks would say, as does this one, that managers spend their time engaged in planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and controlling. These activities, as Hannaway found in her study of managers at work, “do not, in fact, describe what managers do.” At best they seem to describe vague objectives that managers are continually trying to accomplish. The real world, however, is far from being that simple. The world in which most managers work is a “messy and hectic stream of ongoing activity.”