COM 220 Module 1 The Manager's Communication Role Example

Forty-One Hours of Talking: What One Week Reveals About a Regional Manager's Communication Role

Student Name

Business Administration Program, Aspen University

COM 220: Management Communication

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Forty-One Hours of Talking: What One Week Reveals About a Regional Manager's Communication Role

When Harborline Property Management promoted Tasha Greene to regional manager, she took on nine apartment communities in the Tampa area, each run by a community manager with a small office and maintenance staff. Her job is to raise occupancy, keep residents and keep property owners satisfied. After a month, Tasha felt busy all day but unsure what she was accomplishing. At her supervisor's suggestion, she kept a log of every communication for one working week. This paper analyzes the log and compares it with research on how managers communicate.

The Week in Numbers

Tasha worked fifty hours and spent forty-one of them communicating. She made or took thirty-one phone calls, received 214 emails and sent 138, attended eleven scheduled meetings and had dozens of unplanned conversations when she visited communities. Her longest uninterrupted stretch was twenty-six minutes.

Is This Typical?

Mintzberg (1975) observed chief executives closely and compared what he saw with common beliefs about management. He found that managers do not work as reflective, systematic planners. They work at an unrelenting pace, their activities are brief, varied and fragmented, and they strongly favor verbal media, telephone calls and meetings, over documents. Managers rely on soft information gathered through conversation, often before it appears in any report. He described ten roles in three groups: three interpersonal roles centered on people (figurehead, leader, liaison), three informational roles centered on gathering and passing on news (monitor, disseminator, spokesperson) and four decisional roles centered on choices (entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, negotiator).

Tasha's week fits this picture closely. It was fragmented, mostly verbal and filled with disturbance handling. Her role as leader of the community managers, however, barely appears. Most of her contact with them was in the disturbance handler role, responding to problems, rather than in the leader role of developing and directing them.

Where Time Pays Off

Luthans (1988) and his colleagues observed hundreds of managers and grouped their activities into four kinds: routine communication, such as exchanging information and handling paperwork; traditional management, such as planning, decision making and controlling; human resource management, such as motivating, disciplining, managing conflict, staffing and training; and networking, such as socializing, politicking and interacting with outsiders. They then compared successful managers, those promoted relatively quickly, with effective managers, those whose units performed well and whose subordinates were satisfied and committed. Successful managers spent much more of their time networking. Effective managers spent more of their time on routine communication and human resource management. Few managers were both.

For Tasha, the finding is a choice. Time with owners and corporate staff may help her career. But her nine communities' occupancy and resident retention depend on the community managers, and her time with them on coaching, goals and development is small.

Why Communication Ability Matters

Penley et al. (1991) studied managers in banks and measured their communication abilities, including how well they listened, how clearly they communicated, how they handled communication anxiety and how they adapted messages to others. Managers with stronger communication abilities received higher performance ratings. The study supports treating communication as a core managerial skill rather than a soft extra.

What Only Tasha Can Do

Not every message in the log needed Tasha. Of the 214 emails she received, about seventy were copies of conversations between community managers and corporate staff that she did not need to act on, and many vendor calls concerned routine scheduling a community manager could handle. Mintzberg observed that managers often become bottlenecks because information flows through them, and that sharing information more widely frees their time. Tasha will ask to be removed from routine copy lists, give community managers authority to approve vendor schedules within their budgets and keep for herself the communication that depends on her position: setting direction with each community manager, representing the region to owners and settling problems that cross communities.

Listening on Site Visits

Tasha's site visits were the richest communication in her week, but they were unplanned and usually began with whatever crisis was waiting. Penley and colleagues counted listening among the abilities tied to performance, and the visits are where Tasha can listen best. She will start each visit with a fifteen-minute walk with the community manager and one maintenance technician, asking what slowed them down that week before raising any problem she came to address.

Rebalancing the Week

Three changes follow. First, Tasha will hold a thirty-minute weekly one-on-one with each community manager, by video for distant sites, covering occupancy, resident issues and the manager's own development. Second, she will replace scattered owner emails with a single weekly written report for each owner, cutting phone and email time with owners by about a third. Third, she will block two ninety-minute periods each week with no calls or email, for planning.

Checking the Change

In eight weeks, Tasha will repeat the one-week log and compare the hours spent with community managers, the number of owner calls and her longest uninterrupted stretch. Occupancy and resident renewal rates will show whether the change reached the communities. Tasha will also ask each community manager, at the end of the eight weeks, whether the one-on-ones help them, and adjust their length or format if they do not. If owner calls creep back up, she will look at whether the weekly report answers the questions owners are actually asking.

Conclusion

Mintzberg shows that Tasha's fragmented, verbal week is normal for managers, Luthans shows that her time is weighted toward activities that build careers rather than units and Penley and colleagues show that communication ability is tied to performance. A weekly structure that moves time toward the community managers puts her communication where her results are.

References

Luthans, F. (1988). Successful vs. effective real managers. Academy of Management Executive, 2(2), 127-132. https://doi.org/10.5465/ame.1988.4275524

Mintzberg, H. (1975). The manager's job: Folklore and fact. Harvard Business Review, 53(4), 49-61.

Penley, L. E., Alexander, E. R., Jernigan, I. E., & Henwood, C. I. (1991). Communication abilities of managers: The relationship to performance. Journal of Management, 17(1), 57-76. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639101700105