What Managers Do

Every organization exists to achieve some goals, and the role of the manager is to define those goals, and the means of achieving them. Management, therefore, has four basic functions:
1) Planning: defining the goals, the strategy to achieve them, and a comprehensive set of plans to integrate and coordinate activities
2) Organizing: designing an organization's structure including determining what tasks are to be done, by whom, who reports to whom and where decisions are to be made
3) Leading: directing and coordinating people, motivating employees, communicating effectively,
and resolving conflicts
4) Controlling: monitoring performance against previously set goals, and getting organization back on track if there are deviations

Managers play three different categories of roles in the discharge of their duties...
1) Interpersonal - these are roles that are sometimes almost ceremonial and formal in nature. These include being figureheads (symbolic, handing out awards), leaders (hiring, training, motivating, disciplining) and liaisons (maintaining networks for favours or information)
2) Informational - collecting and transmitting information.This includes monitoring (collecting), disseminating (transmiting) and being a spokesperson (transmitting to outsiders on the organization's vision and plan)
3) Decisional - making choices, including being enterprenueral (initiating projects to bring about change), disturbance handler (corrective actions against unexpected disturbances), resource allocator (makes or approves organization decisions around resources) and negotiator (represents organization at major negotiations)

Now, the interesting part. An average manager typically spends an equal amount of time in the four key classes of managerial activities - traditional management (including decision making, planning and controlling), communication, human resource management and networking. Effective managers spent a lot more time on communication at the cost of networking, getting better and faster results. However the successful managers spent a lot more time networking, giving least importance to human resource management! Having better relationships with your bosses and peers is obviously much more effective than spending time becoming liked by your team!