It’s Time to Make Management a True Profession

 

Managers have lost legitimacy over the past decade in the face of a widespread institutional breakdown of trust and self-policing in business. To regain society’s trust, we believe that business leaders must embrace a way of looking at their role that goes beyond their responsibility to the shareholder to include a civic and personal commitment to their duty as institutional custodians. In other words, it is time that management finally became a profession.

True professions have codes of conduct, and the meaning and consequences of those codes are taught as part of the formal education of their members. A governing body, composed of respected members of the profession, oversees members’ compliance. Through these codes, professional institutions forge an implicit social contract with other members of society: Trust us to control and exercise jurisdiction over this important occupational category. In return, the profession promises, we will ensure that our members are worthy of your trust—that they will not only be competent to perform the tasks they have been entrusted with, but they will conduct themselves with high standards and integrity. On balance we believe that a profession, with well-functioning institutions of discipline, will curb misconduct because moral behavior is an integral part of the identity of professionals—a self-image most are motivated to maintain.

The idea of management as a profession is not new. It was launched in the United States with great hope a century ago with the founding of the nation’s university-based business schools. A vanguard of institutional entrepreneurs, both academics and enlightened business leaders, saw the rise of the large corporation as a profound challenge to the existing social order. When large corporations began to sell shares of their stock to the public, thereby dispersing ownership and control, myriad stakeholders (shareholders, labor groups, government officials) all proclaimed the right to direct these powerful new entities.

The business school, in turn, was conceived as a way of legitimating another claimant’s right to control the publicly owned corporation: a new group known as managers. The strategy for advancing management’s claim was to ally the leaders of the business school movement with three institutions viewed as the pillars of the Progressive Era: science, the professions, and the new American research university. The leaders of the business school movement proposed to ensure that the large corporation would be run in the interests of society by turning the occupation of management into a bona fide profession, with the educational underpinning, certifications, and code of conduct that go along with it.

That ambition has so far gone unrealized. The claim that managers are professionals does not withstand scrutiny when you compare management with true professions such as medicine and law. Unlike doctors and lawyers, managers don’t need a formal education, let alone a license, to practice. Nor do they adhere to a universal and enforceable code of conduct. Individual companies may write and enforce corporate codes or value statements, but there’s no universally accepted set of professional values backed up by a governing body with the power to censure managers who deviate from the code.

In principle, there’s no reason why management couldn’t strive to become a profession. The institutional arrangements are known and easy enough to put in place. What’s more difficult is determining whether to push in that direction. Would formalizing management education make individual managers more effective? More generally, how would creating a professional pool of consistently trained managers affect the entrepreneurial activity that drives economic growth? Could we reach a consensus on a set of common standards that would be plausibly enforceable? Would having such a code have any impact on behavior? In the following pages we explore the differences between management and the true professions, describe how a professional management system might work, and examine whether such a system would be desirable.