This essay from HBR by John P. Kotter explains how managers can get more efficient by including activities like hallway chattering into their daily work.

📚 What Effective General Managers Really Do by John P. Kotter

He mentions the two fundamental challenges managers face: “Figuring out what to do despite an enormous amount of potentially relevant information, and getting things done through a large and diverse set of people despite having little direct control over most of them”.

To solve these challenges, Kotter sees two ways: First, to implement flexible agendas and second, “broad networks of relationships”. Flexible agendas allow managers to quickly react to ad-hoc events, while broad networks always get them to the relevant people with influence over certain topics.
The article goes into detail on the two areas of agenda setting and network building.

Agenda setting includes having a loose strategy with objectives, while also being flexible enough to react to the day-to-day events which arise in every organisation.
Network setting, on the other hand, helps managers to “implement and to help update the agendas”. By doing this, general managers often “influence people by simply asking or suggesting that they do something, knowing that because of their relationship, he or she will comply”. This way, the manager can enforce his or her agenda without the enforcers getting direct orders from them.

This leads to twelve patterns general managers show that are defined in the essay:

1. Spending most of their time with others
2. Not only spending their time with their bosses or subordinates
3. Great range of topics in their daily conversations
4. Asking many questions
5. Big agenda-setting decisions are made in the GM’s mind.
6. Using humour and nonwork discussions to gather information and build relationships
7. Spending time on seemingly unimportant (to them) topics
8. Rarely ordering others
9. Spending lots of time influencing others
10. Don’t plan their day in detail and rather react to ad-hoc events
11. Short and disjointed conversations
12. Work long hours (most of the GM’s studied worked around 60 hours per week)

The article shows these patterns on real examples and the detailed schedule of one manager which was tracked for the reader to get a feeling of the practical implementation of the patterns.

One key learning is that short, spontaneous conversations are typically much more effective as planned meetings.
Another one is that often it is better to stop hiring external managers and rather build up a base of potential internal managers who already have a big network in their pocket which enables them to enforce certain agendas much quicker than without it.

The essay ends with an inspiring paragraph: “Time-management experts still tell managers to compose lists of priorities and to limit the number of people they see. However, the successful ones I watched rarely did so. They “wasted” time walking down corridors, engaging in seemingly random chats with seemingly random people, all the while promoting their agendas and building their networks with far less effort than if they’d scheduled meetings along a formal chain of command”.

Even though the article was published in 1999, I think that it is still an important read for everyone managing people.