The Management Guide: Be A Better Manager

boss management

What is Management?

Some define it as an art. Others define it as a science. In either case, all agree that it is managing resources to archive a goal.

In the context of an organization

What Types Exist?

There are many areas. Some examples are:

  • Change
  • Stakeholder
  • Product

The Five Primary Functions of Managers

1. Planning

Planning is future-oriented and determines an organization’s direction. It is a systematic and rational way of making decisions today that will steer the direction of a company. It has a degree of prediction of the future and allows experimentation to get feedback and confirmation that a decision is correct.

2. Organizing

Organizing, in particular in low-level management, consists of in:

  1. Identify the tasks that must be performed and group them whenever necessary.
  2. Assigning these tasks to the team members defines their authority and responsibility.
  3. Delegating this authority to these team members.
  4. Establishing a relationship between authority and responsibility.
  5. Coordinating these activities.

3. Staffing

Staffing is the hiring and sometimes forgotten function of retaining a qualified workforce for the company. It involves the process of recruiting, training, developing, compensating, and evaluating employees and maintaining this workforce with proper incentives and motivations. An organization is a group of people developing a product or service, which is a crucial point of management to recruit the correct workforce.

Moreover, being an organization made of a group of people with different levels of intelligence, skills, knowledge, experience, physical condition, age, values, and beliefs make this function extremely difficult.

4. Directing

Directing your workforce is mainly related to leadership, communication, motivation, and supervision so that your teams’ performance is optimised to achieve the organization’s goals.

The leadership component involves persuading your employees to deliver the organization’s goals.

Communication is critical both upwards and downwards for the organization to increase efficiencies.

Motivation is someway linked with leadership as it is critical to motivating the workforce to work towards the organization’s goals. At the same time, motivated people will require less direction from superiors.

Supervision employees are critical not only to ensure that each individual is coming through with their part in the work required but also to monitor the process to archive the organisation’s overall goals.

5. Controlling

The controlling component is responsible for making sure that the group is going towards the pre-arranged plans if that is not the case, and also to ideally get the data to redefine the pre-arranged plans in a better direction.

Controlling might be summarised as the following steps:

  1. Establish the standard level of performance
  2. Measurement of the actual performance
  3. Finding deviations from the actual performance against the pre-determined standard.
  4. Taking corrective action to bring lower performance to at least the standard level.

Three Layers Of Managers

Small businesses have a smaller structure with a limited number of layers of management. But in larger organizations, there are up to three levels of managers in a hierarchical structure.

Low-Level Managers

Low-level managers is the lowest layer of managers in an organization. It is usually the front-line team leader responsible for overseeing the everyday work of the individual employees, providing them with the directions and conditions to do their best work.

Middle Managers

Senior Management

Senior managers will include titles like the chief executive officer, president, vice president, and board members at an organisation’s top manager hierarchy. These are the managers responsible for an organisation’s overall goals and direction.

Senior managers create strategic plans and company-wide policies and make decisions about the organization at their highest level. Additionally, this management layer is responsible for mobilizing outside resources and protecting and overseeing the company’s shareholders and the general public for the performance of the company.

Best Books

Want more book recommendations? Check my complete list of book recommendations.

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