Archive for September 2011
A core business management skill that a manager or executive must learn is the ability to create a working environment that is conducive to effective teamwork. A successful manager is well aware of their own weaknesses and that they cannot do everything. They understand that they have to leverage their time and other peoples time and skill to get the job done. To be able to leverage peoples time and skills effectively requires a manager that can bring people together and work towards a specific goal.
Successful managers have the ability and skill to empower staff to maximise their potential in being productive and to excel at their job. This is achieved by ensuring that team members buy in to the project that needs to be accomplished. An effective manager will define an objective that each team member will accept and agree on. They will ensure that each member has a specific role and that each member fully understands that role and what is expected of them. They will keep each team member motivated by keeping them fully informed of their progress and milestones achieved.
One habit of an effective manager is to devise a to-do list or plan of action for the department or team under their control. Within this to-do list is the tasks that needs to be accomplished and their priority level and time schedules detailing when each task needs to be accomplished. An effective manager will ensure that each team member adopts the same approach to planning their own work.
The team should be fully informed of what the task entails and when each one needs to be accomplished. The responsibility of each specific task should be allocated to one team member only. Agree with them on what needs to be done and the deadlines to get the job done. Each team members to-do list should clearly outline who is responsible for which task and when.
A key business management skill that any business manager or executive should have is the ability to solve problems. The ability to solve problems is a prerequisite of effective decision making which really is to find solutions to problems or overcome obstacles.
In order to come up with the best solution to solving a problem a manager must find the route or source of the problem. When solving a problem relating to business there are 5 areas where the problem could originate from. These 5 areas include the following:
• Business Environment
• Human Resources
• Machinery and technology
• Method
• Materials
When you have uncovered a problem you need to ask a set of questions when you are assessing the problem in order to find the best solution. For example, if there is a problem within human resources regarding a lack of staff or training then, possible solutions could be bringing in extra part time staff to complete a project.
When solving a problem after you have identified it, it is important that you analyse it thoroughly to find out what is its cause. It is important that you look at all the possible causes before acting on one. You find that if you make a decision to act on the first cause you may find that there is another cause that you may have missed. A good example would be the problem where there is a downturn in sales in a certain market that the company is selling to.
After analysing the problem a possible cause of a downturn in sales could be attributed to a lack of adequate sales training. However, under further analysis it could be found that the market being sold to is not a buyer’s market. That is why it is important to keep searching for the possible cause to ensure the real one is found and dealt with.
Business Management characterizes the process of leading and directing all or part of an organization, often a business, through the deployment and manipulation of resources (human, financial, material, intellectual or intangible). Early twentieth-century business management writer Mary Parker Follett defined management as “the art of getting things done through other people.”
One can also think of business management functionally as the action of measuring a quantity on a regular basis and of adjusting some initial plan, and as the actions taken to reach one’s intended goal. This applies even in situations where planning does not take place. From this perspective, there are several major management functions, namely: planning, organizing, leading, coordinating and controlling.
Management is known by some as “business administration”, although this then excludes management in places outside business, e.g. charities and the public sector. University departments that teach management are nonetheless usually called “business schools”. The term “management” may also be used as a collective word, describe the managers of an organization, for example of a corporation.
Today, we find it increasingly difficult to subdivide management into functional categories in this way. More and more processes simultaneously involve several categories. Instead, we tend to think in terms of the various processes, tasks, and objects subject to management.
One consequence is that workplace democracy has become both more common, and more advocated, in some places distributing all management functions among the workers, each of whom takes on a portion of the work. However, these models predate any current political issue, and may be more natural than command hierarchy.
All management is to some degree democratic in that there must be majority support of workers for the management in the long term, or they leave to find other work, or go on strike. Hence management is becoming less based on the conceptualization of classical military command-and-control, and more about facilitation and support of collaborative activity, utilizing principles such as those of human interaction management to deal with the complexities of human interaction.