Text A. Management of Organizations

How can organizations grow and thrive in today's competitive environment? How can they use their resources wisely, consistently satisfy their customers, and reap profits? How can they meet their challenges and turn them to their advantage? How can they make sense out of the chaotic environment? One answer is through effective management. Effective management helps organizations work smarter to achieve their goals. In other words, it allows them to make strategic moves instead of random guesses.

Management is both an art and a science. Past and current research in management and behavioral science guides us by providing specific information on human behavior and organizational dynamics. By drawing on this knowledge, we can make sense out of what we encounter and avoid mistakes.

But management is also an art because it deals with human beings and their relationships. Gaining insight into individuals and the way they interact takes practical experience that no book can teach.

Managing people in an organization is not just an optional part of running a business; it is the key to bottom-line success. Formally defined, management is directing the use of an organization’s recourses in a way that efficiently accomplishes the organization's goals. Today, more than ever, managers need skills in making the best use of the organization's resources, especially its people. The world is turbulent and complex. When organizations successfully try a new tactic or launch a new product, competitors from all parts of the world are soon ready to try the same thing—or something better. Customers, shareholders, and the public have higher expectations than in the past. They want high performance, low prices, and ethical behavior simultaneously. When products and programs fail, they are quickly dropped or sold off—frequently costing thousands of jobs. When managers fall short, they do not remain long with an organization. With the stakes so high, managers need to develop personal skills and resources they can draw on as much as— probably more than—product or functional expertise.

What Makes a Person an Ideal Manager?

At the most general level, successful managers tend to have four characteristics:

· they take enormous pleasure and pride in the growth of their people;

· they are basically cheerful optimists – someone has to keep up moral when setbacks occur;

· they don’t promise more than they can deliver;

· when they move on from a job, they always leave the situation a little better than it was when they arrived.

The following is the list of some essential tasks at which a manager must excel to be truly effective.

Great managers accept blame: When the big wheel from head office visits and expresses displeasure, the great manager immediately accepts full responsibility. In everyday working life, the best managers are constantly aware that they selected and should have developed their people. Errors made by team members are in the very real sense their responsibility.

Great managers give praise: Praise is probably the most under-used management tool. Great managers are forever trying to catch their people doing something right, and congratulating them on it. And praise comes from outside, they are swift not merely to publicise the fact, but to make clear who has earned it. Managers who regularly give praise are in a much stronger position to critisise or reprimand poor performance. If you simply comment when you are dissatisfied with performance, it is also too common for your words to be taken as a straightforward expression of personal dislike.

Great managers make blue sky: Very few people are comfortable with the idea that they will be doing exactly what they are doing today in 10 years’ time. Great managers anticipate people’s dissatisfaction.

Great managers put themselves about: Most managers now accept the need to find out not merely what their team is thinking, but what the rest of the world, including their customers, is saying. So MBWA (management by walking about) is an excellent thing, so it has to be distinguished from MBWAWP (management by walking about – without purpose), where senior management wander aimlessly, annoying customers, worrying staff and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

Great managers judge on merit: A great deal more difficult than it sounds. It’s virtually impossible to divorce your feelings about someone – whether you like or dislike them – from how you view their actions. But suspicions of discriminations of favoritism are fatal of the smooth running of any team, so the great manager accepts this as an aspect of the game that really needs to be worked on.

Great managers exploit strengths, not weaknesses, in themselves and in their people: Weak managers feel threatened by other’s people’s strengths. They also revel in the recovery of weakness and regard it as something to be exploited rather than remedied. Great managers have no truck with the destructive thinking. They see strengths, in themselves as well as in other people, as things to be built on, and weakness as something to be accommodated, worked around and, if possible, eliminated.

Great managers make things happen: The old-fashioned approach to management was rather like the old-fashioned approach to child-rearing: “Go and see what the children are doing and tell them to stop it!” Great managers have confidence that their people will be working in their interests and do everything they can to create an environment in which people feel free to express themselves.

Great managers make themselves redundant: Not as drastic as it sounds! What great managers do is learn new skills and acquire useful information from the outside world, and then immediately pass them on, to ensure that if they were to be run down by a bus, the team would have still the benefit of the new information. No one in an organization should be doing work that could be accomplished equally effectively by someone less well paid than themselves. So the great managers are perpetually on the look-out for higher-level activities to occupy their own time, while constantly passing on tasks that they have already mastered.

Management Activities

The job of a manager can take many forms, from a foreman in a Boeing airplane factory to a hospital administrator, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the broker who runs a six-person real estate office. Considering the vast differences of these workplaces, how can we draw any conclusions or make any recommendations about their managers' roles? To begin, we have to look at what these jobs have in common.