questions

Learning outcomes

1 Describe what management is.

WHAT IS MANAGEMENT?

Management issues are fundamental to any organisation: how do we plan to get things done, organise the company to be efficient and effective, lead and motivate employees, and put in place controls to make sure our plans are followed and our goals are met? Good management is basic to starting a business, growing a business and maintaining a business once it has achieved some measure of success.

2 Explain the four functions of management.

Planning is determining organisational goals and a means for achieving them. Planning is one of the best ways to improve performance. It encourages people to work harder, to work hard for extended periods, to engage in behaviour directly related to goal accomplishment and to think of better ways to do their jobs. More importantly, companies that plan have larger profits and faster growth than companies that don’t plan.

Organising is deciding where decisions will be made, who will do what jobs and tasks and who will work for whom in the company.

Our third management function, leading, involves inspiring and motivating employees to work hard to achieve organisational goals.

The last function of management, controlling, is monitoring progress towards goal achievement and taking corrective action when progress isn’t being made. The basic control process involves setting standards to achieve goals, comparing actual performance to those standards, and then making changes to return performance to the standards you set.

3 Describe the different kinds of managers.

There are four kinds of managers, each with different jobs and responsibilities:

• top managers

• middle managers

• first-line managers

• team leaders

4 Explain the major roles and sub-roles that managers perform in their jobs.

In other words, managers talk to people, gather and give information and make decisions. Furthermore, as shown in Figure 1.2, these three major roles can be subdivided into 10 sub-roles;

In fulfilling the interpersonal roles of management, managers perform three sub-roles: figurehead, leader and liaison.

Not only do managers spend more of their time in face- to-face contact with others, but they also spend much of it obtaining and sharing information. In this regard, management can be viewed as processing information, gathering information by scanning the business environment and listening to others, and then sharing that information with the people inside and outside the company. Mintzberg described three informational sub- roles: monitor, disseminator and spokesperson.

Mintzberg found that obtaining and sharing information is not an end in itself. Obtaining and sharing information with people inside and outside the company is useful to managers because it helps them make good decisions. According to Mintzberg, managers engage in four decisional sub-roles: entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator and negotiator.

5 Explain what companies look for in managers.

When companies look for employees who would be good managers, they look for individuals who have technical skills, human skills, conceptual skills and the motivation to manage.

Technical skills are the ability to apply the specialised procedures, techniques and knowledge required to get the job done. For sales managers, technical skills are the ability to find new sales prospects, develop accurate sales pitches based on customer needs and close the sale. For a nurse supervisor, technical skills might include being able to give an injection or know what to do if a patient goes into cardiac arrest. Technical skills are most important for team leaders and lower-level managers because they supervise the employees who make products or serve customers. Team leaders and first-line managers need technical knowledge and skills to train new employees and help employees solve problems. Technical knowledge and skills are also needed to troubleshoot problems that employees can’t handle. Technical skills become less important as managers rise through the managerial ranks, but they are still important.

Human skills can be summarised as the ability to work well with others. Managers with people skills work effectively within groups, encourage others to express their thoughts and feelings, are sensitive to others’ needs and viewpoints and are good listeners and communicators. Human skills are equally important at all levels of management, from first-line supervisors to CEOs. However, because lower-level managers spend much of their time solving technical problems, upper-level managers may actually spend more time dealing directly with people. On average, first-line managers spend 57 per cent of their time with people, but that percentage increases to 63 percent for middle managers and 78 per cent for top managers.

Conceptual skills are the ability to see the organisation as a whole, to understand how the different parts of the company affect each other and to recognise how the company fits into or is affected by its external environment, such as the local community, social and economic forces, customers and the competition. Good managers have to be able to recognise, understand and reconcile multiple complex problems and perspectives. In other words, managers have to be smart! In fact, intelligence makes so much difference for managerial performance that managers with above-average intelligence typically outperform managers with average intelligence by approximately 48 per cent. Clearly, companies need to be careful to promote smart employees into management. Conceptual skills increase in importance as managers rise through the management hierarchy. Good management involves much more than intelligence, however. For example, making the department genius a manager can be disastrous if that genius lacks technical skills, human skills or one other factor known as the ‘motivation to manage’.

Motivation to manage is an assessment of how motivated employees are to interact with superiors, participate in competitive situations, behave assertively towards others, tell others what to do, reward good behaviour and punish poor behaviour, perform actions that are highly visible to others and handle and organise administrative tasks. Managers typically have a stronger motivation to manage than their subordinates and managers at higher levels usually have stronger motivation to manage than managers at lower levels. Furthermore, managers with a stronger motivation to manage are promoted faster, are rated as better managers by their employees and earn more money than managers with a weak motivation to manage.

6 Discuss the top mistakes that managers make in their jobs.

The number one mistake made by derailers was that they were insensitive to others by virtue of their abrasive, intimidating and bullying management style. The authors of one study described a manager who walked into his subordinate’s office and interrupted a meeting by saying, ‘I need to see you’. When the subordinate tried to explain that he was not available because he was in the middle of a meeting, the manager barked, ‘I don’t give a damn. I said I wanted to see you now’.52 Not surprisingly, only 25 per cent of derailers were rated by others as being good with people, compared with 75 per cent of arrivers.

The second mistake was that derailers were often cold, aloof or arrogant.

The third and fourth mistakes made by the derailers, betraying trust and being overly ambitious, reflect a lack of concern for co-workers and subordinates. Betraying a trust doesn’t mean being dishonest. Instead, it means making others look bad by not doing what you said you would do when you said you would do it. The mistake, in itself, is not fatal because managers and their employees aren’t machines.

The fourth mistake is being overly political and ambitious. Managers who always have their eye on their next job rarely establish more than superficial relationships with peers and co-workers. In their haste to gain credit for successes that would be noticed by upper management, they make the fatal mistake of treating people as though they don’t matter. An employee with an overly ambitious boss described him this way: ‘He gave me a new definition of shared risk: if something I did was successful, he took the credit. If it wasn’t, I got the blame’.

7 Describe the transition that employees go through when they are promoted to management positions.