Management Competencies and Functions

Management Competencies for Today’s World

• Management achieves goals effectively and efficiently through planning, organizing, leading, and controlling resources.
• It involves conducting or supervising an activity or business.
• Management is applicable everywhere.
• Adaptability is crucial due to environmental shifts and technological advancements like social media.
• New competencies include enabling rather than controlling, leading teams, fostering collaboration, empowering employees, and mobilizing change.

Basic Concepts and Functions

• Managers solve problems and improve organizational performance.
• Peter Drucker outlined the manager's job as setting objectives, organizing, motivating, measuring, and developing people.
• These activities translate into four management functions: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.

Planning

• It involves defining organizational goals and outlining tasks to achieve them.
• Managerial planning sets the organization's future direction.
• General Electric (GE) shifted focus to energy, aircraft engines, healthcare, and financial services.
• GE used to relocate senior executives to develop expertise, now they are staying in business for longer

Organizing

• It involves assigning tasks, grouping departments, delegating authority, and allocating resources, reflecting the implementation of plans.
• Companies, for example, IBM, the Catholic Church, Estee Lauder and the FBI have reorganized to adapt to changes.
• Oprah Winfrey restructured OWN by repositioning executives, cutting costs, and streamlining operations for a leaner approach.

Leading

• It means motivating employees to achieve goals by creating a culture, communicating goals, and inspiring high performance.
• Sergio Marchionne, CEO of Chrysler, meets with teams to motivate them, rejecting the executive suite for hands-on leadership.

Controlling

• Involves monitoring activities, assessing progress toward goals, and making necessary corrections.
• Companies are shifting from top-down control to empowering employees while managers maintain ultimate oversight.
• Citigroup's CEO, Michael Corbat, implements new tools to track performance and ensure accountability.

Characteristics

• It is a means to achieve specific group/organizational goals by ensuring efficient resource utilization.
• Success is measured by the extent of goal achievement, making it purposeful.
• It is essential in every organized activity, making it a pervasive function.
• It requires the coordination of individual efforts into a team, and reconcile the individual goal with the organizational goal.
• It integrates human element and other resources.
• Management involves interpersonal relations, emphasizing human development.
• It depends on engineering, sociology, psychology, economics, anthropology, etc.
• Knowledge in management draws heavily upon other fields of study.
• It is a dynamic and ongoing process that continues as long as there is an organized activity.
• Intangible force, its impact is felt through results, with managers being the tangible element.
• It combines theoretical knowledge with practical application, involving training and ethics to meet social obligations.
• Management coordinates human and material resources to achieve goals.

Management Skills

• Necessary skills are conceptual, human, and technical, and vary in importance with management level.

Technical Skills

• Involves mastery of methods, techniques, and equipment specific to functions like engineering and finance
• Includes specialized knowledge, analytical ability, and tool proficiency.

Human Skills

• Require the manager's ability to work with and through people effectively as a group member
• Demonstrated by the ability to motivate, facilitate, coordinate, lead, communicate, and resolve conflicts.
• Motivational skill is a key factor in employee engagement/commitment.

Conceptual Skills

• Involve seeing the organization as a whole while understanding relationships
• It requires understanding the organization's fit within the industry, community, and broader environment
• Ability to think strategically, take a broad/long-term view, and solve complex problems.

When Skills Fail

• Good management skills are not automatic, and managers should be on their toes
• Apply skills and competencies in a way that benefits employees, customers, investors, etc.

Management Types

• Conceptual, human, and technical skills are required to perform planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.
• Managers are responsible for different departments, work at different levels, and meet different requirements for high performance.

Levels

• The hierarchical level determines a manager's job characteristics.
• The manager's job differs across the three hierarchical levels and found that the primary focus changes at different levels.

First-level managers

• Facilitate individual employee performance.

Middle managers

• Link groups, allocate resources, and coordinate teams to implement top management plans.

Top-level managers

• Monitor the external environment and determine the best competitive strategy.
• Top managers set goals, define strategies, monitor the environment, and make decisions.
• Middle managers implement strategies/policies, focusing on the near future.
• A project manager oversees temporary projects involving individuals from various functions and levels.

First-line managers

• Responsible for production, applying rules/procedures, providing technical assistance, and motivating subordinates.
• Functional managers oversee departments with similar tasks/skills, like advertising and finance.

Line managers

• Responsible for manufacturing and marketing.

Staff managers

• In charge of departments (finance/HR) supporting line departments.

General managers

• Responsible for multiple departments.
• Project managers also have general management responsibility because they coordinate people.

Manager Roles

• A role is a set of expectations for behavior, categorized as informational, interpersonal, and decisional.
• Each role supports planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.

Informational roles

• It maintains/develops information networks and involves spending 75% of time communicating.
• The monitor seeks current information from sources such as current written material.
• The disseminator and spokesperson transmit information both internally/externally.

Interpersonal Roles

• These roles relate to interactions with others and are connected to human skills.
• The figurehead manages ceremonial/symbolic duties and their unit.
• The leader encompasses relationships with subordinates, and the liaison develops internal/external information.

Decisional Roles

• It requires managers to make choices and take action using conceptual and human skills.
• The entrepreneur initiates change/future-oriented visions.
• The disturbance handler resolves conflicts.
• The resource allocator distributes resources.
• The negotiator represents team/department interests.