Management: Innovation & Current Challenges

Lecture Overview

• The lecture will discuss why innovation matters and current challenges managers face, as well as managers who make a difference.
• Management's definition, its four functions, organizational performance, management skills, when skills fail, and management types will all be covered
• The structure of the lecture will address what it is that managers do, including how they manager smaller business.
• Crisis management, management of the new workplace, performance of Australian managers, and sustainable development will all be covered

Why Innovation Matters

• Innovation is important for maintaining a competitive edge.
• Sustainable development requires innovation in products, services, management systems, and production processes.
• Companies that fail to innovate will not survive.

Current Challenges for Managers

• Challenges exist for government at federal, state, and municipal levels.
• Managerial and policy challenges are factors.
• Business challenges exist on both local and global scales, with challenges for both large and small firms.
• Individual employees face challenges, with skills, job insecurity, and careers as factors.

Managers Who Make a Difference

• Those in management must guide through turbulence, expect the unexpected, and embrace change.
• Managers must forge a shared vision and cultural values while encouraging workplace collaboration.

The Definition of Management

• Management involves attaining organizational goals effectively and efficiently through planning, organizing, leading, and controlling organizational resources.
• Samson and Daft defined management in 2012.

Management Functions

• Management entails four functions: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.
• Planning is selecting goals and ways to attain them, organizing is assigning responsibility for task accomplishment, leading involves motivating employees, and controlling means monitoring activities to make corrections.
• Resources available to management include human, financial, raw materials, technological and informational.
• Performance is measured by goals attained, volume of product, service provided, efficiency and effectiveness

The Four Management Functions

• Planning: Defining and establishing goals for future organizational execution, then deciding on the tasks and use of resources needed to achieve them.
• Organizing: Assigning tasks, grouping those tasks into departments, then allocating available resources to departments.
• Leading: Using varying degrees of influence to motivate employees to achieve the goals of the company.
• Controlling: Keeping the organization on track towards achieving its stated goals by monitoring employee activity and making corrections when needed.

Organizational Performance

• Organizational performance means an organization's ability to attain its goals by using resources in an efficient and effective manner.
• Effectiveness refers to the degree an organization achieves a stated goal.
• Efficiency involves using minimal resources to produce an output.

Management Skills

• Cognitive skill is the ability to see the organization as a whole and the relationship among its parts.
• Human skills means the ability to work with and through other people and to work effectively as a group member.
• Technical skills means the understanding of and proficiency in the performance of specific tasks.

When Skills Fail

• Reasons for errors made by managers include demands of the rapidly changing environment.
• External factors for failing skills can include poor communication, suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and lack of team building.

Management Types

• Management can be broken down into vertical and horizontal differences
• Vertical differences include top / middle / project / first-line managers
• Horizontal differences include functional and general managers

What is it Like to Be a Manager?

• Making the transition to a manager comes with a new identity.
• A manager’s activities include adventures in multitasking.
• A manager may fill and take on informational, interpersonal, and decisional roles.

Making the Leap: Becoming a New Manager

• Individual specialists perform specific tasks, whereas managers coordinate diverse tasks.
• Individuals get things done through their own efforts, but managers get things done through others.
• Individuals act alone whereas managers act as network builders
• Individuals work independently but managers must be able to work in a highly interdependent way

Manager Activities: Adventures in Multitasking

• A manager's role requires variety, fragmentation, brevity, and constant availability.

Manager Roles

• Informational roles of management include being a monitor, disseminator, and spokesperson
• Interpersonal roles of management include being a figurehead, leader, and liaison
• Decisional roles of management includes being an entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator

Managing in Small Businesses and Not-for-Profit Organizations

• A small business manager must be a spokesperson and entrepreneur.
• A not-for-profit manager is a figurehead, leader,, and resource allocator.

Management and the New Workplace

• The new workplace is characterized by bits of information, virtual workspaces and empowered employees, while the old workplace was characterized by atoms or physical assets.
• Current forces on organizations include global markets, diverse workforces, changes, and more frequent events.
• Management competencies have shifted to include dispersed leadership, connection with customers and employees, collaboration, and learning organization.

Forces on Organizations & Innovative Response

• Forces on organizations include globalization, advancing technology, the increasing diversity among employees & rapid change.
• As a result, new technologies and innovative management practices had been formed.
• New management competencies involve leadership, team-building, and relationships.

Turbulent Times: Managing Crises and Unexpected Events

• In times of crisis, it's important to stay calm, be visible, put people before business, tell the truth, and know when to get back to business.

Improving from a Low Base: Australia's Managers

• Australian manager's strengths include being hardworking, egalitarian, genuine/direct, honest/ethical, innovative, independent thinkers, flexible/adaptable, resourceful, and technically sound.
• Weaknesses include short-term/lacking strategic view, lacking open-mindedness/rigidity, complacency, poor teamwork/people skills, and a lack of self-confidence.

Sustainable Development

• Decisions must be made so that financial, environmental, and social outcomes are achieved in both the short and long term.
• Sustainable development is the 'triple bottom line'.