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In one way or another, we’ve all had experience managing, being put in charge of a project with a
specific goal or objective. In a business environment, managing typically involves the four stages
of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling to reach their objective. P.O.L.C., as it’s often
called, can be used in a variety of settings, for example, managing a busy restaurant or any type
of small business. But within larger organizations, there are five key functional areas where
managers will follow the four stages of P.O.L.C., operations, marketing, finance, human
resources, and research and development.
The role of the manager is to understand them and how they interrelate with each other. If you
will, it’s the conductor of the orchestra whose coordinating all of these important but distinctive
components. Understanding the management of operations is to understand the core activities
that happen within the organization, the factory floor, if you will. Marketing then is much more
about communications. It’s about knowledge. It’s about two-way knowledge transfer.
The focus of communicating marketing is on the four P’s, product, price, promotion, and
placement.
In a real sense, finance’s about coordinating the activity of assets within the organization, making
sure that they’re prioritized and linked to goals and objectives of the organization and
understanding how they are needed to be balanced with short, medium, and long-term goals of
the organization.
These functions have all evolved over the years. Human resources now views people as assets
rather than instruments for getting work done.
So you just don’t have your normal, traditional HR director and manager. You have what’s called
workforce development people. You have what’s called people in culture to deal with the
diversity. And you have HR that’s now more about thinking on the intellectual, capital side of the
organization. So HR is also changing, and that’s what HR is today and should be.
Human Resources managers need to understand how you best orchestrate and coordinate all of
those in a way that leaves the employees feeling enriched, fulfilled, motivated, and therefore,
more likely to be more efficient and effective.
The rise of technology and advances in production has increased the importance of research and
development. Managers are continually challenged to explore new ideas and improve the way a
business operates.
People’s sense of community, their friends, their sense of belonging, and that self-identity, it’s
very tied up with the workplace now. Understanding what that means helps a manager to
empower their people to be more efficient and more effective.
It’s often said that by failing to plan, you’re planning to fail. Without a plan, even a very rough
one, a manager is doomed. Planning is the process of setting objectives and deciding on the best
methods of achieving those objectives.
Planning is very important to our organization, and we do approach it in three different ways in
terms of the short, the medium, and the long-term.
The most important thing to remember about planning is that these short, medium, and long-term
plans need to be very tightly integrated with each other. They need to be linked to each other.
And everybody in this process of performing them needs to know what they are and needs to
know why they need to do what they’re doing.
Though they all relate to each other, short, medium, and long-term plans require different
strategies.
Short-term planning really applies to the individual tasks on operational basis. So if you’re a
supervisor managing a team of people, you’ll be planning on a weekly basis, on a daily basis
what your team are going to be doing, the simple operations that the client needs and the client’s
paying for.
Medium-term planning is more to do with resource allocation. So you’re looking at do we have
the right number of people? Do we have the right skills? Do we have the right equipment, the
right supplies that we need to perform the task that we do?
And also medium-term plans helps you in today’s very fast-paced society to see how does your
goals, your ambitions, your objectives, and your strategies actually match with the external
environment?
The long-term planning is more about where we’re going strategically as an organization. Do we
have the finances in place? Do we have the right succession planning to make sure that we’re
going to have the right people in the right roles to achieve our objectives.
So long-term plans these days, we’re looking at realistically three to five years. Anything beyond
five years is actually very unrealistic for a manager to plan, because things are really changing.
The planning process has five key stages, setting objectives, analyzing the environment,
developing alternatives, implementing the plan, and reviewing results.
It’s very important to have clear objectives, and we as an organization have them at various
different levels throughout the business.
And it’s really important for managers to spend the appropriate amount of time on this step,
because what you’re doing then is you’re setting up what the objectives are, meaning how do the
activities that you’re planning for a line with the long-term goals of the organization. Why are
you doing what you’re doing? And so you need to be clear on what you’re doing. You need to be
clear on who defines this as their goal.
When we analyze the environment in which we operate, we do an analysis of all of the markets
in which we operate. Most of the businesses that we have don’t just operate in a single market,
say for example the health service or in defense or in education. They operate across a whole
variety of different market sectors.
A common tool used by managers at this stage is a S.W.O.T. analysis. What are the plan’s
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? Strengths and weaknesses are those internal
factors affecting the plan to either provide an advantage in the case of strengths or a disadvantage
in the case of weaknesses. Internal factors are ultimately within an organization’s control.
The opportunity and threat component look at the external factors, which need to be considered
in evaluating your plan, the opportunities that the plan will bring to your organization, the threats
that are out there, whether they are caused by your organization or the external environment that
may be a risk of performing the plan or risks for the plan’s success.
Developing alternative strategies can be a complex part of planning.
You’ve looked at already what are your goals? You’ve looked at what are the different
environments and the different markets that might be useful? Then, the next thing you need to do
is find out what are the full list of strategies? You can’t just stop and assume that your first
impression, that one strategy is the only one you’ve got.
Armed with all possible strategies, a manager then implements the plan. It needs to be monitored
to ensure it’s heading towards achieving its objectives. After implementation, results need to be
evaluated and reviewed. No plan, no matter how carefully managed, is perfect. Managers who
can respond to unexpected issues and understand what it means to the business are in the best
position to achieve the plan’s overall objectives.
So this is the point where the manager really resembles a conductor of an orchestra. And just like
in the orchestra, your functioning in real time. The manager during the operational stage doesn’t
have time to go back to the drawing board. This is where things happen, and they have to be
really well-planned, prepared, trained, and communicated in advance, because in the operation’s
point of the delivery of your plan is where things have to happen right there, right in real time.
Organizing is the process of arranging resources and tasks to achieve objectives. Firstly, a
manager needs to know what resources they have and work out how they can best be allocated.
Allocating the resources that you have properly is really the key to the success of any
organization, because if you don’t put the right people and the right resources in the right place,
then you’re not going to achieve the objectives that you’ve set for yourself. Put simply, what it
means is allocating your time to the things that really matter, the things that add value to your
organization. What are the things that in terms of your personal objectives, your business
objectives, and, therefore, group objectives that need to be done to help everybody achieve
those?
Secondly, a manager needs to decide who is going to complete each task?
Really what’s crucial with task allocation is having a detailed understanding of all the different
tasks that need to be done and again prioritizing them, so the things that are most important to be
done get done first by the people with the maximum skills to achieve those. And perhaps there
are others of lower priority that could wait till later in the day or the month or the period that
you’re working in.
But a certain recognition, that task allocation is highly individualized, because the manager
needs to know what the relative strengths or weaknesses of the different individuals or teams
within their group are.
Finally, there needs to be an evaluation of what systems have been put in place to achieve the
objectives.
Organizing systems really requires the manager to understand first that everything they do is part
of a larger context. They’re part of it. Their activities are part of a larger system and that all of
these things that they’re looking to do are influenced by all of these other things that are
happening around them. And when the manager understands the major influences that are
happening throughout the system, this web of activities, the better they are to anticipate, to
understand, and to respond to it.
The pressure to perform is a reality for every manager. But rather than trying to do it all
themselves, a successful manager delegates, but they need to know who can be trusted to take on
responsibility.
This goes back to the idea of them being the coordinator, and so a manager who is on top of
things is a manager who is organized not just for themselves, but organized for all of the people
and all of resources.
History has provided many examples of great leaders. And we all have some idea of what
leading is. In business, it’s about motivating or influencing staff to achieve the organization’s
objectives. While this might offer us the starting point in understanding leadership, a manager
still has a number of ongoing challenges.
Leadership is very dependent upon the needs of the organization that’s being led, the individuals
who are being lead, and the goals of that organization.
The classic model of leading was transactional, where rewards, recognition, promotion, and pay
raises were offered as incentives for better performance. However, this has shifted towards the
transformational model, where people are motivated less by tangible rewards.
What a really inspirational leader can do is bring everybody into a sense of we’re in it together.
We’re all working together. And they tend to inter-operate and work amongst themselves better
in a way that they’re all working towards the similar goal, a similar sense of this is what we’re in
it for.
Probably most importantly, it’s someone who makes the team fun. So it’s someone who makes
you want to come to work everyday, because you know you’re going to be taken care of, they’re
going to listen to you, they’ve got great vision of where they’re going as an organization, and if
you do well, you’re all going to do well.
The ability to inspire, to share the bigger picture, to develop trusting relationships, and to show
humility– these are interpersonal qualities in a great leader.
Someone who actually understands a holistic viewpoint of how business operate, so someone
who just says ideas may not necessarily make a good leader if he or she does not actually
understand how to read the financial aspects of the books. But if you look at leadership skills
within the project environment, then that changes a little bit more. So you need to be a lot more
systematic in your thinking. You need to be a lot more goal driven in your thinking. You need to
actually be able to bring a team together. You need to have leadership skills to bring teams
together.
But information qualities can be equally important in leadership. They include the ability to
gather relevant information to understand what it means and to communicate this to the
appropriate people.
An effective or a great leader is someone that really cares about the people working for them. It’s
someone who listens to the issues that are going on in the team that they work in. It’s someone
who has a very clear view of the direction that they’re going in as an organization and
communicates that really well to the people in the team. And it’s someone that has confidence.
It’s someone that projects that inner calm when things are going not as well as they could. And
it’s someone who inspires the rest of the team.
In everyday life, we tend to think of control as a way of getting what we want, but in
management, control is viewed differently.
It’s not about using your power and abusing the power of control. It’s actually using the control
as in ways of empowering people, so people actually get to understand what they need to do,
they have the authority to do what they need to do, and they are responsible towards what they
have to do.
Control may be just as much by understanding what is your motivation for doing what you’re
doing and making sure that you’re satisfied, making sure that you’re happy that you have the
resources that you need, that you receive the right kind of knowledge training or communication
or interaction with other departments. Control is the ability to make things happen that need to
happen to do your job correctly.
A manager is always comparing what was intended to happen with what actually did happen in
their organization. The gap between the two is where they can use different control methods.
Establishing performance standards and measuring the performance are the first two steps in the
control process.
So at a local level, they’re very focused on the very detailed cost analysis, the invoicing, the
collection of cash, managing the risk around bad debts. At a group level, we’re looking more at
does the overall performance of the group add up to the strategy that we’re trying to achieve, and
does it meet the expectations of our shareholders who are in the company?
Very often, success may be measured by how much money do you make? But how much money
do you make this week? How much money do you make this year? Or are you willing to take a
loss this year for a profit 5, 10, 20, years down the line if you are an organization which has a
more complicated set of goals and objects, for example a hospital?
Hospitals, yes, they need to make money, but they also have patient care. They have community
service. They have educational roles, which may be just as important if not more important in
certain circumstances. So it becomes very complicated understanding what defines success for
your organization, and this is why that first step is so important to be clear about what is success?
The third step in the control process is identifying and investigating deviations in performance
from the standard set.
We also review our sales performance during the month. We review HR statistics in terms of
people joining the business, people leaving the business. We also review how many issues we’ve
had in terms of problems, complaints, customer complaints to make sure that we stay on top of
what’s going on in the business on a very regular basis.
The final step involves making changes when necessary to ensure the objectives of the
organization are met.
Lots of organizations are turning to project style work. So if they are turning to project style
work, then getting a manager who has got good skills in controlling the project’s schedule but not
controlling the people is an important ethical skill.
But there’s a lot of other things that you can do to control and to encourage behavior, especially
if you’re looking to control or encourage behavior and a more complex or higher level within the
organization. People work for their own individual, complex set of motivations. Understanding
what these motivations are, understanding the role that the group dynamic, the group culture
plays the way that communication passes through an organization, the way that people are
working for a sense of challenge, and a sense of fulfillment at the workplace has in a large extent
replaced a lot of the old sense of community.
…
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