"The MGMT Solution," Vocabulary from Chapter 1

Management issues are fundamental to any organization: How do we plan to get things done, organize the company to be efficient and effective, lead and motivate employees, and put controls in place to make sure our plans are followed and our goals met?

Good management is basic to starting a business, growing a business, and maintaining a business once it has achieved some measure of success.

Nayar’s description of managerial responsibilities suggests that managers also have to be concerned with efficiency and effectiveness in the work process.

Managers must also strive for effectiveness, which is accomplishing tasks that help fulfill organizational objectives such as customer service and satisfaction.

Managers need to perform five managerial functions in order to be successful, according to Fayol: planning, organizing, coordinating, commanding, and controlling. Most management textbooks today have updated this list by dropping the coordinating function and referring to Fayol’s commanding function as “leading.”

Planning involves determining organizational goals and a means for achieving them.

Organizing 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 workers to work hard to achieve organizational goals.

One of the worst things you can do as a manager is micromanage--making every decision, watching over every employee, being involved in every single facet of the business.

The last function of management, controlling, is monitoring progress toward goal achievement and taking corrective action when progress isn’t being made.

Creating a context for change includes forming a long-range vision or mission for the company.

First-line managers train CEOs to send and reinforce and supervise the performance of nonmanagerial employees and communicate clear, consistent messages. You’ve got to say the same thing over and over and over.

This means that top managers must closely monitor customer needs, competitors’ moves, and long-term business, economic, and social trends.

One specific middle management responsibility is to plan and allocate resources to meet objectives.

Finally, middle managers are also responsible for implementing the changes or strategies generated by top managers.

First-line managers hold positions like office manager, shift supervisor, or department manager.

By contrast to the long-term plans of top managers (three to five years out) and the intermediate plans of middle managers (six to eighteen months out), first-line managers engage in plans and actions that typically produce results within two weeks.

Team leaders are primarily responsible for facilitating team activities toward accomplishing a goal.

Relationships among team members and between different teams are crucial to good team performance and must be well managed by team leaders, who are responsible for fostering good relationships and addressing problematic ones within their teams.

Team leaders act as the bridge or liaison between their teams and other teams, departments, and divisions in a company.

He concluded that managers fulfill three major roles while performing their jobs—interpersonal roles, informational roles, and decisional roles.

In fulfilling the interpersonal role of management, managers perform three subroles: figurehead, leader, and liaison.

In the leader role, managers motivate and encourage workers to accomplish organizational objectives.

Because of their numerous personal contacts and their access to subordinates, managers are often hubs for the distribution of critical information.

In contrast to the disseminator role, in which managers distribute information to employees inside the company, managers in the spokesperson role share information with people outside their departments and companies.

In the entrepreneur role, managers adapt themselves, their subordinates, and their units to change.

In the disturbance handler role, managers respond to pressures and problems so severe that they demand immediate attention and action.

In the resource allocator role, managers decide who will get what resources and how many resources they will get.

In the negotiator role, managers negotiate schedules, projects, goals, outcomes, resources, and employee raises.

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.

Good managers have to be able to recognize, understand, and reconcile multiple complex problems and perspectives.

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.

But what distinguished derailers from arrivers was that derailers possessed two or more fatal flaws with respect to the way they managed people.

Second, because they are trying to do their subordinates’ jobs in addition to their own, managers who fail to delegate will not have enough time to do much of anything well.

But when the managers “assisted” in this way, their subordinates were resentful and viewed their help as interference.

In his books Competitive Advantage through People: Unleashing the Power of the Work Force and The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First, Stanford University business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer contends that what separates top-performing companies from their competitors is the way they treat their work forces—in other words, their management style.

Pfeffer found that managers in top-performing companies used ideas like employment security, selective hiring, self-managed teams and decentralization, high pay contingent on company performance, extensive training, reduced status distinctions (between managers and employees), and extensive sharing of financial information to achieve financial performance that, on average, was 40 percent higher than that of other companies.

If employees are the basis for a company's competitive advantage and those employees have employment security, then the company needs to aggressively recruit and selectively screen applicants in order to hire the most talented employees available.

High wages are needed to attract and retain talented workers and to indicate that the organization values its workers.

It turns out that managers influence customer satisfaction through employee satisfaction.