What Managers Do?

Managers get things done through other people .they make decisions ,allocate resources ,and direct the activities of others to attain goals .managers do their work in organizations .this is a consciously coordinated social unit ,composed of two or more people ,that functions on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals .on the basis of this definition ,manufacturing and service firms are organizations and so are schools, hospitals ,churches, military units ,retail stores ,police departments ,and local ,state or other federal government agencies . The people who oversee the activities of others and who are responsible for attaining goals in these organizations
are managers .

Management functions
Since organizations exist to achieve goals, some one has to define those goals and the means by which they can be achieved .the "planning" function encompasses defining an organization’s goals, establishing an overall strategy for achieving those goals, and developing a comprehensive hierarchy
of plans to integrate and coordinate activities .
Managers are also responsible for designing an organization’s structure .we call this function "organizing ". It includes the determination of what tasks are to be done, who is to do them, how the tasks are to be grouped, who reports to whom, and where decisions are to be made.
Every organization contains people, and it is management’s job to direct and coordinate those people. This is the "leading" function. When managers motivate employees, direct the activities of others, select the most effective communication channel, or resolve conflicts among members, they are engaging in leading.
The final function managers perform is
“Controlling” .to ensure that things
are going as they should , management must monitor the organization’s performance .actual performance must be compared with previously set goals. if there are any significant deviations, it’s manager’s job to get the organization back on track .this monitoring ,comparing ,and potential correcting is what is made by the controlling function .

So using the functional approach, the answer to the question what do managers do? Is that they plan, organize, lead, and control.

Management roles
The management roles can be grouped as being primarily concerned with interpersonal relationships, the transfer of information, and decision making.

Interpersonal roles ; All managers are required to perform duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature. When the president of a college hands out diplomats at commencement or a factory supervisor gives a group of high school students a tour of the plant, he or she is acting in a figurehead role. All managers also have a leadership role. This role includes hiring, training, motivating, and disciplining employees. The third role within the interpersonal grouping is the liaison role. This is the role of contracting the others to provide the manager with information. These may be individuals or groups inside or outside the organization. The sales manager who obtains information from the personnel manager in his or her own company has an internal liaison relationship. When that sales manager has contacts with other sales executives through a marketing trade association, he or she has an outside liaison relationship.

Information roles ; All managers, to some degree, collect information from other organizations and institutions outside their own. Typically, the gather information by reading magazine and talking with other people to learn of changes in the public tastes, what competitors may be planning, and the like. This is called the monitor role. Managers also act as a conduit to transmit information to organizational members. This is the disseminator role managers additionally perform a spokesperson role when they represent the organization to outsiders.

Decision roles ; In the entrepreneur role, managers initiate and oversee new projects that improve their organizations performance. As disturbance handlers, managers take corrective action in response to unforeseen problems. As resource alligators, managers are responsible for allocating human, physical and monetary resources. Last, managers
Perform a negotiator role, in which they discuss issues and bargain with other units to
Gain advantages for their own unit.

Management skills
Still another way of considering what managers do is to look at the skills or competencies they need to successfully achieve their goals.

Technical skills Technical skills encompass the ability to apply the specialized knowledge or expertise. When you think of the skills held by professionals such as civil
Engineers or oral surgeons, you typically focus on their technical skills.
Through extensive formal education, they have learned the special knowledge and practices of their field. Of course, professionals do not have a monopoly on technical skills, and not all technical skills have to be learned in schools or formal training programs. All jobs require some specialized expertise, and many people develop their technical skills on the job.

Human skills ; The ability to work with, understand, and motivate other people, both individually and in groups, describes human skills. Many people are technically proficient but interpersonally incompetent. They might be poor listeners, unable to understand the needs of others, or have difficulty managing conflicts. Since managers get things done through other people, they must have good human skills to communicate, motivate, and delegate.

Conceptual skills ; Managers must have the mental ability to analyze the diagnose complex situations. These tasks require conceptual skills. Decision making for example,
Requires managers to spot problems, identify alternatives that can correct them, evaluate those alternatives, and select the best one. Managers can be technically and interpersonally competent but fail because of an inability to rationally process and interpret information.

Effective vs. Successful Managerial Activities
Studies show that managers all engage in four managerial activities:
1. Traditional management. Decision making, planning, and controlling
2. Communication. Exchanging routine information and processing paperwork.
3. Human resource management. Motivating, disciplining, managing conflict, staffing and training
4. Networking. Socializing, politicking, and intracting with outsiders.

The typical manager will spent different percent of his or her time for different activities. Successful managers (defined in terms of the speed of promotion within their organization), have a very different emphasis than effective managers (defined in terms of the quantity and quality of their performance and the satisfaction and commitment of their employees). Successful managers may have more emphasis on networking and human resource management. For effective managers, perhaps communication will make largest relative contribution.

Responding to Globalization
Globalization affects a manager’s people skills in at least two ways. First if you are a manager, you’re increasingly likely to find yourself in a foreign assignment, you may be transferred to you employer’s operating division or subsidiary in another country. Once there you will have to manage a workforce that is likely to be very different from in needs, aspirations, and attitudes from the ones you were used to back home. Second, even in your own country, you’re going to find yourself working with bosses, peers, and other employees who were born and raised in different cultures. What motivates you may not motivate them. Your style of communication may be straightforward and open, but they may find this style uncomfortable and threatening. To work effectively with these people, you will need to understand their culture, how it has shaped them, and how to adopt your management style to their differences.

Managing Workforce Diversity
Workforce diversity has important implications for management practice. Managers will need to shift their philosophy from treating everyone alike to recognizing differences and responding those differences in ways that will ensure employee retention and greater productivity while, at the same time, not discriminating. This shift includes, for instance, providing diversity training and revamping benefit programs to make them more "family friend." Diversity if positively managed, can increase creativity and innovation in organizations as well as improve decision making by providing different perspectives on problems.

Improving Quality and Productivity
Toward the goal of improving quality and productivity, they are implementing programs such as total quality management and reengineering—programs that require extensive employee involvement. Total quality management (TQM) is a philosophy of management that is driven by the constant attainment of customer satisfaction through the continuous improvement of all organization process. In times of rapid and and dramatic change, it's sometimes necessary to approach improving quality and productivity from the perspective of "how would we do things around here if we were starting over from scratch?" that, in essence, is the approach of reengineering. It asks the managers to reconsider how works would be done and their organization structured if they were starting over.

Empowering People
If you pick up any popular business periodical nowadays, you’ll read about the reshaping of the relationship between managers and those they’re supposedly responsible. You’ll find managers being called coaches, advisers, sponsors, or facilitators. In many organizations, employees are now called associates. And there is a blurring between the managers and workers. Decision making is being pushed down to the operating level, where workers are being given the freedom to make choices about schedules and procedures and to solve work-related problems. What’s going on is that managers are empowering employees. They are putting employees in charge of what they do. And in so doing, managers have to learn how to give up control, and employees having to learn how to take responsibility for their work and make appropriate decisions.

Coping with "Temporariness"
Managers have always been concerned with change. What’s different nowadays is the length of time between changes. It used to be that managers needed to introduce major change programs once or twice a decade. Today, change in an ongoing activity for most managers. The concept of continuous improvement, for instance implies, constant change. In past managing could be characterized by long periods of stability, interrupted occasionally by short periods of change. Managing today would be more accurately described as long periods of long periods of ongoing change, interrupted occasionally by short periods of stability! The world that most managers and employees face today is one of permanent temporariness. The actual job that workers perform are in a permanent sate of flux, so workers need to continually update their knowledge and skills to perform new job requirements.

Work group are also increasing in a state of flux. In the past, employees were assigned to a specific work group, and that assignment was relatively permanent. There was a considerable amount of security in working with the same day in and day out. That predictability has been replaced by temporary work groups, teams that include members from different departments and whose members change all the time, and the increased use of employee rotation to fill constantly changing work assignments. Finally organizations themselves are in a state of flux. They continually reorganize their various divisions, sell all poor performing businesses, downsize operations, subcontract noncritical services, and operations to other organizations, and replace permanent employees with temporaries. Today managers and employees must learn to cope with temporariness. They have to learn to live with flexibility, spontaneity, and unpredictability.

Stimulating Innovations and Change
Today’s successful organizations must foster innovation and master the art of change or they’ll become candidates for extinction. Victory will go to those organizations that maintain their flexibility, continually improve their quality, and beat their competition to the marketplace with a constant stream of innovative products and services.

Improving Ethical Behavior
In an organizational world characterized by cutbacks, expectations of increasing worker productivity, and though competition in the marketplace, it is not altogether surprising that many employees feel pressured to cut corners, break roles, and engage in other form of questionable practices. Members of organizations are increasing finding themselves facing ethical dilemmas, situations in which they are required to define right and wrong conduct. What constitutes right conduct has never been clearly defined. And in recent years, the line differentiating right from wrong has become even more blurred. Employees see people all around them engaging in unethical practices. Managers and their organizations are responding to this problem from a number of directions. They're writing and distributing codes of ethics to guide employees through ethical dilemmas. Today managers need to create an ethical healthy climate for his or her employees, where they can do their work productively ad confront a minimal degree of ambiguity regarding what constitutes right and wrong behaviors.

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