What is Managing?

Posted on April 01, 2024 by Martin Hahn, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

Managers can have the most remarkable effects on organizations. The effect of good management is amazing. Take a chaotic situation and install a skilled manager, and he or she can soon get the enterprise humming. In the New Orleans turmoil after Hurricane Katrina hit several years ago, no one in government seemed to know what to do. People were starving on rooftops, begging passing planes for help. The U.S. Army sent in Lieutenant General Russell Honore. He swiftly established a chain of command, decided what had to be done, prioritized those tasks, assigned officers to do them, and created a communications structure through which he maintained control.

A definition of Management
Managers are responsible for making sure that the company achieves its goals. Specifically, a manager is someone who is responsible for accomplishing an organization’s goals, and who does so by planning, organizing, leading, and controlling the efforts of the organization’s people.

Management most often refers to the group of people or the managers who are responsible for accomplishing an organization’s goals through planning, organizing, leading, and controlling the efforts of the organization’s people. However, management also refers to the totality of managerial actions, people, systems, procedures, and processes in place in an organization.

Three Aspects of Managerial Work
The above definitions of management highlight three key aspects of managerial work. First, a manager is always responsible for contribution or on his or her shoulders lies the responsibility for accomplishing the organization’s goals. Therefore, while managers may apply management theories, managing is never just theoretical. The manager is responsible for getting things done.

Second, managers always get things done through other people. The owner/entrepreneur running a small florist shop without the aid of employees is not managing. Only when she starts hiring people and trying to get things done through them can she call herself a manager. She’ll have to train and motivate her new employees and put controls in place so that the person who closes the store won’t borrow part of the day’s receipts.

The third aspect of managerial work refers to what managers actually do (and why some people turn out to be better at managing than others). That third aspect is that managers must be skilled at planning, organizing, leading, and controlling if they are to accomplish the organization’s goals through other people. Management writers traditionally refer to the manager’s four basic functions — planning, organizing, leading, and controlling — as the management process.

They include:

◗ Planning. Planning is setting goals and deciding on courses of action, developing rules and procedures, developing plans (for both the organization and those who work in it), and forecasting (predicting or projecting what the future holds for the firm).

◗ Organizing. Organizing is identifying jobs to be done, hiring people to do them, establishing departments, delegating or pushing authority down to subordinates, establishing a chain of command (in other words, channels of authority and communication), and coordinating the work of subordinates.

◗ Leading. Leading is influencing other people to get the job done, maintaining morale, molding company culture, and managing conflicts and communication.

◗ Controlling. Controlling is setting standards (such as sales quotas or quality standards), comparing actual performance with these standards, and then taking corrective action as required.

Some people think that managing is easy and that anyone with half a brain can do it. But if it is so easy, why do 90 percent of new businesses fail within five years due to poor management? Why did FEMA drop the ball when Katrina hit? The words about management and managing in this article are easy to read. However, don’t let that lull you into thinking that managing is easy.

Application of Managing
You Too Are a Manager Managing is something we’re often called upon to do every day.

In business, for instance, even a non-managerial employee may have to manage once in a while. The marketing manager might ask a marketing analyst to head a team analyzing a product’s potential. Everyone who works should know the basics of managing.

Furthermore, life sometimes requires management skills. For example, suppose that you and some friends want to spend the summer in France. They’ve asked you to manage the trip. Where would you start? Start with planning.

You will need to plan the dates the group is leaving and returning, the cities and towns in France to visit, the airline to take you there and back, how the group will get around in France, and where to stay while you are there.

You might divide the work and create an organization. For example, put Rosa in charge of checking airline schedules and prices, Ned in charge of checking hotels, and Ruth in charge of checking the sites to see in various cities as well as the transportation between them. However, the job won’t get done without supervision.

For example, Ned can’t schedule hotels unless he knows from Ruth what sites to see and when. You will either have to schedule weekly manager’s meetings or coordinate the work of these people yourself.

Leadership can also be a challenge. Rosa is a genius with numbers, but she tends to get discouraged. You’ll have to make sure she stays focused. Finally, you will have to ensure that the whole project stays in control. At a minimum, make sure that all those airline tickets, hotel reservations, and itineraries are checked so there are no mistakes.

What Else Do Managers Do?

Planning, organizing, leading, and controlling are the heart of what managers do, but there is more to the manager’s job. For example, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs presented the new video iPod a while ago, he was acting as Apple’s spokesperson.

Mintzberg’s Managerials Roles
Professor Henry Mintzberg studied what managers actually do. Mintzberg found that in a typical day, managers didn’t just plan, organize, lead, and control. Instead, they also filled these various roles:

◗ The figurehead role. Every manager spends some time performing ceremonial duties.

◗ The leader role. Every manager must function as a leader, motivating and encouraging employees.

◗ The liaison role. Managers spend a lot of time in contact with people outside their own departments, essentially acting as the liaison between their departments and other people within and outside the organization.

◗ The spokesperson role. The manager is often the spokesperson for his or her organization.

◗ The negotiator role. Managers spend a lot of time negotiating; the head of an air- line, for instance, might try to negotiate a new contract with the pilots’ union.

The Manager as Innovator
In today’s fast-changing world, managers also have to make sure their companies can innovate new products and react quickly to change. Therefore, management experts Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher Bartlett say that successful managers must also improve their companies’ abilities to be more innovative.

Effective managers do this in three ways:

◗ They encourage entrepreneurship. In their study of successful companies, Ghoshal and Bartlett found that successful managers got employees to think of themselves as entrepreneurs. For example, the managers made sure employees had the support and rewards they needed to create and run their own projects.

◗ They build competence. Bartlett and Ghoshal also found that successful managers make sure employees had the skills and competencies to be innovative and to run their own operations. They encourage them to take on more responsibility, provide the education and training they need, allow them to make mistakes without fear of punishment, and coach them.

◗ They promote a sense of renewal. Successful managers also foster what Bartlett and Ghoshal call renewal. Effective managers take steps to guard against complacency. They encourage employees to question if they might do things differently. Effective managers want all their employees to be innovative.