What is Management?
Management is one of the unique processes, which involves a multitude of qualities including courage, commitment, enthusiasm, optimism, tenacity, confidence, accountability, ethics, honesty and many others. Management requires rational decision making, which refers to “collections of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations” . Managers should have conceptual as well as visual understanding of situations in order to ensure a strategic vision with experience and confidence for realizing sudden insights. One could characterize the functions of a manager into variety, brevity, interruption and fragmentation along with strong orientation. Since management and leadership go hand in hand, it is essential to visualize managers as leaders. “Separating leadership from management” is one of the fundamental problems encountered by organizations . Therefore, a manager who lacks leadership qualities is pretty discouraging.
Effective management is an art, which integrates ideas into action. Managers learn through experience, wisdom, judgment and intuition. Management brings the best out of people. Managers work out things through their ability in a thoughtful way. It is the responsibility of managers to base their decisions on their knowledge as large organizations demand knowledge work. Management is a dynamic process, which keeps changing over time. However, the practice and fundamental characteristics of management have not changed over time. Management is not an easy process rather involves dilemmas, paradoxes, mysteries and confusion, which could not be resolved easily. It is not folklore of “planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling”; rather “knowing” the lateral nature of management . It is an explicit process and a reflective planner for every organization.
A manager is not only accountable for the success of the team, but also its failure. Therefore, management is a job that involves perpetual preoccupation. It requires concentration and specialization in terms of work patterns. Managers must always be ready to shift their moods frequently as management involves significant activities that have no particular pattern. Management requires systematic thinking. It extends “beyond the thinking and the analyzing and the planning” . Management is a difficult task as the pace of managerial work involves pressure to fulfill the needs of the organization. It has a strange culture of retreat, which has the potential of triggering major organizational changes. Furthermore, management is an inherent open-ended job, which demands a large quantity of work from managers, recognizing their power of authority . It is a delusion that allows individuals to think that they can transform people.
Management is all about infusion, which is a quiet change that seeps in steadily, slowly and profoundly. It is the responsibility of every manager to ensure that serious changes take hold. Quiet management is essential for every organization as quiet managers play a crucial role of strengthening “cultural bonds between people” by treating them as human capital instead of “detachable human resources” . One of the key skills to managing strategies is detecting the emerging pattern of situations and enabling them take the right shape. The role of a manager extends beyond preconceiving strategies and involves the recognition of the emergence of strategies. Management is a process of oral communication. Approximately, 60 to 90 percent of the communications take place through informal telephone calls, emails and meetings. Through oral communication, managers grab the future of market opportunities by overcoming their past corporate abilities.
Refuse to change is one of the greatest mistakes committed by managers. It is necessary for managers to reorganize their strategies consistently in order to make things work appropriately. Efficient management could be carried out by middle-level managers rather than top-level managers as they form a bridge between their superiors and subordinates, thereby dealing with organizational functions . It is essential for managers to ensure that their initial set of decisions define their subsequent commitments about the next step of actions. The failure to exercise control at this stage would land the managers into deep trouble. Participatory management is one of the complex forms of management, not because of its intention, but because of its implementation. The best way of managing change is to allow it happen by setting up appropriate conditions for people to “follow their natural instincts to experiment and transform behavior” .
One of the most important roles of a manager is predicting the future in spite of uncertainty. This process requires special skills that could be acquired only through prior experience in the nature of management. Management of organizational strategies demands managing stability rather than change. The responsibility of an effective manager is not to formulate a strategy rather make the organization as effective as possible through the pursuance of strategies that they already possess . Management is a vital process that distinguishes one organization from another organization through mastery of organizational functions. The Internet, especially the email has influenced management in a potential way. It has heightened the pace, range and volume of communication, thereby speeding up the management functions.
Management is all about inspiration and not empowerment. It is dependent on mutual respect that has been rooted in deeper understanding and common experiences. With a dramatic increase of the number of managers through Master of Business Administration (MBA) degrees, the task of recognizing and managing the best talent has become sophisticated and complex than ever before. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the capabilities and potential of an individual rather than academic degree. Senior managers are not aware of what is going on in the organization; yet have no choice, but to intervene when appropriate . However, they are powerful role models to their subordinates in the sense that they are the key contribution to change. Senior managers lead their people by modeling new behaviors, which they expect of them.
Management should blend into the everyday life of an organization so that individuals could pursue exciting initiatives with their feet placed firmly on the ground. It suggests working with a workforce with trust and respect. Effective managers foster creative action and thoughtful inquiry in the organizations they work. In order to transform an organization into a healthy one, management demands deception and distortion in addition to complete and accurate communication . Any breakdown in communication would lead to failure of the organization irrespective of the efficiency of the managers. Management does not favor regulations as they rarely help in the resolution of problems. Yet, in order to ensure a systematic management, it is necessary to formulate and implement specific regulations that act as limitations to the actions of managers. Altogether, organizations would achieve a level of satisfaction only when the management is effective and capable of dealing with every situation in a systematic way.
Reference
Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., & Lampel, J. B. (2013). Management? It's not what you think! Pearson UK.
