AG

Study Notes: The Manager's Task and Functions

The Role of Management

  • Guide organizations toward goal accomplishment

  • Combine and use organizational resources to ensure organizations achieve their purpose

  • Move their organization toward its purposes or goals by identifying tasks needed to be completed to attain the goals and assigning them to the human resources of the firm

  • Encourage individual activities to be focused on reaching organizational goals and thus managers lead their employees toward this purpose

  • Managers also focus on activities or other factors that may get in the way of goal achievement

  • Essentially, managers never take their minds off the organizational goal and its accomplishment

  • Stakeholders and goal setting:

    • For suppliers

    • For customers

    • Helps us say "no" to the long list of wrong things for our organization

    • This is applicable in our personal lives as well

Planning

  • Setting organizational goals

  • Choosing the tasks that are performed to attain the organizational goals

  • Outlining how tasks must be performed

  • Indicating when the tasks will be performed

  • Focus is on attaining goals

  • Getting the "right" things done

  • Steering the ship in the direction of goal accomplishment

Organizing

  • Assigning tasks identified in the planning function to the human resources within the organization

  • Puts plans into action

  • Assigning work activities to the humans within the org.

  • Grouping tasks into departments, determining tasks and groupings of work

  • Annual budget process considerations:

    • How much to sell?

    • What are the expenses? (Labor, CapEx, Materials)

    • On track? Who will do what?

    • Is there a 'right' way to organize the team? The machines?

Organizational Resources and Effectiveness

  • Organizational Resources

    • Effective vs Efficient .. Same thing??

  • Human - people who work for the organization, their skills & knowledge

  • Monetary - amounts of money used to purchase goods and services

  • Raw materials - the ingredients used directly to build products

  • Capital - the machines used during the manufacturing process

  • Managerial Effectiveness

    • When resources are used to achieve goals, managers are effective

  • Managerial Efficiency

    • When resources contribute to productivity, managers are efficient

    • Proportion of total organizational resources that contribute to productivity during manufacturing process. The higher this proportion, the more efficient is the manager.

  • Real-world example (news):

    • CNBC, Jan 27, 2022 — Elon Musk says it's more important for Tesla to make a robot than new car models

    • Market context example: Tesla stock movements referenced alongside this point

Influencing

  • Commonly also referred to as motivating, leading, directing, or actuating

  • Focus is primarily on the people within organization

  • Guiding organizational members in the directions appropriate to achieve the organizational tasks as they complete their individual job assignments

  • Overall purpose is to increase productivity

  • Workplaces with human-oriented work situations typically generate higher levels of long-term production than do task-oriented work situations

Controlling

  • Managers gather information regarding recent performance in the organization (KPI)

  • Managers compare actual results versus planned results

  • Managers take corrective action if needed to find new ways of improving productivity

  • Always remember WIIFM

    • Why would employees cross train?

    • Why will team work hard? At all levels?

  • Social vs. Organizational structure

  • If you meet daily goals, you can meet weekly goals, monthly goals, annual goals

  • Learning from mistakes .. Corrective & preventive actions

  • KPI on lead time, scrap, cost, sale price, inventory, supplier relations, employee turnover

Management Skill: A Classical View

  • Figure 1.6: As a manager moves from the supervisory to the top-management level, conceptual skills become more important than technical skills, but human skills remain equally important

MANAGEMENT LEVELS AND SKILLS NEEDED (as shown in figure)

  • Top management

  • Middle management

  • Supervisory or operational management

  • Skill categories:

    • Technical skills

    • Conceptual skills

    • Human skills

  • Key takeaway from the slide:

    • As you move from supervisory to top-management, conceptual skills become more important than technical skills, but human skills remain equally important

  • Source: Pearson (copyright information attached)