MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONS

BASIC MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONS

 

In ensuring that resources are used for designated purposes within an organization, management carries out various functions. These functions are referred to as the basic functions of management. These functions include: organizing, staffing, motivating, directing/leading and monitoring/controlling.

In this article, we will briefly examine these basic management functions. A proper understanding of these functions will enable us to fully appreciate the role of these fundamental management functions in the struggle for organization effectiveness.

Motivation: This is a management function that generates the spirit of co-operation amongst company manpower’s. Without motivation employees will lose the required drive to work effectively and produce maximum result for the organizational growth. Grenier’s theory of organizational growth clearly demonstrates the role played by motivation in getting the best out of an employee.

Without motivation, employees may not make sense of the other management functions. Planning make no sense in the absence of motivation. Monitoring produces provocation because the employees now perceive them selves as being used by their employer. Organization produces more confusion and a deliberate waste of resources because it will lack the power of implementation. No matter how brilliant and profitable your strategies, if there no cooperating employees with the personal initiative to bring it logical conclusion, it will never be implemented.

Planning: This is the active process of deciding the structural layout of events and happenings within the organization. Management decides the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly activity of the company. All these they do in strict compliance with the best option for profitable utilization of the scarce resources of the organization.

Organization:  By acting this way management carefully provides a blue print plan for the way the organization is to be operated. This blue print informs the required action to be taken for the realization of organizational goals and corporate objectives. Organization is the management power of implementation.

Staffing: Management carry out the function of analyzing the talent market place, create recruitment policies, create job specification and hire the right employee to match the job and task. By doing this they are able to employee the right employee that will increase the potential earning capacity of their organization. Employing the wrong person in your business can be the starting point in ensuring a business failure. For information in choosing the employee for your business, see my article on Hiring.

Controlling/Monitoring:  Controlling/Monitoring is a management function that checks progress against plans. You have to ensure that everything work according to plan to the minutest detail. Where there are differences, management assesses to ascertain the course, and also to affect corrective measures that ensures that the set objectives of the organization are excellently met.

Leading/Directing: Leading/Directing is a function of management that determines what needed to be done in a given situation, and also getting the right people with the perfect combination of skills and potential to do it. It is effectively providing leadership by example. Leading/Directing is not bossing over your employee, but it is the effective way of getting maximum result by showing how to do it by you getting involved in the process of getting the job done.

Take your time to understand the above management functions, and also applying it to your organization to ensure effective organizational structure, stability and profitability.

See you at the top!