The verb manage comes from the Italian word maneggiare which means handling (especially a horse), which is derived from the Latin word manus meaning hand. In the 17th and 18th centuries, meaning of the English word management evolved from the Old French word mesnage. Management is the art of getting things done through people, says management consultant Mary Parker Follett.
Frenchman Henri Fayol describes management as a composition of five functions namely planning, organizing, leading, coordination and control.
- Planning: Planning involves identification of your business goal and finding the way to reach it. It involves the estimation of various costs that will be incurred and evaluation of the time required to attain the business goal. A business plan has to be documented and reviewed on a regular basis. A plan is worth it if the attainment of the business goal is feasible with the planned resources. You need to communicate your plan to your employees and accept their feedback.
- Organizing: It involves the assignment of tasks and allocation of resources throughout the business organization. It includes determining the primary goals of the business and strategies to reach them. Divide the activities into tasks and assign the tasks to suitable and deserving employees.
- Leading: Leadership is a management skill in itself. A true leader inculcates feelings of confidence, admiration in the followers and a sense of commitment towards their business. A leader influences others to follow him. Transformation is the need of the day and so, leaders need to be flexible, adaptable to change and encourage these qualities in the team members too. Being innovative is important for business growth. Innovation is a skill in itself. Leaders need to be open to new ideas, they need to innovate, bring in positive change as and when needed and progress. Rather, progress is hardly possible without innovation. A leader not only dreams but also provides his employees with a framework to fulfill those dreams. Innovation involves both imagination and action in accordance with it. Delegation is another important aspect of leading. It refers to allocation of tasks to the right people. It involves entrusting deserving candidates with work that they can do best.
- Coordination and Control: These skills are important for the success of a business. Coordination involves effective communication between team members and across teams. It is useful in tracking activities towards goal achievement. It is crucial to taking decisions about the future lines of action. Control is better implemented in the form of able guidance given to employees by their manager. Evaluations are necessary to track business performance.
The ability of directed thinking to develop a business idea is another business management skill. One more quality that a skilled manager should possess, is the willingness to work hard towards the achievement of his business goal. Management guru Peter Drucker made a distinction between being efficient and being effective. According to him, performing an activity swiftly and economically refers to being efficient, while doing the right thing at the right time, with efficiency refers to effectiveness. Good business management skills lead you to the right goals. On the other hand doing the wrong things or doing things in the wrong direction is a waste of time and energy. In other words, it's the exercise of efficiency to no avail. A leader should know how to prioritize business activities. He should be able to understand what's important for the business and differentiate it from what is urgent. That is important for effective business management.
As a leader, you should be able to understand the weaknesses of the organization and try to improve on them. You must be able to look at the threats to your business and fight them effectively. You should have the skill to endure every setback and learn from your mistakes. Successful business development strategies used by others can help you devise your own. This is when your skill to 'experiment' comes in the scene. Experimentation has to be accompanied by the right judgment of your actions and results.
Business management includes management of money and time too. Being a team manager, you have to time yourself and schedule tasks for your team, so that deadlines are met. Management of money is an integral part of running a business. The activities of buying, selling and pricing have to be done skillfully. Business management is not a cakewalk. It includes everything from planning, supervising, right up to being the spokesperson for your business.
People skills, as they are called, are important for a manager to acquire. After all, management is about handling people. Bringing out the best from the people you are leading is an important part of management. Difficult people, those with rigid opinions and those not adaptable to change, need to be dealt with. You need to improve yourself and imbibe in the minds of others that improvement is a continuous process. You should learn to celebrate the success of your team members and encourage them to work to the fullest of their capacities. You should be able to keep their spirits high and keep them motivated. It's human psychology to like getting noticed for one's work. It' a general tendency to expect recognition for one's work. One of the important business management skills is to be able to encourage your team members, extract the best from them and appreciate their efforts. Another managerial skill is to create and maintain an open atmosphere in the team. The team members should feel free to voice their concerns and always be made aware that their concerns are heard. There should be a proper hierarchy for communication within the organization. It is a good practice to assign relatively experienced employees as buddies for those newly joined so that the new recruits do not feel unheard. This way, everyone in the organization has a point of contact. Communicating in a way that everyone is on the same page is a skill every manager should have. That's essential for teamwork and thereby for business management in general.
In the words of Henry Ford, Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success. This is what teamwork means. Developing and maintaining a team spirit is indeed a management skill. You need to have excellent communication skills to be a good manager. Being able to convey your idea to people, and getting the work done from them, is a skill. Communication should be effective, be it internal or with external parties. You may need to exercise your communication skills not just when interacting with your team, but also when communicating with external parties, for example during business negotiations or when addressing customer issues. That depends on your job responsibilities in the organization, but communication is integral to a managerial role. A business manager needs to be a good communicator.
Foresight is important in business management. You need to be able to sense trouble ahead of time. You need to be prepared for it and plan accordingly. You need to think ahead of time to be ahead in the industry. An excellent example of a manager and business developer with foresight, was Steve Jobs. You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new, he said. He believed in anticipating customer needs in advance to be able to give them products they would start wanting.
Management is about taking the right decisions at the right time and getting them implemented by the right people. Effective business management requires you to have certain basic skills. But perhaps, the most important thing you need to have is common sense.
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