What is management? It can be defined as the administration of an organization irrespective of its nature, scope or scale.
In simple terms, it is about effectively managing teams the daily affairs of a company or business. And to be specific, management is about getting the work done with the help of others to achieve the business objectives of an organization.
A company’s management has to perform certain important functions to ensure the work gets done effectively and systematically to accomplish the goals of the company. The effective functions of the management can be classified into:
- Planning
- Organizing
- Staffing
- Directing
- Coordinating
- Motivating
- Controlling
Let us check out these important management functions in detail.
Planning
Planning is a continuous intellectual function performed by managers across all levels. In essence, it is a never-ending process and is extremely essential for the positive growth of the employees and the organization.
Planning is all about thinking in advance and deciding the future course of action. This includes advance decision making on aspects such as:
- What to do?
- How to do?
- Where to do?
- When to do?
- How to analyse the result?
The planning procedure includes identifying the objectives of the organization. And, formulating policies, plans, strategies, schedules, programmes and procedures to accomplish the desired objectives of the organization.
Organizing
Organizing involves the bringing together of manpower and resources, viz., machinery, materials, workforce, etc. and applying them efficiently at the workplace to the desired objectives of the enterprise. Skilful organizing is important to bring in more efficiency and to maximize the output. This ensures a healthy increase in employee productivity.
Organizing is essentially a process that involves the following steps:
- The management or manager identifies the tasks that need to be performed
- Classify or group the work as per the available man and machinery
- Assign the classified or grouped tasks to the workforce
- Fix responsibility for the task and assign proper authority over the workforce
- Establish a good structural relationship with the workforce to boost efficiency to achieve the objective
Staffing
Staffing is mainly about the human resources of a company. As the name suggests, this function primarily deals with the management of different job positions that are created by the company. Staffing is all about managing the needs and requirements of existing employees and finding ideal candidates to fill up the open positions.
The staffing process can be broadly defined as a managerial function that involves managing the structure of the company through the effective methods of employee selection, development and appraisal to fill up designated roles. This process consists of:
- Manpower planning
- Recruitment, selection and training
- Manpower placement
- Development, promotion, appraisal and transfer
- Deciding the remuneration of employees
Directing
Directing involves the functions of instructing, guiding, influencing, supervising and motivating the workforce to do their work efficiently.
The role of directing includes the following actions:
- Communication: It is defined as the method of the passage of information among individuals. The process includes cohesive and systematic speech, listening and acknowledging.
- Leadership: Leadership is about influencing and motivating the workforce, leading and properly guiding them to ensure systematic performance at work.
- Supervision: Supervision involves overseeing the task and the performance of the workforce.
Coordinating
A company is divided and further subdivided into various sections or segments as per the specialization to reap more benefits for the organization. Due to such division of tasks within the organization, it is essential to unify, harmonize and synchronize the tasks of different groups of employees to attain the main objective or goal of the organization.
In any company, to ensure successful delivery of product or services, all departments must work in unison and coordinate to accomplish the desired objective within the given time. This cohesiveness between different groups determines the overall success of an organization.
The functions of managers at different levels are to ensure that there is a seamless, smooth and transparent relay to information and resources among different departments to accomplish the project goals. Coordination, therefore, is a systematic arrangement of all the group activities to unify the actions and efforts of all the groups towards the common objective.
Motivating
Motivation is a simple yet essential function of the management. It is aboutinspiring people to take action; to encourage them to work better in order to attain the goal.
Managers can use motivation to inspire their workforce to raise their performance in order to meet the common objective of the organization. Motivation is about doing all the activities that inspire and compels your subordinates to produce extraordinary work. It is about igniting the inner desire in an individual and giving them a vision and mission to take action towards achieving the objectives of the organization.
Motivation can be imparted on to your subordinate through:
- Effective leadership
- Inspiring cooperation among employees
- Effective and transparent communication
- Creating a work environment that promotes learning and development among individuals
Additionally, the act of recognising and rewarding the performance of your workforce also boosts the confidence of your employees and motivates them to work much better the next time. Thus, motivation is an important management function.
Controlling
Controlling is a systematic procedure that enables the top management to implement policies and initiate corrective action when the performance is not as per the preset standards. The controlling function is implemented to ensure that employee performance meets the planned project requirements.
Controlling ensures quantitative and qualitative work performance by the workforce to fulfil the objectives of the organization. The principal goal of controlling is to oversee whether every task, action or activity of employees within the organization is as per the plans of the company. Effective control measures performance detects and improves negative deviations, and fixes responsibility to deliver the plans successfully.
Controlling is not the same as micro-managing and must not be confused with it.
This is how the important functions of the management are classified effectively. The effectiveness of management functions generally depends on the efficient decision making of the organization.
About Author: Digvijay Singh Kanwar is a professional content writer and digital marketing expert and he loves to write about finance and tech-based articles. You can contact him on [email protected]