“The structure of business management and organization”

Modern business requires modern management and this means well trained managers. Even today, most people undertake their first management position with little or no formal training.  As a result, they adopt the styles by themselves were managed.  Too often this perpetuates poor or discredited management techniques which have no place in today’s world. With few exceptions, the majority of managers find the most difficult aspect of their job is the management of people, who after all the most important resource of any organization.
A form of management began when man first employed others to work for him.  In those early days, the relationship between employer and employee was  master and servant or landlord and serf.  Workers were treated as chattels and motivation was based on the simple principle “ if you don’t work, you don’t eat”.  Some people seem to believe that things have changed little change. Managing modern organization, it requires a completely different set of skills, one of the common myths is that the manager, should be the best exponent of the craft skills with in the organization.  In theory, a good manager should be able to manage any department with in an organization with the minimum of adaptation.  What makes a good manager?  A good manager is one whose staff works with him rather than for him.
Can anyone become a manager?  In theory, yes in practice no.  many people are unable or unwilling to adopt to the need of management.  People are usually promoted because they are good at their present job, they have been with the company for a long time, their age gives them seniority, they know the right people, and they happen to be in the right place at the right time. Rarely they are promoted because they will make good managers.

As with most activities in life, you won’t know how good you are until you really try it.   Management is no different so you should learn how to do it before taking such a major career step.  Every manager has responsibilities towards him or herself, their team, the individual within the team, the company and task in hand.  This includes motivating staff to perform to the best of their abilities and to prevent demotivation, delegating task, to plan and to control the activities within their domain to ensure that objectives are meet.
To take decisions and of course managing problems, not to solve them all, but to help the team reach acceptable solutions.  Effective manager, initiate and encourage ideas from the subordinates and developed the team.  Considering the resources in management group,   the people, acknowledging their different needs, attitudes, abilities and personalities.  These are not constant and can change from day to day, but a good and a modern  manager in a modern organization can maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses.
Time – the most democratic of the resources.  Every one has 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, etc.  It is how this time is used that determines managerial effectiveness.
Space- this is expensive and many work places suffer from alack of it.  However, much can be made of the space available to improve the working condition /environment  and peoples behavior.
Finance- all managers involved with budgets and expenditure to some degree.  Trainings specifically designed to deal with finance for non-financial managers are available.
Equipment – including desk, telephones, photocopiers and personal computers.  You should ensure that your team have sufficient for their needs, while bearing in mind that idle equipment is a non-productive cost.
Information- ensure that all information received is given the right priority and used as appropriate to help the team.
Their utilization will affect the team and the individuals within the team, so managing these resources effectively is vital. After understanding manager’s role and of course before trying to manage other, it is vital to know how to manage yourself.  I f you are seen to be disorganized, easily pressured, blinkered in your views, unmotivated, and subject to swift changes of mood, you will not win the respect and credibility of your staff. “Healthy self-criticism and an abiding willingness to learn seem to me to be the most important requirements of any manager” HRH Prince Philip.
Self management is not about the amount of time you spend in an activity, but about what you do during that time.  His quality that counts, not quantity.  Time is very easily wasted but impossible to regain.  Time spent on non-management activity is not necessarily unproductive time.  But could the time have been between use elsewhere?  It is very important also to learn and control emotions at work  Highly emotional people are often labeled as unstable, untrust worthy and weak.  None of these are traits associated with good management.
Communicating people in modern organization is very important Good verbal communicating is a two-way process, the speaker gives the listeners the opportunity to ask questions and make comments about what has been said in order to clarify and query the statement. The objectives is to transmit a message so that it is understood by the listeners.  The art of effective listening is essential to clear communication and clear communication is necessary to management success.
Understanding how people are motivated an organization is a task and action that require into a staff to undertake.  In order to be able to motivate them to do so, you must know and understand the needs of each member of the team.  Because of the parameters in which you operate, you may be unable to satisfy the surface needs as money or promotion.
Therefore, you have to look for the subconscious needs that these represent and try to satisfy the person concerned by other means such as the need of recognition, we all need to be recognized by others for what we are.  Second, the need for respect, it is our bright right to be accepted and respected as an individual person or to the worker.  Third, the need for responsibility, by having a task, however small, for which they are totally responsible and accountable, this is best achieved by delegation.  Fourth, the need for reward, not necessarily in the form of money, prizes or time off.  So often, this can be satisfied by a simple but genuine word of praise.
Learning to delegate is another task inside the management.  Good delegation will give many benefits to the subordinates, a valuable development, motivation, a sense of responsibility for the staff, involvement and of course improve teamwork.  This will take some of your management time to set up but once operating it, is simple to update and will provide with a very useful management tool.
Most people work in modern organization, groups, whether it be an office, a laboratory, a hospital, the factory floor or a theatre, in order that they can achieve their respective objectives, therefore, they must work as a team to build and lead.  It is equally important that all work groups operate or not a group becomes a team depends on how they are lead.  Considering this, analyzing a successful team, identifying team roles, understanding leadership qualities and styles, and managing “difficult” people is part of building an effective team.
Building a successful team can be a slow process and requires patience and perseverance on our part.  If things do not work the first time, don’t blame the team, try again- you will get it together eventually. “ ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL”. The most important, and be reminded that our life is full of decisions making, every day we make decisions, these decisions affect only ourselves or our families and many of them are made on experience.  All decisions contain a degree of uncertainty, otherwise there would be no decisions make.  To help overcome these uncertainties, we can apply the following steps:
a.)Define the aim- clarify the reasons and objectives.
b.)Collect the facts- obtain as much information as possible, relevant to the decision.
c.)Examine the options- study a number of possible options, don’t rely sole on past experience.
d.)Consider the outcome- look at the risk factor of each option and the consequences of a wrong decisions.
e.)Select the best option- decide upon the option with the lowest risk factor which will still meet the aim.
f.)Do it- once a decision has been reached, put it into action, don’t procrastinate.
g.)Evaluate the decision- to proved to be right or wrong.
Managers continually face assessing management problems in two distinctive categories; those related to work itself and those related to people.  Whilst the objective in both cases is to solve the problem, they are tackled in quite different ways.  When confronted with a problem, the first question to ask yourself is “Is this my problem? If not, then should you really be trying to solve it?  However, should the problem be yours and you are the best person to find a solution, make sure that you understand exactly what the problem is.  Much time and effort is spent in business trying to solve the wrong problem.
Addressing work problems is also important, these can be short, medium or long term.  Some are simple, others more complex.  Many work-related problems can be solved by you alone, while others are better served by involving different people.  Whatever the problem, it is good practice to have a clearly defined method of handling it.  Taking a systematic approach, a series of steps that need to be taken and questions that require answers before attempting to find a solution.  This will be follow; analyze, plan, execute and  evaluate.  Time is democratic, we all have the same amount.  It is what we do with it that really counts.
Time ticks by relentlessly.  It is very easy to waste but impossible to regain.  The only way in which we can save time by doing something more quickly or by not doing it at all.  There is ‘working’  time and ‘social’ time.  If we add to one we automatically take from the other.  The art is to maintain a sound balance between the two.  As a manager, you need to manage your time carefully, so that we can maximize its use and do not encroach upon your ‘social’ time.
Before trying to manage your time effectively, we need to analyze how you spend it at present. So, time organizing to be applied.  List those activities that you do during the course of a normal week.  For example, paperwork, telephoning, attending meetings, dealing with people, traveling and so on.  Estimate the number of hours you spend on each activity.  Time allocation, to ensure that you deal with all of your tasks on time, it is essential to plan how you will use your time effectively.
Your last job each day should be to list everything that you have to do the next day.  To innovate is to “ make changes”, to introduce ‘new things’.  However, many people find it very hard to come up with new ideas, particularly to order, this is managing innovation.  Generating new ideas often occur when we are doing something quite unconnected with the problem, such as driving the car, walking the dog or watching television.
However, part of the management time should be devoted to innovation, to help generating new ideas, explore all approaches without evaluation, switch from problem to problem, allowing mind to wander over alternative and apparently irrelevant ways of looking at the situation and write down ideas and thoughts.  Managing different types of interviews, an interview is a meeting of people, tow or more, face to face, to accomplish a certain known purpose’.  In reality, an interview should be confined to two persons.
Good interviewing prepare by obtaining as much information as possible before the interview, ensure privacy, emphasize confidentiality, ask appropriate questions, listen carefully, observe the interviewee’s body language, use counseling techniques to discover the core problem and encourage the interviewees to reach their own solution.
People have first to decide that they want to change, then they must be encouraged not to be afraid of change and finally they must be able to see where change is leading them.  Understanding and managing change, changes to an organization are caused by both internal and external factors.  Many of these changes are unpredictable and, whatever, the causes or circumstances, invariably involve people.
The way in which people react to change will depend on how the change is presented to them and how they perceive it will affect them.  The causes of change can be divided into two types, those over which as a manager have no influence and those over which you do.  In the first group are changes which will affect the whole company, such as relocation or a change in company policy.  These are often due to external factors such as the economy, environment or the law.  Changes which you can influence are normally those which will mainly affect only your and your staff.
Managing stress at work, one of the main reasons why people are stressed at work is their boss and the way they are managed.  There is one way for an executive to manage stress.  He must stop taking for granted success at home, and begin giving as much priority in terms of time and energy to achieving success there as he does to his job.  Understanding the causes of stress, the most common causes of stress have their origins outside the workplace.
A few years ago a list of activities which can cause stress was complied by psychologists.  It is based on a scale of 0-100.  The higher the value, the greater the stress.  Both positive and negative events can cause stress.  It is interesting to note that of 34 activities listed over, only seven are directly work related and the highest two of those will have a direct effect on your domestic life.  Although management as a profession only has a stress rating of 5.8, some managers seem to spend their time trying to push it as far up the scale as possible.
People who experience domestic pressures often immerse themselves in their work in an attempt to forget these problems.  However, the problems are still there when they return home, so they will work longer hours in order to delay having to go home.  These increased absences result in still more stress on the domestic front.  It is a vicious circle.  Other stressful factors are; too much work, giving few opportunities to plan or priorities.  To mo little work, boredom and a sense of being under-valued and ignored.
Isolation, most people need human contact and those who work alone can be stressed by a lack of communication.  Routine work, not being stretched or challenged.  Poor supervision, unable to become involved or use creative abilities.  No clear promotional structure, frustration.  Environment,  working in cramped conditions, seating arrangements, open plan office, too much noise.  Managing in a changing work place is also included in managing the modern organization.
With this, abilities and skills of being a manager, managing in a modern organization, it has become fashionable for companies to adopt a flatter organizational structure.  This is achieved by ripping out the middle management stratum and replacing it with working manager’s at supervisory level.  These people are expected to continue with their specialist role, be it operating a lathe, selling products or repairing computers, and at the same time manage a team.  Although this means that people are promoted who may not have expected to be, it also result in a wider gap between the workforce and senior management.
Whilst it is acknowledged that a proportion of those managers who have lost their jobs may have been poor managers, did they receive adequate, or indeed any, management training?  It is to be hoped that senior executives will quickly realize the benefits to their companies of having good, well qualified managers and reverse this trend before causing further damage to the morale of the employees.
References :
Managing Trough People, by John Humphries, Published by Grolier Business Library International, Inc. printed in 2003.
Business Organization and Management edited by H. Guitierrez, Jose M. Pura Jr., Rolando M. Garcia sixth edition, R.M Garcia Publishing House, Quezon City Philippines.