Managements life blood of successful business

Premasara EPASINGHE - BA (Cey), Dip in Ed, Dip in Mktg, Marketing and PR Consultant “Lecturer”

Premasara EPASINGHE

The word Management have a number of meanings. Control and organization of business, organization, institution is one of them. Sometimes, we hear, the failure of a company, institution, organization was caused by bad management or success was caused by good disciplined management process. The controlling of a business, enterprise is known as Management. Sometimes you hear the Management is considering to close the factory or the Business is under a new Management. You may have heard about the “Top management job”.

The skills in dealing with people is an art of Management. No government, organization or a business will prosper or be successful, without proper Management. Therefore, in the Business world proper disciplined and smooth management is a “Must”.

Management is the life blood of any successful business venture. The proper function of management consist of five basic activities. They are Planning, Organizing, Motivating, Staffing and Controlling.

Planning in Business can be called a bridge between the present and future. It is the process by which one determines whether to attempt a task, work out the most effective way of reaching desired objective. For proper planning, dedication, commitment, new thinking and innovation is very necessary. Planning is the start of a process.

In 1980 26 years back, one of the greatest financial wizards that Sri Lanka produced was N U Jayawardane, who started a bank investment and credit bank (Sampath Bank). He was the person who planned many new innovations in the banking sector.

His planning and thinking was to take banking to the door step of customer. He was responsible to change the banking hours from 9.00 am to 3.00 pm. Sampath Bank also introduced the Electronic Teller Machine and named at “SET” Machine.

As a pioneer employee, I joined NUJ in 1986-1987 as a marketing man and collected the funds before the share issue went on public. Going round the country, appointing Agents. I termed these Agents as Opinion Leaders.

I collected millions in the private issue. It was the amazing planning and solid foundation that helped Sampath Bank to be one of the leading banks in Sri Lanka. Further, it was a brilliant team effort of the staff.

No doubt, it was a tough assignment, with proper planning from the management, “our mission was a great success.” The planning consisted of all those managerial activities.

In any organization or mercantile sector managers play a vital role in Management. If they are going to be effective in their jobs, first and firemost, they must develop their interpersonal or people skills. The impact that individuals, groups and structure have on behavior within an organization should be screened. It can be called a study on Organization Behavior (OB).

Making of decision, direct activities of others to attain goals are done by managers. They do their work in Organization.

The planning includes of all those managerial activities, related to preparation of all future specific tasks, which includes forecasting, establishing objectives, devising strategies, developing policies and setting goals.

The second function is Organizing. To determine, who does what, who reports to whom. Organization includes all those managerial tasks and authority relationship. The specific areas include organizational design, job specialization, job description and specifications. The third important function of management is motivating. It involves in shaping human behaviour, some of the topics include leadership, communication, work group functions, delegation of authority, boosting up the morale managers and employees.

The staffing activities are centered round personnel or Human Resources Management. This includes wages and salaries, employee benefits, union relationship. Career development and Public Relations. This can be considered as fourth function of Management.

To obtain successful results, controlling is vital.

In this segment, the key areas are quality control, financial control, inventory and expenses controls, reward and sanctions. This function of Management includes all operations. This is vital for effective strategy evaluation.

It consists of four basic steps, namely set up performance standard on a firm or permanent basis, measuring individual and organizational performances, comparing actual and planned performance standards and steps taking corrective actions.

Good Marketing is a result of proper planning and execution. Marketing deals with identifying, understanding and meeting human and social needs. There are many definitions describing what Marketing is. The American Marketing Association defines Marketing as an organizations function, a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stake-holders.

Marketing Managements can be defined as the Arts and Science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping and growing customers through creating, delivering and communicating superior customer value.

Therefore, the role of played by the Marketing Manager is vital to the success of any organization.

He must be level-headed intelligent human being, with a golden-heart. A leader who can motivate his staff and get the maximum out of them.

What are the management roles?

Henry Mintzberg, from MIT, in 1960 did a research study on Managers. It shows they perform ten different management roles inter-related with Interpersonal Relationship, transmitting of Information and Decision Making.

In the case of Interpersonal Roles, Managers play figurehead, leadership and liaison, roles.

All managers collect information from organization and institutions. They are play monitor, disseminator roles.

Mintzberg mentioned four roles that managers perform in Decisional Roles such as Entrepreneurs Disturbance Handlers, Resources Allocators and a Negotiators Role.

According to Robert Katz, there are three essential Management skills, namely Technical, Human, Conceptured.

Technical is very necessary in Management. It gives you specialized knowledge.

The ability to work with understanding and motivating individuals and groups can be defined as Human Skill.

In an important management study, done by Fred Luthans and associates on 450 managers, Managerial Activities showed the following results. The report indicated they were involved in four managerial activities.

(a) Traditional Management – Decision Making Planning and Controlling.

(b) Communication – Exchange Routine Informed and paper work

Human Resource Management – Motivating, Disciplining, Managing Conflict, Staffing and Training. Networking – Socializing, politicking, interacting with outsiders. In studying this report of Luthans associates an Average Manager spent 32% in Traditional Management Activities, 19% in communicating, 20% in HRM, 19% on networking.

A golden thread that runs and bind the functions, roles skills and activities approaches management.

It recognizes the vital importance of managing people. The success of a business lies on proper, scientific, smooth management.