Page 285 - Business Principles and Management

Unit 4

Management is the process of accomplishing the goals of an organization
through the effective use of people and other resources. As you learned earlier,
those resources include money, buildings, equipment, and materials. The pri-
mary work of all managers can be grouped within four functions: (1) planning,
(2) organizing, (3) implementing, and (4) controlling.
Planning involves analyzing information and making decisions about what
needs to be done. Organizing is concerned with determining how plans can be
accomplished most effectively and arranging resources to complete work. A
manager is implementing when carrying out the plans and helping employees
to work effectively, and is controlling when evaluating results to determine if
the company’s objectives have been accomplished as planned.
Operating any business is a very complex process. Even managers of small
businesses must make product, marketing, personnel, and finance decisions every
day. If managers are not well prepared to operate the business, problems will soon
develop. The manager who knows how to plan, organize, implement, and control
is prepared to make the decisions needed to operate a business successfully.

CHECKPOINT

What are the four functions all managers complete?

The Work of Managers

All managers perform the same four broad functions as a part of their jobs, but
the specific activities they perform and the amount of time they spend on each
function will be quite different. The functions of management may even seem to
describe work activities of some employees who are not classified as managers.

MANAGERS AND NONMANAGEMENT EMPLOYEES
Many employees of a business complete activities that could be considered man-
agement activities. They might plan and organize their work or decide how to
organize materials to complete work efficiently. An experienced employee may
be given the responsibility to be the leader on a group project, and the group
members may help the manager evaluate the project when it has been com-
pleted. The increasing use of teams in organizations is providing employees
many more opportunities to participate in activities that previously have been
the domain of managers.
In each of these examples, the employee is getting valuable experience. That
experience will help the employee to understand the work of managers and to
prepare for possible promotion to a management position. If the company in the
earlier example had used these types of experiences to develop employees, Erik
might have had a better idea of what it would be like to be a supervisor. Giving
those types of responsibilities to employees can also be an effective motivating
technique. However, even though employees perform some work that is similar
to managers’ responsibilities, the employees are not managers. There are impor-
tant differences in the nature of managers’ work and that of nonmanagerial
employees.

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