Management is the management of an organisation, whether it’s a private firm, a government agency, or an international organisation. It is very important for anyone holding any senior management position in an organisation. Managing and leadership go hand in hand. There are various types of management, but the two main types are; strategic management and managerial leadership.
Strategic management deals with making strategic decisions to increase a company’s profitability. These decisions may include sales, marketing, and operational decisions. They are made on behalf of the owners and stakeholders. Strategic managers often have some kind of management plan to guide them and make sure they achieve the company’s goals. This is often called a corporate strategy.
Managerial leadership on the other hand is very different in that it is horizontal – it looks at the activities of people inside an organisation and directs them towards achieving a set of desired results. Good management often coordinates with the leadership of other departments, so that a single, unified effort is achieved. This coordinating process can also be part of a training or development programme. Directing people and processes towards achieving a specific goal has a lot of advantages. Organisations that successfully organized their staff under this strategy were able to: get things done, direct people towards their tasks, keep them motivated, and make sure they took the right steps to achieving their goals.
These are just some of the advantages of good organizational management. Although there are several theories on how to organize organizations, one good way to look at it is from the perspective of a behavioural management theory called the “behavioural revolution”. According to this theory, managers are forced to improve their behavior because their managers, supervisors and colleagues are constantly discouraging them from doing so. Because managers have a deep-rooted need to appear competent, they will do all that is required to appear so by complying with the many requests put forward by employees. It is because of this that they get stuck in a vicious cycle whereby they try to improve their behaviour, but they realise that this only encourages other employees to become aggressive and push them away.
Managers must therefore be aware of their environment and of the fact that they are not the only ones looking out for their success. They therefore need to organize their staff around the five functions of management in order to achieve an effective coordination between the different aspects of their organization. The five functions of management are planning, ordering, organizing, handling, and motivating. The more successful managers have been able to apply these principles in their organisations, the more productive the business has been. For example, Wal-Mart, which was known for its cliques, intense competition and autocratic management style, succeeded due to the fact that its management set out to achieve high levels of organization and coordination, and set clear organizational goals (to become a world leader in retail).
Agile management approaches are flexible and encourage transparency and accountability in the workplace. Agile is a growing field and is used in a wide variety of organizations from finance to aerospace to manufacturing. A well established framework is available that draws upon the strengths and values of managers, workers and owners. The advantages of the Agile management philosophy include its simple and incremental approach which are inherently client centric, its focus on human factors and its ability to build flexibility and trust within an organizational structure. It is considered to be an alternative to traditional management approaches and some of its key benefits include: