Lecture
Tasks and functions of management * are realized only through the activities of a special category of professionals, who are usually called managers * .
A manager is a specialist professionally engaged in management activities in a specific area of a company's operation. Professional occupation means that this specialist occupies a permanent position in the enterprise and is empowered to make management decisions in a particular field of activity of the enterprise.
Often the question arises: who should be considered a manager? The term "manager" can be used in relation to a fairly broad category of employees:
As recorded in many Western European and American manuals, managers are people endowed with a large amount of work that they can only cope with with the help of other people. So it was before, so it is in our days. The essence of managerial activity remains unchanged, only the functions of the manager and his methods of work change, but it should be borne in mind that the manager is not necessarily the head. The manager does not make a manager a power, not a rank, but a contribution to the activity of the whole organization and responsibility for its results. In any modern organization, the fastest growing group of people belongs in this sense to managers, but, as a rule, have no subordinates: their decisions are advisory in nature and implemented through other managers-administrators.
Being a manager means sharing responsibility for the success of an enterprise. A person from whom no such responsibility is expected is not a manager. Managers * differ from other specialists only in this responsibility for the work of the entire enterprise. The difference between a market research manager with a staff of 50 people and a market researcher who does the same work without any apparatus, only in means, not in a contribution, and certainly not in a function. Both managers.
The company's treasurer, who is responsible for the inflow and use of money, may not have a single subordinate and work with the company's investors, with financial institutions. For all his time in office, he may not give a single order, his contribution is purely individual - and, however, he is, without a doubt, a manager.
Management, thus, has no obligatory communication with delegation of authority. The tasks of management are autonomous and rooted in the needs of the enterprise. There are managerial positions, there is managerial work, there is managerial skill, and there is a managerial organization that is distinguishable from others.
Managers * - one of the main resources of the company. There may be almost no workers at a fully automated company - but managers will be there.
The number of managers in the United States alone rose from 6.4 million people in 1955 to 17.7 million people in 1996 (from 10.2% to 17.7%) in the total number of employees.
In the United States, 1,500 universities are trained by professional managers. 25% of students and 25% of graduates who have studied for a Master of Business Administration degree specialize in management studies.
Managers - the most expensive resource and the fastest depreciates. It takes years to build a management team, and you can destroy it in a few months. Investments in managers and requirements of firms to them grow. These requirements are doubled each generation.
Compared to other types of work in an organization, managerial work has a number of features expressed in the nature of labor itself, its subject, results, and means used.
The specificity of the tasks to be solved predetermines the predominantly mental, creative character of managerial labor. Managers make human, financial, and physical resources as productive as possible. They have a special subject of labor - information, transforming that they make the decisions necessary to change the state of the controlled object. Therefore, as a tool of labor managers are primarily means of working with information. The result of their activities is evaluated by the achievement of goals.
There are five basic operations in the work of each manager, no matter what area he is engaged in. Their result is the integration of resources to maintain the viability and growth of the firm.
First, the manager sets goals. It defines the tasks in each group of goals. Decides what needs to be done to achieve these goals.
Secondly, the manager organizes. It analyzes the types of activities, decisions, relationships that are needed to fulfill the objectives; divides them into manageable aggregates, and these aggregates into manageable labor tasks. The manager groups these populations and tasks into an organizational structure. He selects people to manage these populations and for the tasks to be performed.
Thirdly, the manager supports motivation and communication. He is a team of people responsible for various jobs. And it does this with the help of specific methods, through personnel decisions about remuneration, appointments, promotions and through a variety of different decisions defining the so-called quality of working life, which is not at all reduced to either wages or working conditions in our usual sense. And he does this by maintaining constant communication with his subordinates, superiors, and colleagues.
Fourth, an important element in the work of a manager is measurement. It sets the units of measurement - there are few factors that are so important for the success of the company. Ensures that each person has indicators focused on the work of the entire company and at the same time on the work of a specific individual and helped him to do it. The manager * analyzes, evaluates and interprets the results. As in all other areas of work, he informs them of his leadership, subordinates and colleagues.
Finally, fifth, the manager promotes the growth of the competence of people, including himself. The mentioned qualities of working life in one of the possible interpretations are just the totality of conditions conducive to the growth of the competence of the members of the company.
All these operations can be divided into categories of work, each of which requires specific qualities and qualifications.
The manager solves two specific tasks. The first is the creation of a genuine whole, which is larger than the sum of the parts, productive unity, producing more than what is invested. In other words, the manager creates a system and contributes to the emergence of order from chaos or, in any case, ensures the formation of a new order, qualitatively superior to the previous one.
The manager can be compared with the conductor of the orchestra. But the conductor has a score written by the composer. He is only an interpreter. The manager immediately and the composer, and the conductor. This task requires him to maximize the effectiveness of the use of the forces that he has (above all, human resources) and to neutralize weak points. The second task is to harmonize the requirements of the immediate and distant future in each decision and action.
The specificity of economic, in particular, production, processes as objects of management predetermines the special nature of the labor of managers and the composition of the requirements for them. The work of a manager is highly creative, requires diverse knowledge, implies a tendency of an individual to engage in analytical work and the ability to concentrate at certain moments on limited problems. Since the main subject of managerial labor is management information, the prerequisite for its effective work is the knowledge and ability to use modern information technologies in the management of enterprises. There are three categories of requirements for the professional competence of a manager:
The first category of requirements implies that the manager has special training in the field of management theory, knowledge of the fundamentals of modern macro- and microeconomics, general systems theory and management decision-making, the ability to apply new information technologies and economic and mathematical methods to optimize decisions. Given the dynamic nature of the development of modern theory and practice of management, a mandatory feature of a manager should be the propensity for continuous learning and professional development.
The second category of requirements for the competence of the manager is the ability to communicate and the ability to work with people. It follows from the binding position of the manager in the communications system in the enterprise. To analyze any managerial situation, a manager is required to provide, as a rule, external and internal communications between such subjects of the system as a higher manager, colleagues of related departments or enterprises, a work team (groups, departments or enterprises) and certain subordinate employees. The manager should be able to objectively recognize each of the subjects of a managerial situation, adequately (in accordance with his style and motives of work) respond to him and influence optimally to achieve the goal of the activity.
The ability to communicate largely depends on the individual properties of the person and therefore can be determined by means of tests for professional suitability and the level of qualification of the manager.
The third category of requirements related to competence in the field of specialization of the enterprise, provides for the availability of special knowledge in the field of technology of production processes, theoretical and practical aspects of the production, the features of their physical processes.
The nature of the activity of a particular manager in an enterprise is determined by the composition of the powers delegated to him in making management decisions. This composition is established in accordance with the system of division of labor adopted by the enterprise and the specialization of managerial personnel. In principle, in the structure of any enterprise one can find two types of division of labor of managers: horizontal and vertical.
The horizontal division of labor in management is associated with the specialization of managers primarily on a functional basis, that is, assignment of one or several substantive management functions to them. This division of labor leads to the creation at the enterprise of special marketing, production, finance, personnel, and so on.
The vertical division of labor of managers depends on the nature of the processes, the scale of activities and is expressed in the organizational structure of the enterprise, the composition of management levels. As a rule, an enterprise can be divided into three hierarchical levels of management: upper, middle and lower. The volume and significance of the consequences of managerial decisions at every level of managerial decisions increase with the transition from the lowest to the highest management. The top management includes the head of the enterprise, his first deputies in functional areas of activity (R & D, production, marketing, etc.). Middle management consists of heads of departments, services and administrative bodies of the enterprise and includes up to 60% of the total number of managers in the enterprise. To the lowest level are the leaders of creative groups, grass-roots laboratories, production sites, etc.
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