However good you are – or think you are – you can always improve.

Self – development of the effective executive is central to the development of the organization.

What is management?

Essentially, management is about deciding what to do and then getting it done through people. This definition emphasizes that people are the most important resource available to managers. It is through this resource that all the other resources – knowledge, finance, materials, plant, equipment etc. will be managed.

Process of Management

• Planning
• Organizing
• Motivating
• Controlling

Managers carry out their work on a day-to-day basis in condition of endless variety, turbulence and unpredictability.

Managerial qualities

1. command of basic facts
2. relevant professional knowledge
3. continuing sensitivity to events
4. analytical, problem solving and decision/judgement making skills
5. social skills and abilities
6. emotional resilience
7. pro-activity
8. creativity
9. mental agility
10. balanced learning habits and skills
11. self-knowledge

Personality traits

• A willingness to work hard
• Perseverance and determination
• A willingness to take risks
• An ability to inspire enthusiasm
• Toughness

A-Z of management:

Achieving results

Assertiveness

Benchmarking

Budgeting

Case presentation

Change Management

Clear thinking

Coaching

Communicating

Conflict management

Continuous improvement

Controlling

Coordinating

Corporate culture and how to manage it

Cost cutting

Counseling

Creative thinking

Crisis management

Delegating

Developing people

Empowerment

Getting on

How things go wrong and how to put them right

Improve organizational effectiveness

Innovating

Interviewing

Leadership

Managing your boss

Meetings

Motivating

Negotiating

Objective setting

Organizing

Performance management

Persuading

Planning

Policies

Power and politics

Presentations and effective speaking

Problem solving and decision making

Productivity improvement

Profit improvement

Re-engineering the business

Report writing

Strategic management

Stress management

Team management

Time management

Total quality management

Trouble shooting

Achieving results:

Three sorts of managers

• Those who make things happen
• Those who watch things happening
• Those who don’t know what is happening

Personality is important. Unless you have will power and drive nothing will get done. But remember that your personality is a function of both nature and nurture. You are born with certain characteristics. Upbringing, education, training and above all, experience, develop you into the person you are.

What do achievers do?

1. They define to themselves precisely what they want to do.
2. They set demanding but attainable time-scales in which to do it.
3. They convey clearly what they want done and by when
4. They are prepared to discuss how things should be done and will listen to and take advice. But once the course of action has been agreed they stick to it unless events dictate a change of direction.
5. They are single-minded about getting where they want to go, showing perseverance and determination in the face of adversity.
6. They demand high performance from themselves and are somewhat callous in expecting equally high performance from every one else.
7. They work hard and work well under pressure; in fact, it brings out the best in them.
8. They tend to be dissatisfied with the status quo.
9. They are never completely satisfied with their own performance and continually question themselves
10. They will take calculated risks
11. They snap out of setbacks without being personally shattered and quickly regroup their forces and their ideas
12. They are enthusiastic about the task and convey their enthusiasm to others.
13. They are decisive in the sense that they are able to quickly sum up situations, define alternative courses of action, determine the preferred course, and convey to their subordinates what needs to be done.
14. They continually monitor their own, and their subordinates’ performance so that any deviation can be corrected in good time.

Advice:

"Promises: if asked when you can deliver something ask for time to think. Build in a margin of safety. Name a date. Then deliver it earlier than you promised."

Clear Thinking:

Main fallacies to avoid or to spot in other people’s arguments are:

• sweeping statements
• potted thinking
• special pleading
• over-simplification
• reaching false conclusions
• begging the question
• false analogy
• using words ambiguously

Coaching is a personal, on-the-job approach used by managers and trainers to help people develop their skills and levels of competence.

Barriers to communications

• Hearing what we want to hear
• Ignoring conflicting information
• Perceptions about the communicator
• Influence of the group
• Words mean different things to different people

Non verbal communication: emotions, noise, size

Overcoming barriers to communication

• Adjust to the world of the receiver
• Use feedback
• Use face-to-face communication
• Use reinforcement
• Use direct simple language
• Suit the actions to the word
• Use different channels
• Reduce problems of size

The Learning organization:

• Encourages managers and staff to identify their own learning needs
• Provides a regular review of performance and learning for the individual
• Encourages employees to set challenging learning goals for themselves
• Provides feedback at the time on both performance and achieved learning
• Reviews the performance of managers in helping to develop others
• Assist employees to see learning opportunities on the job.
• Seeks to provide new experiences from which people can learn
• Provides or facilitates on-the-job training
• Tolerates some mistakes, provided people try to learn from them.
• Encourages managers to review, conclude and plan learning activities
• Encourages people to challenge traditional ways of working

Corporate culture: Values, norms and artifacts

Values:

• care and consideration for people
• care for customers
• competitiveness
• enterprise
• equity in the treatment of employees
• excellence
• growth
• innovation
• market/customer orientation
• priority given to organizational rather than to people needs
• performance orientation
• productivity
• provision of equal opportunity for employees
• quality
• social responsibility
• team work

Norms: unwritten rules of behavior

Artifacts: visible and tangible aspects of an organization which people hear, see or feel.

Cost-Cutting:

Costs always need controlling. Some companies have not only survived but flourished after drastic cost-cutting exercises

What to cut: Labor costs, manufacturing costs, selling costs, development costs, material and inventory costs, operating costs.

Waste:

• Unnecessary forms or over-complex paperwork
• Too much checking and verifying of work
• Too many and/or too large committees
• Too many layers of management
• Bottlenecks and inefficient work flows or procurement procedures
• Delays in decision-making because authority is not delegated down the line
• Over-rigid adherence to rules and regulations
• Too much commitment to paper.

Counseling:

Any activity in the workplace where one individual uses a set of skills and techniques to help another individual to take responsibility for and to manage their own decision making whether it is work related or personal.

Stages:

1. listening, understanding and communicating
2. changing the picture
3. implementing action

Counseling skills:

Problem identification

Open questioning

Listening

Sensitivity

Reflecting

Empathy

Impartiality

Sincerity

Belief

Getting on:

Getting on is first about knowing what you can do- your strengths and weaknesses

Knowing yourself:

1. What have I achieved so far?
2. When have I failed to achieve what I wanted?
3. What am I good or bad at doing?
4. How well do I know my chosen area of expertise?
5. What sort of person am I?

Outgoing or reserved

Intellectual or non-intellectual

Emotionally stable or affected by feeling

Assertive or submissive

Enthusiastic or sober

Conscientious or expedient

Venturesome or shy

Tender-minded or tough-minded

Trusting or suspicious

Practical or imaginative

Shrewd or artless

Confident or apprehensive

Experimenting or conservative

Self-sufficient or group-dependent

Controlled or casual

Relaxed or tense

Develop Skills

• Communicating
• Problem-solving
• Decision making
• Listening
• Motivating
• Staffing
• Motivating yourself

Personal qualities and behavior

• Be enthusiastic and show it
• Innovate and create
• Show willing
• Be positive
• Work hard
• Present yourself well
• Be ambitious
• Be courageous
• Be assertive but not aggressive
• Put your points across firmly and succinctly
• Don’t talk too much
• Learn to cope with stress
• Accept reverses calmly
• Get people to trust you
• Accept constructive criticism
• Admin your own mistakes openly even joyfully.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are – Roosevelt

Why things go wrong?

• inability to learn from mistakes
• sheer incompetence through over-promotion
• poor selection, inadequate training
• over-confidence
• under-confidence
• laziness
• lack of foresight

What is leadership?

1. To gain the commitment and cooperation of their team
2. To get the group into action to achieve agreed objectives
3. To make the best use of skills, energies and talents of the team.

Leadership Qualities:

1. Ability to work with people
2. Early responsibility for important tasks
3. A need to achieve results
4. Leadership experiences early in career
5. Wide experience in many functions
6. Ability to make deals and negotiate
7. Willingness to take risks
8. Ability to have better ideas than colleagues
9. Having talents ‘stretched’ by immediate bosses
10. Ability to change managerial style to suit the occasion.

Leadership Checklist

The Task:

1. What needs to be done and why?
2. What results have to be achieved?
3. What problems have to be overcome?
4. Is the solution to these problems straightforward or is there a measure of ambiguity?
5. Is this a crisis situation?
6. What is the time-scale for completing the task?
7. What pressures are going to be exerted on the leader?

The Team:

1. What is the composition of the team?
2. How well is the team organized?
3. Do the team members of the team work well together?
4. What will they want to get out of this?
5. How can the commitment of this particular team be achieved?
6. How are results to be obtained by satisfying their needs?
7. How are they likely to response to the various leadership styles or approaches may be adopted?

The individuals in the team

1. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each member of the team?
2. What sort of issues are likely to motivate them?
3. How are they likely to respond individually to various leadership styles?