Text№ 3 The managerial role

USA Today's tight planning resembles what many other companies are doing. Alert to new opportunities and eager to succeed against aggressive competition, managers in autos, retailing, computers, and countless other fields now see how important it is to have a plan but to stay flexible. And innovative ideas are circulating. The last few years have brought a wave of new theories about management, plus a number of new methods for solving practical management problems.

Why should there be such interest in management? Because manage­ment is universally necessary in organizations. It is the force holding every­thing else in a business enterprise together and setting everything in motion; it is the coordination of an organization's resources - land, labor, and cap­ital - to meet an objective. Certain basic principles of coordination can be applied to virtually every type of organization, whatever its size or purpose. An auto plant, a city government, a football team, a typing service - all require management. Whenever people work together to achieve a goal, someone must make decisions about who will do what when, what money and other resources are to be used when.

The management hierarchy

In all but the smallest organizations, more than one manager is necessary to oversee the activities of other employees. Generally, the managerial staff consists of these three basic levels, with several subdivisions within each level: top management, or upper-level managers, who have the most power and take overall responsibility for the organization; the middle managers, whose power and responsibility are used chiefly to implement the broad goals set by top management; and supervisory management, or operating managers, whose power and responsibility are used to coordinate the work of all who are not managers.

Different job titles are used

to designate the three basic

levels in the management

hierarchy and their responsibilities

These three levels form a hierarchy - a structure with a top, middle, and bottom can be represented as a pyramid. There are a number of managers at the bottom level, a smaller number at the middle level, and just a few, or in many cases only one, at the very top. On the surface, management hierarchies may seem to differ from one organization to the next, because the titles of managers' jobs vary. But such differences are often misleading. Three executives in three similar corporations, for in­stance, may have different titles - senior vice president, executive vice pres­ident, and president - but actually perform the same jobs within their com­panies.

Managerial skills

Whatever the type or size of organization and whatever the level of manage­ment, managers employ certain skills. Of course, they employ them in dis­tinctive mixes which varies by industry, organization, management level, and individual manager.

A president or board chairman in a small manufacturing company, for example, would spend a lot of time analyzing information - say, about in­dustry trends and the economic climate - and making decisions based on that information. A substantial amount of a top manager's time would also be spent with people, eliciting information and conveying decisions.

A brand manager in a large consumer products company, as part of mid­dle management, would serve as a conduit between top management and supervisory management. She would be likely to have some responsibility for analyzing information received from lower-level employees and transmitting it to higher-ups; in return, she would make decisions about how to implement the desires of top management and convey the decisions to those who would actually carry them out.

A supervisory manager would be just as likely to deal with people and even more likely to get involved in the organization's actual work. For in­stance, the shift supervisor of a large restaurant would spend most of his time working alongside the serving staff and the kitchen staff — showing them what to do, motivating them, and conveying the wishes of the owner (top management) and the manager (middle management). The skills required to complete these tasks successfully fall into three categories: technical skills, human skills, and conceptual skills. Although some people may start out with an advantage in one or more of these areas, all three skills can be acquired with some degree of success.

Technical skills

A person who knows how to operate a machine, prepare a financial state­ment, program a computer, or pass a football has technical skills. That is, he or she is able to perform the mechanics of a particular job. Supervisory man­agers, such as production supervisors, must often understand a technical skill well enough to train workers in their jobs and to keep higher-level man­agers informed about problems in the production process. But in certain companies, managers without the relevant technical skills may supervise such highly trained workers as computer programmers, engineers, and accountants.

Regardless of whether they have the technical skills to perform the jobs they supervise, all managers must have some "technical" managerial skills - or administrative skills - such as the ability to make schedules and to read computer printouts. Although many technical skills are not readily transfer­able from one industry to another, administrative skills may often be applied in a wide range of industries. If you are trained to operate textile-cutting ma­chines, you probably would be unable to use your skills in the restaurant business. But if you're an executive who runs a garment business, you might be able to use your administrative skills in another type of manufacturing business.

Human skills

All the skills required to understand other people, to interact effec­tively with them, and to get them working together as a team are human skills. Managers need human skills in countless situations, because their main job is getting things done through people. Even if the manager has the authority to fire anyone at will, human skills are still essential; after all, some employees don't always do good work. One human skill that all managers must have is communication skill - that is, skill at transferring information. In any organization, communication is what keeps internal operations running smoothly and fosters good rela­tions with people outside the organization. Successful communication is a two-way street. A manager should always be attuned to the way people are reacting to what's being said and, most of all, listen to what they have to say in return.

Oral communication Speaking and listening generally take up a substantial part of any business day. Within the firm, there are meetings, presentations, conferences, informal chats between em­ployees at all levels. All require effective oral communication. Outside the firm, sales talks, interviews, speeches, and press conferences require manag­ers to use oral communication to achieve organizational goals.

Written communication Within an organization, especially a large one, memos, letters, progress reports, policy statements, job descriptions, and other forms of written communication circulate constantly. A company's plans, long-range and short-range, must be recorded in the form of policy directives, summaries of high-level meetings, budget statements, rulebooks, and any number of other written documents. At the same time, written com­munication is essential in presenting an organization to the outside world. Letters, press releases, annual reports, sales brochures, advertisements - all play a direct role in shaping a company's public image.

The ability to communicate effectively on paper is thus a valuable skill at all levels of management. There is not enough space here to impart this skill, but a few points deserve special emphasis:

• The message must be suitable for its audience. In explaining how a windmill works, for instance, you would use one style of writing for an elementary-school magazine and quite a different one for a sales brochure directed to potential buyers.

• It must be readable. Long, needlessly complex sentences will only slow the reader and camouflage the message you're trying to put across.

• It must be objective. If you are not careful to balance the message, the reader may easily reject it as biased and unreliable.