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MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONS: THE KEY FOR EFFECTIVE
AND EFFICIENT LEADERSHIP
By
JOEL L. PELENIO
Doctoral Student
As managers, we need to know the tenets of management functions to be able to navigate our organizations to the fulfillment of their vision, mission and goals. Our thorough knowledge of the functions of management (planning, leading, organizing, controlling and staffing) would serve as our quantum leap in reaching the visions that we have set for our organizations.
Planning involves selecting missions and objectives and the actions to achieve them. It requires decision-making. For every organization, planning process must be realistic and agreeable to the scientific approach in solving any problem that would confront the organization. That is, all activities in the planning process must also be well-defined in order to achieve what are the desired outcomes of the activities. One given example that the reporter, Mr. Robert E. Roperos, gave was the processes on how SWOT Analysis should be done.
Organizing is viewed as the activities to collect and configure or arrange resources in order to implement plans in a highly effective and efficient fashion. And these resources do not only refer to materials because aside from material, we also have machines and man that should be well utilized for the advancement of the organization. Without these three resources being organized, all the process of the organization will really be negatively affected. The problem of Mrs. Nora Molde in one of her employees is a concrete example that resources need to be organized. If she fails to give proper intervention on this, there will be a tendency that her organization will not work very well. But based on my assessment of her narrations, she only needs to expose and give more training to that employee in order to address the problem. Leading. “Leading means inspiring…” A manager should strive to become an inspiration to the rest of his/her employees. When Employees will follow a manager because the manager is the boss. However, a manager that is an inspiration means that employees follow that person because they believe in what the manager is doing and they are trying to help the company achieve its goals. Finding ways to inspire employees means coaching them and motivating them to succeed as integral parts of the company.
When Mr. Jonathan Jomonong reported on this topic, the discussion was brought back to Maam Nora’s human resource problem probably because of the concepts on coaching and motivating. I strongly believe that her employee still needs further coaching and motivation regarding her work so that she can perform her tasks efficiently and effectively.
Controlling. Instead of defining what is controlling in management, I want to make a little emphasis on the characteristics of the Effective Control Systems: (1) Control at all levels in the business; (2) Acceptability to those who will enforce decisions; (3) Flexibility; (4) Accuracy; (5) Timeliness; (6) Effectiveness; (7) Understandability; (8) Balance between objectivity and subjectivity; and (9) Coordinated with planning, organizing and leading. With all these characteristics present in our organizations, we can be assured that all will be well with us in managing our organizations. While we look into the direction where our organization is heading, along the way, we need to consider and take effect the abovementioned characteristics in order to ensure that our organization is really heading towards the achievement of our organizational goals. And when we say, “we need consider and take effect the abovementioned characteristics”, we mean that every now and then we do monitoring and evaluation because this is the ultimate way by which we can gauge the performance of our human resources, material resources and machine resources.
My senses were caught by a quotation in the report of Mrs. Marivic Cuizon that says, “Management not only has to see the accomplishment of the goals but also, has to look into the process that their way is feasible for the organization or company.” For me, this statement alone explains every thing about controlling as one of the functions of management. Our long term goal is really to achieve the mandates of the vision, mission and goals of our organization, and along the process of doing it, we need to do practical, reasonable and realistic endeavors that benefit everybody who is in the organization.
