Management Functions
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Functions of Management
Introduction
All organizations require leadership and direction at various levels in order to realize direction at various levels in order to realize its goals. To achieve its goals as an organization, a firm must have strong management. Management revolves around four main functions. These include, planning, organizing, controlling of all resources, and leading of people to achieve production goals (Norman and Keeling, 1992). The functions of management are performed by management at all levels, from the president to the supervisors.
Planning
Planning is a function of management that analyzes all relevant information from the past and the present to find probable developments for the future. Once the analyzing is complete, a course of action or a plan is put together to enable the organization to meet its future goals. Some of the planning stages include developing policies and objectives for the various services (Spinner, 1999). For example, equipping the work areas with modern office equipment and staffing the office with qualified employees.
In my current workplace, planning is of high importance. Every change or new procedure is planned thoroughly from the new forms used to the training. This is done to ensure that a new idea to improve production is not implemented without covering every aspect it might affect. Recently, we underwent a change in technology used that included training our mechanics to use a computer versus paper to log in their parts and labor into the computer. This was a challenging plan because many mechanics in our facility had never used a computer.
Organizing
Organizing is a management function is which all economic resources are brought together to accomplish specific objectives. Economic resources consist of the actual work, the environment or workplace, the information currently used, and the workers (Norman and Keeling, 1992). To organize, management applies basic principles to determine working relationships among employees and skills needed to achieve maximum production.
During the organizing phase of our implementation, we had to measure all our resources to provide a budget necessary to achieve our plan of action. Included in this were the amount of workstations, safety conditions, worker training, purchase of upgraded equipment, and the metrics program to measure improvement.
Leading
To successfully achieve an organizations objectives, management leads the workers by motivating and directing them. Leading also includes directing and supervising the office activities and implementing workable personnel policies to maintain desirable morale. In addition, leading involves orienting, training, counseling, empowering, and promoting office personnel.
As a part of management, my job was to motivate and emphasize the importance of the change to our mechanics. Many of them