Identified as Contributing to Effective Managerial Performance

This report is to consult a range of sources of information to investigate and report on the key factors that have been identified as contributing to effective managerial performance.

According to the Harvard Business Review: What makes a leader, effective leaders are alike in some crucial way, they will all have a high degree of emotional intelligence and they understand their workers, they know how to get them in commitments. No matter how talent how smart a person is, without these he won’t become a great leader. The leaders need to be self-aware in order to fully understand their moods, emotions and what their impact to others is. It should be combined with self-regulations which are the ability to control and redirect all your bad moods, to talk simple, it is to think before you act. As manager is the top of a company, his actions influencing not only himself, but also other employees. Therefore, managers need to think more twice before they act.

Apart from the manager’s emotion, the employees’ one is an important issue to concern as well. They will need to be motivated so have passions to work for reasons other than money or status. With this intelligence, the company can pursue goals effectively with energy and persistence. Therefore, a knowledge of major theories of motivation such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, Herzberg’s two factory theory, McClelland’s need theory, theory X and theory Y, and expectancy theory of motivation is essential (Stoner & Freeman, 1992). Manager should understand the emotional makeup of other people then treat people in different ways according to their emotional reactions. This could help managers to find commons of the workers and effectively joining them in groups.

“As much as you need a strong personality to build a business from scratch, you also must understand the art of delegation,” says Richard Branson. As stated before, good management didn’t determine by how clever a person is, of course managers should be good at what they do, but they are not required to know everything. The main job of the managers is to teach, or to let the employees understand what they are doing. When a manager’s influencing the company and his employees, which is what we call the minority influencing the majority. In theory, minority will influence the majority that easily as majority influence minority, it is because majority could stimulate the effect of conformity. When minority want to influence people significantly, they will need to be sure of their believing, sticking into it and make full commitment to achieve their goal. A good example explains that is Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apples. He won’t sit on the fence, once he made the decisions, he won’t U-turn; Even U-turning, that’s because he has found an alternative method to improve product: he won’t flip-flop or vacillate. A good manager should have a variety of skills, he needs to show others he’s unique in some ways from others.

He needs to have the following skills according to The one minute manager: The first one is the conceptual skills, it is the ability to use information to solve business problems, identification of opportunities for innovation, recognizing problem areas and implementing solutions, selecting critical information from masses of data, understanding the business uses of technology, understanding the organization’s business model. The second one is communication skills which are the ability to transform ideas into words and actions, credibility among colleagues, peers, and subordinates, listening and asking questions, presentation skills. The third one is effectiveness skills, including multitasking, working at multiple tasks at parallel, negotiating skills, project management, reviewing operations and implementing improvements, setting and maintaining performance standards internally and externally, setting priorities for attention and activity and time management. The last one is the interpersonal Skills including coaching and mentoring skills, diversity skills, working with diverse people and culture, networking within and outside the organization. With all these skills, employees will take the manager as a role model and will follow his steps.

People loves to feel engaged in something they are doing, the manager needs to let the employees engaged in the ideas he made, even though he had made a decision. It is because two is better than one and no one’s perfect, therefore other people’s advice might make a brilliant improvement of the idea. Apple is organized like a startup — teams working on products with zero committees. “We trust the other folks to come through with their parts without watching them all the time,” says Steve Jobs. He also pointed out that the good employees need to have power to make decision, as he said, “if you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions.” The company should be run by ideas instead of hierarchy, the ideas will not be considered depends on whose ideas they are, so that the best ideas should always be taken. Compare with Virgin, Richard likes to motivate employees by giving them a stake in his ventures. He believes that this can motivate them even more successfully and then delegates. The Gallop Organization, which studied employee engagement in 7,939 business units in 36 companies, found that employee engagement was positively associated with performance in a variety of areas, including increased customer satisfaction, profitability and productivity, and reduced employee turnover, data provided by Harter, Schmidt & Hayes, 2002.

We made comparisons between the two big firms- The New York Times and Virgin which adopt autocratic and democratic management style respectively. An Autocratic style means that the manager makes decisions unilaterally, and without much regard for subordinates. As a result, decisions will reflect the opinions and personality of the manager; this in turn can project an image of a confident, well managed business. On the other hand, subordinates may become overly dependent upon the leaders and more supervision may be needed. In contrast, in a Democratic style, the manager allows the employees to take part in decision-making, therefore everything is agreed upon by the majority. The communication is extensive in both directions (from employees to leaders and vice-versa). This style can be particularly useful when complex decisions need to be made that require a range of specialist skills. For example, when a new ICT system needs to be put in place, and the upper management of the business is computer-illiterate. From the overall business’s point of view, job satisfaction and quality of work will improve. The downside is that the decision-making process is severely slowed down, and the need of a consensus may avoid taking the ‘best’ decision for the business. It can go against a better choice of action. However, it is difficult to say which management style is the best as they both have pros and cons.

In a conclusion, we think the employees’ involvement contributes the most to an effective managerial performance. High-involvement work practices that provide employees with the power to make workplace decisions, training to build their knowledge and skills in order to make and implement decisions effectively, information about how their actions affect business unit performance, and rewards for their efforts to improve performance, can result in a win-win situation for employees and managers. Employees seem to enjoy working in high involvement workplaces, and managers reap enhanced performance from these systems.

However, all of the other factors are vital important, without anyone of those, a company cannot be managed effectively.

References:

Harvard Business Review: What makes a leader
The one minute manager
Steve jobs biography
Article: Lesson 1: Be A Good Leader from evancarmichael.com Harter, Schmidt & Hayes, 2002
Youtube video: Steve Jobs Talks About Managing People