Functions Of Management

In this day of global competitiveness, company can no longer assume the company brand or previous business model and management style can sustain the company excellency in an ever evolving business arena. Not only organizations need to deliver value and benefits that set them a part from their competitors but management must always be on the look-out to apply management skills in ways that allow the company to ripe the benefits of product innovation with the utmost quality outcome. Quality and innovative products alone is not enough to sustain an organization bottom line profit. Companies need to produce their goods at the most efficient speed and cost competitiveness. To realize such a comprehensive strategy, management will practice the four pillars of management functions such as planning, organizing, leading and controlling depending on how far out the goals timeline.

Planning is the process of working with the company resources to achieve the company's goals which has been pre-determined during the brainstorming or pre-goal setting sessions. The company resources here are referring to either people, hard goods, machineries, capital, finance and others resources deem need. Planning often include analysis of current condition, future and even past objectives so that appropriate and strategic action can be plan. Planning is often refer to as strategic goal setting and usually considered long-term goals. My most recent employer, Trianz, for example, have a corporate calendar of 1 year, 5 years and beyond. When we had a new HR manager last year and to break the ice, she has spent one on one time with each of the staff to ask what changes we would like to see or change within our department. During our meeting, I proposed that we should have a department calendar for our Human Resources department as I hate to see our department being responsive reactive. Even though we call it a calendar, it acts more like a road map or planning guide for our department more than its purpose as the typical calendar. As a department, we have events or tasks that we need to be complete on an annual basis. With such a road map or planning guide, we can allocate our resources and plan to meet such deadline efficiently such as Open Enrollment, discrimination testing, census preparation for Open Enrollment, year end preparation and W-2 audit, W-2's deliveries. As the sole person responsible for most of these tasks, I felt the need to be more organized on these major tasks, hence the department calendar or planning guide.

Speaking of organizing which involving the coordination of various sources like human, financial, physical, informational and other resources to complete successfully the organization's planning goals. On a department level, at Trianz, we have department quarterly kick-off, usually off site where we will meet and review our progress of the previous quarter or quarters and make announcement of upcoming plans. During these kick off meetings, we also have the Vice President from our department as well as representatives from the executive members to offer guidance on where and how they are going lead the company to our next path of success.

What is leading, one would ponder? What and how these strategic thinkers would lead us by? Quarters after quarters, up to the actual kick-off date, I am