Functions Of Management

Functions of Management

Andrew Noel

University of Phoenix

Functions of Management

What is "management"? According to McNamara (2006), in the traditional sense, it often refers to either a group of individuals or a set of activities that have to do with the four functions of management (planning, organizing, leading and controlling)(Ð'¶1). In most organizations, this term reoccurs throughout its organizational structure with each different level of management performing the same four key functions.

Planning

Of the four key elements of management, the most important is planning. It has to do with being able to see how the decisions of today can potentially impact the decisions of tomorrow. As well as setting the goals for the business to achieve. Planning is deemed as the key building block of which the other three elements stack upon.

Within Bank of America (B of A), our plans are set by the chief executives. Often these plans are very high level and are passed done through division heads and managers, each step of the way being added to or modified, with each manager adjusting the detail to fit there area. Each manager is responsible for reporting up on a quarterly bases how well they are achieving the overall goals and plans set fourth by the executives.

Organizing

The second key element of management is organizing. This means being able to understand and align the areas of the company in the best possible way for the effectiveness of communication, coordination, and achieving the overall mission.

At B of A it has been a real challenge to figure out how the company is organized. It changes almost every six months and seems to be in constant chaos. All though I don't think this is through any poor planning of either chief executives or subordinates. I think it has to do more with the constant mergers we are going through. In the past three years I have been with this company, we have gone through 3 major mergers. The first year it was actually the bank I worked for that was merged. The second year it was another bank and last year it was a major credit card company. Mergers always bring out the worst and the best in an organization, often throwing the management structure out of balance. Communication breaks down, since it takes managers months to figure out what to do with all the new employees doing duplicate functions, redundant information systems, and not to mention with managers doing duplicate functions, it becomes difficult to know who reports to whom. In my company's case, we are still going through some of these growing pains from the last merger which technically was finalized back in October 2006. We still have employees struggling to find a place where they fit and in attempting to get recognized.

Leading

The third element of management is leading. Leading is simply defined as being able to direct and motivate individuals to achieve the goals and objectives of the business. This phase often requires that you have some basic core competencies, such as, an understanding of the job tasks, the ability to problem solve, forward thinking, goal setting abilities, and most of all the ability to influence people to do what needs to be done.

Since B of A has emerged from a recent merger, I have begun to see and understand how the newly acquired employees with in management positions have begun to lead and shape the organizational areas. With in my own division, we are seeing a large shift from regular employees to using more contractors,