If you’re contributing to a blog, a blog of any kind on any subject, it is often a challenge to decide what to write about or how to write it. Well we’ve written many articles on management and today I thought… “well, why not go back to basics” after all, many, many of us have had many years of experience, yet every month there are people new to management.
Equally we read there are XYZ many principles. Indeed I found articles saying there were 7 principles, also 5 and 4. I bet I could find someone saying there were 6 too. But here I want to touch on 4 principles that I personally feel need to be embraced if you’re to be a good manager and I guess not only do you have to embrace them, you also have to be pretty good and practiced at them.
Planning
Having run my own business, I’ve come to realise that if you don’t plan, likelihood is something will go wrong – ok it might just go right, but the likelihood is that unless you spend time, perhaps sitting quietly somewhere considering in what direction you want the business to go, it won’t get where you would ultimately like it to go. Lets face it, if you don’t have a vision of what you would consider success, then how will you impart that vision, (the vision of what you have planned) to anyone else?
Organization
The reason organizational skills are so important, is that if you are unable to get all your ducks in a row (so to speak) how are you going to implement the plan you’ve worked so hard on? So you need to organize your team, be that marketeers, sales, production and others to produce what you have planned to produce, at the production costs you have calculated , and sell them to the markets you have chosen to sell into.
Leadership
Ultimately, you can plan your plan and organize your team, but if you can’t lead, encourage, communicate and excite your team to work effectively together then all the planning in the world won’t bring success.
Control
Without controls how will you know that you’re producing the products you planned to produce and selling them at the price you planned to sell them at, to the markets you planned to sell them into? Control is simply essential to ensure the company’s mission is achieved.
As a foot note I would add that in relation to control a system similar (in essence) to ISO 9002 will be a boon. I personally feel that 9002 is not for every company, but the principles it dictates are good ones and can identify areas that need more control than others, also making individual team members account for their own particular area of responsibilities.
