Effective manager: 15 key boards on track to their own success
Practical guidance
Vadim Milorodov

© Vadim Milorodov, 2023

ISBN 978-5-0060-0688-1

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Introduction

A manager is one of the main parts of any modern organization. A person, on whom the efficiency of building processes and the ability to achieve the goals and objectives of the company largely depends. That is why employers are hunting today for efficient and best managers, who can catch the mood and offer the best solutions, multitasking, and executing at the same time. Today, the manager is becoming a key figure in the activities of any economic entity, which leads to the market demand for competent and qualified managers. An employer is ready to appreciate a manager if he demonstrates a high level of practice, makes results, and shows initiative, and autonomy.

The topic of management efficiency is so large-scale, complex, and diverse that it can be endlessly considered one of the main problems of modern management. The market and the chaotic and unpredictable conditions created by it, largely beyond the control of entrepreneurs and representatives of business structures, simply determine the need to find employees who will meet the established requirements of the employer. Meeting these requirements is the necessary minimum for a candidate to be considered for a position. However, this does not mean that a company will turn down a candidate who is significantly above the average employee. According to current statistics, a similar number of candidates apply to replace each employee. In general, the level of demand for vacancies in the world is quite high.

For this reason, representatives of different types of modern companies – both small businesses and large businesses, their unions and groups, form whole services or departments on personnel selection, and all this only to find the very person who will be able, while in the workplace, to create progress and move with the company to the desired result.

The path to success is largely determined by a person’s involvement and willingness to work independently. For a XXI-century employer, the most important thing is that you as an employee can perform your job duties well and quickly and do not create additional obstacles for the business. However, a wealth of experience shows that this is not enough today. The market is showing changing trends and making new demands on employees. Nowadays, to get a good job at a high-potential company, you must not only show work experience and formal education but also prove your positive non-standard character in practice by coming to the interview, after which you must successfully overcome the adaptation period [19]. It is possible to assess effectiveness only in dynamics and concerning specific functions and metrics, but a little contact and interaction are enough to make a hiring decision. This is only because the manager must understand the likely minimum requirements for him, be willing to work within the rules, and meet the expectations of the employer. Otherwise, the problem of efficiency cannot be solved. Stepping onto the path of improvement, you take on a heavy burden full of frustrations and difficulties, through which you gain invaluable experience. And it is invaluable only because its accumulation is valued by potential and future employers, and will be used by you in other positions.

The management system in a modern company is one of the main parts of development. Realizing this fact, managers try to smooth the process of selecting candidates for the management system as much as possible and encounter many difficulties. These difficulties have a downside for potential candidates and current employees because if you become less effective against other employees, you can probably soon lose your place to be replaced by someone better than you. Such a contradiction requires an objective understanding of the essence of many processes that take place in a modern company and immersion in these processes.

This book is the result of the author’s long and painstaking work as an actor on both sides of the common “kitchen” – as a manager and as the head of his own business, who is now recruiting managers. Through a retrospective of experience, we will try to show what a manager should be, and how the manager can see the best candidate, how the manager to become one of the first on the list of in-demand.

Finally, let us tell you why it is good for you to read this book, and what is its value to the reader:

– You, as a potential job seeker, will learn the basics of the modern manager’s work in a company and all the functions and tasks faced by a manager every day: from the banal routine to the manifestations of true creativity.

– You, as a current employee-manager, will better understand your manager’s desires and requirements and realize your value in this company, learn how to improve your effectiveness and be more likely to move up the career ladder and find out the general rules that any modern organization follows.

– You, as the head of your own business, will find it useful to learn tips on how to set up a manager to work effectively, which have been collected in many years of business management practice.

The content of this book will be useful not only to candidates (applicants) for an executive position in the “dream company”, but to current employees, and heads of business structures themselves, faced with the problem of improving the effectiveness of management personnel and attracting managers, but also a wide range of readers who want to understand who the manager is and why today there is a large-scale hunt for the best representatives of this profession.

Moreover, this book shows the rich managerial experience of the author, demonstrates the contradictions faced by the employee when working in a company, and collapses the expectations that are formed without participation in a coherent management system.

Chapter 1. The Manager in the Management Structure of the Organization: the Head’s Position

General provisions of the modern manager’s work in the company

Manager and head in the construction of relations as a subordinate and subordinate, clearly demonstrate the modern essence of the management apparatus of any company and characterize the readiness of the subject of entrepreneurship to constant evolution. Understanding the essence of the manager in the company is the primary task, predetermining the distribution of labor functions and powers, and allocation of areas of responsibility. Realization of this task as a whole precedes the possibility of effective management of the company – because you, as a head, face the problem of absence or low efficiency of managers.

It is important to understand that management as a whole is a complex concept of managerial terminology, which together boils down to the manifestation of a special kind of professional activity to achieve any pre-determined organizational goals. Management has financial (material) and labor resources at its disposal, serving as a tool on the way to organizational effectiveness.

In this regard, to understand the essence of management, the head should not identify it with the panacea for everything. Management is only a system formed in the organization, but it, like any system, needs competent and well-positioned management. Management, unlike management, has nothing to do with purposeful human activity, becoming only a reflection of events occurring in the process of management and the possibility of achieving goals. In this regard, it is important to clearly distinguish between a management system and the management of a single person.

The manager is one of the participants of the management system, who can implement the functions of management aimed at any of the objects of management [26]. The latter represents the management system itself, which, depending on the particular manager, acquires its properties and features. For example, some managers interact with employees, others lead entire subdivisions, while others create the appearance of working at the local level. Each of them manages his own processes, and some of them do not manage at all.

Indeed, the manager is a purely salaried employee, endowed by management with certain powers, which, as a rule, directly depend on the degree of the head’s confidence in the employee. And the range of these powers determines the place of the manager in the entire management system, his subordinates, as well as the availability of access to certain resources for the development of the company, which outlines the prospects for further growth.

If you are a manager heading a company, you have both finances and people at your disposal; if you are a manager heading a division, you have only other human resources at your command, acting ultimately on the orders of higher leaders and the basis of resources received from them. This vertical hierarchy leads to the formation of levels of the entire management system, which distinguishes top managers, middle managers, and low managers, according to the principle “from the highest to the lowest”. The principled and proportional division of management participants can be represented in the form of a pyramid (pic. 1).

Pic. 1. Management pyramid of the organization.

The existence of this hierarchy is not and cannot be proof of the existence of obstacles to career advancement. Any “low” should have the prospect of promotion to the “middle” or “top” level.

Each of the vertical branches of management has its own goals and tasks, which are delegated to those below. As a result, the most routine and typical operations fall on the shoulders of low-level managers, which leads to their own stereotypes based on the “universality” of the manager, who combines a secretary, a consultant, a janitor, and only then a “manager”. Despite the loud name, this stereotype has its place. The reality is that not every head can be assigned complex tasks on which the result of the entire company will directly depend. The head needs an exceptionally effective manager who will enjoy the personal trust and demonstrate a high reputation. A head may want to distribute all his tasks and authority among his subordinates, but as practice shows, if there is uncertainty about success, such a scheme is ruled out. Your goal in the company is to pass the way from the low-level manager to the middle or top manager, to reach a certain position in the management structure, and only then we can speak about your full-fledged efficiency, a significant contribution.

The common feature of all managers is to solve complex problems for normal functioning, and then already the development of the company [28]. It is the normalization and maintenance of the state of habitual operations, bringing them to completion on time and without disruption that fall on the shoulders of low managers. Therefore, a modern company puts a great deal of effort into finding people with these skills: pic. 2.

Pic. 2. Key skills of a manager in today’s environment.

The difference between the managers of the various vertical levels is that each of them, as we noted earlier, has its own authority and the corresponding size of the tasks that need to be addressed in the course of work activity.

For managers at the lowest level (low-level managers), day-to-day operational tasks based on certain job functions are of paramount importance. It is the “low” position that is associated with “give, bring, step back, and don’t bother” type of work. But in fact, the path of any manager to success always begins with the “low” position, as we indirectly pointed out earlier.

For managers at the middle level (middle managers), there are tasks of a tactical scale, which are usually considered at the level of a particular unit and the focus of its activities. This level is characterized by being responsible for a specific set of established unit functions, such as the purchasing department, in which management is focused on implementing the strategies of top management and achieving minimally predictable results.

Finally, the senior manager (top manager) is responsible for the effective work of the entire system of departments and outlines strategic plans for the functioning of the company and its overall development in the current market environment. He defines the entire management structure of the company because he works “side by side” with the head. Often the top manager himself is the head of the company.

Thus, depending on the place of a manager in the vertical hierarchy, a load of responsibility imposed on him naturally increases, which generally reflects the distribution of expectations of the employer to the candidate for a managerial position, as well as indicating the current level of confidence. Usually, open recruitment of managers is carried out with an emphasis on the low level, with the prospect of gradual promotion “upwards” with a demonstration of minimum abilities and signs of effectiveness, readiness to work independently, and development.

Before describing the basic criteria for determining an effective and ineffective manager, let us note that there is also the so-called horizontal hierarchy of managers, which determines the position of job responsibilities of managers within one level. For example, it may be sales, logistics, finance, and many other managers who are responsible for specific and assigned functions.

The division of managers into effective and ineffective is quite normal, which means that there is a place for prioritizing and selecting employees who can create value for the company and be trusted by their superiors. Let’s start, perhaps, with the obvious signs of inefficiency. An ineffective manager will always seek to complete any task on his own without involving subordinates; by distracting yourself with tasks that you can a priori delegate to another person, you become an ineffective manager. Reach your potential in the most complex tasks rather than taking on generic operations. This is true at all levels of the vertical hierarchy, and the higher you are, the more your inefficiency affects the organization’s bottom line.

An effective manager concentrates on the most difficult and inaccessible activities for other managers, eliminating routine and unnecessary operations by redistributing them among other operational employees. Also, unless we are talking about upper management, a manager is ineffective when he demonstrates his busy and rambunctious activities without trying to engage other subordinates. Demonstrating in this case is nothing but a reflection of idleness, of zero efficiency.

An effective manager, however, meets several expectation characteristics, among them:

– The ability to separate important and urgent matters.

– Managing a team and creating conditions for its development.

– Exceptional professionalism.

– Responsibility only for defined powers.

– Assessment of the state of the environment not for its site (the object of management), but in the context of the global management system – the company. The same applies to the issues of assessing the value of actions, which should be considered through the prism of not only independence but also the global impact on the result of interest to the company.

– Compliance with company rules, regulations, and principles.

Also note that the latter category is often a managerial abyss, which, as practice shows, is underdeveloped in many companies. Its development requires the creation of additional organizational conditions, which we will discuss in more detail below.

Tips for the manager: how to set up a manager to work efficiently

For a manager in an organization to be effective, it is not enough to simply select an effective candidate. You, as a head, must create all the conditions that ensure effectiveness, focusing on prescribing certain rules and measures, compliance with which will achieve minimum performance indicators. Management of managers is based on a whole system of factors, starting from the chosen methods, principles, and style of leadership, the management system itself (which we will talk about in more detail below), and ending with a set of rules, regulations, and prohibitions that will set the manager a certain framework of activity. Of course, limitless possibilities and creativity are good, but how long can your company survive without performing the simplest operations? Our answer is probably not long.

In connection with the understanding of the particular importance of the issue at hand, let’s formulate some of the most important tips-basics, the observance of which will make it possible to create a system of effective management of managers in the company:

– Build your own system of interaction, sticking to the format that is most convenient for you, which will lead to a positive result. Years of practice have shown that effective management requires:

– providing clear, correct, concise, and unambiguous instructions, excluding fantasies and guesswork;

– establishing direct contact on the principle of “speak directly” and pointing out mistakes, criticizing, and giving advice;

– introducing conventions into the chain of command and trivial, generally applicable rules, which at the same time will not be a burden on employees;

– motivating employees and encouraging them to work prospectively, setting additional goals, and incorporating incentives;

– providing direct assistance, except for the transfer of labor functions from one person to another.

– Establish a set of rules: work regulations, prohibitions, general conditions, and rules of interaction, which will be consistent with the general principles and policies of the company. Define the general rules of work in the company, paying special attention to the basics of teamwork: the need for mutual understanding and human relations, avoiding conflicts, disputes, and violations. Describe the general working conditions for all managers and employees: rules for everyone, show the importance of following the rules, give the right to point out mistakes to others and build respect for each other in the team [11]. Clarify inhibitions in work: manifestations of bad moods/negativity, conflicts, emotions, peculiarities of speech, place of politics, religion, or worldview, eliminate the words “do not know”, “cannot do”, “do not remember”, “forgot”, “not my job”, “I do not get for it” and other similar, eradicate cheating and competition. The main reference point is stability, cohesion, strength and personal responsibility, and autonomy, partly limited to the area of responsibility.

– Show the result of the work and tell the manager in what ways and methods he should achieve it. The employee must understand what the ultimate goal of his activity is and how he can track the fulfillment of his task. For example, a sales manager may have the following objectives: direct sales, customer interaction, discounting, and negotiating other terms. The manager must clearly understand where his job functions end and how he must properly demonstrate his results. The best assistance in this matter is the creation of a training manual instruction for employees, which will reflect the order of actions and the only correct approaches to their performance.

– Create the prospect of promotion, awards, training, or other opportunities. For example, conduct regular training sessions with employees, involving them in the process of creating additional motivation. In general, a focus on motivation is the main reference point in setting an employee up for effective performance; therefore, it is important to create all the conditions that motivate the employee.

The career path can be visualized like this: pic. 3.

Pic. 3. The career structure in the company.

However, even if you create all the necessary conditions for effective management, including adhering to the principles described above, no one can guarantee you the success of the management team. Success is largely determined situationally, and compliance with these rules is only one of the few factors that determine the formation of this particular situation and not any other.

Leadership styles, principles and methods of management, approaches to building a management system

As we have already said, the head needs a comprehensive approach to the issue of shaping the entire management system. In this regard, it is conceptually important to determine the state of such areas as management style and specific tools for its implementation. Let’s start with the style itself.

Management style is a portrait of the boss that subordinates should see in front of them. We should note at once that there is no “pure” leadership style in nature, since in practice the manifestations of each of them “mix” into a single whole, demonstrating the individual approach of the head to interaction. However, the scientific practice has identified three main (clearly distinguishable) leadership styles [8]:

– Authoritarian. This style is usually associated with a tough head who works solely for results and excludes the appearance of formal friendships or other relationships. In an authoritarian style, the head is tough, disloyal, somewhat conflicted, and threatening, seeking to instill fear in employees to ensure the effectiveness of certain tasks, to order or point out what “should” rather than “must” be done. The effectiveness of the authoritarian style is conditioned by the specific situation; as many years of practice show, the leader-dictator, if he is competent, can bring the company to a new level, but is not able to make the team healthy, to direct it to a good atmosphere and mutual assistance [4].

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