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MANAGEMENT AS A STRATEGIC TOOL FOR ORGANIZATIONAL GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

MANAGEMENT AS A STRATEGIC TOOL FOR ORGANIZATIONAL GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

Michael Ikenna OkaforWhen we talk of management and managers, most readers are going to take their minds to only those who have “manager” attached to their job titles or those whom their organizations placed on the “management” cadre. This is far from it. As for me, a manager is anyone who drives organizational objectives through people. So, even if you are a driver in your organization or an Administrative Officer who supervises the works of other people, this makes you a manager since you manage their activities to ensure that they align with that of the general organization.

Managers play good and essential roles in every organization, but it is only good managers that drive the goal of any organization. This is because management and managers oversee motivating, monitoring, planning, driving performance, ensuring compliance, and managing conflicts. They also ensure that employees are rightfully engaged, projects are completed, and service or product quality is maintained. Therefore, one can safely say that management (an act of managing) is the use of key skills-sets and practices to help organizations achieve their highest potential. The good news is that management skills can be learned.

Management has three basic scopes in the context of an organization from my discovery. They are;

We shall focus on Managing People as this is the core of management. It is people who drive the performance and performance drives the entire survival of the business.

Over the weekend, I came across a video by Rajiv Talreja who is an Entrepreneur and Personal Growth Analyst. In this video, he points out that there are basically three generations of workers. The first generation he calls the Industrial Revolution workers who mainly work just to get food. The second he calls the Information Revolution workers who worked to have a better standard of living and now the Digital or Social Revolution workers who work mainly to have a good quality of life. In all these, the management style of these set of workers at various points in time varies. A good manager must be able to understand this.

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This means the Social or Digital Revolution Generation, which for me is the Generation X and the Millennia fall under works to gain social status (fame, name, recognition, appreciation) they need quality of life (spending time with people, quality of environment, quality of school their kids attend, role, opportunity). Therefore, Managers and Management must understand these changing dynamics and create mechanisms to address the wants of the people they manage.

To be a successful manager who can optimize performance to achieve successful business goals requires that one must be tactical, hands-on, and have leadership skills as well as possess agile management skills. This is because there is a thin line between a manager and a leader. One such leadership skill is being visionary and strategic. Being visionary and strategic implies that you make plans and decisions now for your organization that would position you ahead of your competitors. One typical example was in 2020 during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic. Most organizations survived today because they had begun to make plans should such happen even when they never knew if it would happen, how, or when.

This brings me to another point for a manager to be strategic, he/she must conduct a SWOT Analysis of all situations (Please see my article on that) weighing all options, especially external factors such as market, final, cultural, and global affairs. All these and many similar of such external factors must be put into consideration when managing people in today’s organization. This is because competition is not seen alone in getting into originations, but it’s also seen between business entities battling to get hold of the best staff. Staff in turn are now choosing organizations they wish or wish not to stay.

In Agile Management, a phrase from agile project management requires that managers must adopt certain methodologies to achieve its goal. One such strategy is being proactive to mitigate certain management risks before their occurrence. Where corrective measures are taken after an incident, agile management requires that one must be responsibly and responsively reactive not just to solve the current situation but to proffer immediate and long-term solutions.

In conclusion, organizations of today through their managers and management must harness peoples’ skills, build culture, and create an inspiring vision, and inclusive strategies to bring innovation among its members to achieve their organizational objectives.

Ikenna M. Okafor,

(SmeDoctor)

Human Resource Manager @ Ammasco International Limited

Management Consultant @ Integrate Institute of Professional Management

WhatsApp: +234(0)7032940777

LinkedIn Profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ogahr

KEYWORDS

#SmeDoctor #OgaHR, #Management #Leadership #Manager #Organizations #Strategy #Managing #Objective #Growth #AgileManagement #IIPM #Certification #Workshop #Training

Editorial Team:

Trustlyne Akalezi – Editor-in-Chief | Adeyemi Caleb – Member | Michael Ikenna Okafor – Member

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