Archive for September, 2011
Stakeholders in business management are those people who make a difference in your position. They can be your employees with specific skill sets who need to be placed in certain positions. The ability to place employees in the right positions will help project productivity. Stakeholders are also those people who have a stake in what you do at work. These might be your managers or other departmental personnel you work with. They can also include big clients. Knowing who the important stakeholders are in terms of your position at work can help you enhance your career by developing good working relationships with them.
Stakeholders have expectations of you as a manager. You need to know what the expectations are of you from all of the stakeholders in your position. If you don’t know what is expected of you, you won’t know if you are making everyone happy. Employees expect you to teach them when they don’t understand, work with them, motivate them, create a good working environment, and celebrate when success occurs. Management expects much more. Learn everything expected from your stakeholders so there are no surprises. This way you can make everyone happy and be successful in your position.
Business management also requires you to know how stakeholders are measuring your success as a manager. You might know what the expectations of the stakeholders are, but you might not know how you are being measured. Completion of a project might not be good enough. Your business management skills might be measured from a teamwork perspective. If you have assigned tasks to your employees and everyone is working individually, then you have completely failed their expectations even though the project was completed. As a manager, you are required to know how you are being measured so you can meet the goals properly. It is difficult to be successful if you don’t know how you are being measured by every stakeholder.
Business management requires you to know everything about the stakeholders of your position. The stakeholders in your position can make or break you. If you don’t know who they are then you will not be successful as a manager in business management.
A core business management skill that a manager or executive must learn is the ability to create a working environment that is conducive to effective teamwork. A successful manager is well aware of their own weaknesses and that they cannot do everything. They understand that they have to leverage their time and other peoples time and skill to get the job done. To be able to leverage peoples time and skills effectively requires a manager that can bring people together and work towards a specific goal.
Successful managers have the ability and skill to empower staff to maximise their potential in being productive and to excel at their job. This is achieved by ensuring that team members buy in to the project that needs to be accomplished. An effective manager will define an objective that each team member will accept and agree on. They will ensure that each member has a specific role and that each member fully understands that role and what is expected of them. They will keep each team member motivated by keeping them fully informed of their progress and milestones achieved.
One habit of an effective manager is to devise a to-do list or plan of action for the department or team under their control. Within this to-do list is the tasks that needs to be accomplished and their priority level and time schedules detailing when each task needs to be accomplished. An effective manager will ensure that each team member adopts the same approach to planning their own work.
The team should be fully informed of what the task entails and when each one needs to be accomplished. The responsibility of each specific task should be allocated to one team member only. Agree with them on what needs to be done and the deadlines to get the job done. Each team members to-do list should clearly outline who is responsible for which task and when.
A key business management skill that any business manager or executive should have is the ability to solve problems. The ability to solve problems is a prerequisite of effective decision making which really is to find solutions to problems or overcome obstacles.
In order to come up with the best solution to solving a problem a manager must find the route or source of the problem. When solving a problem relating to business there are 5 areas where the problem could originate from. These 5 areas include the following:
• Business Environment
• Human Resources
• Machinery and technology
• Method
• Materials
When you have uncovered a problem you need to ask a set of questions when you are assessing the problem in order to find the best solution. For example, if there is a problem within human resources regarding a lack of staff or training then, possible solutions could be bringing in extra part time staff to complete a project.
When solving a problem after you have identified it, it is important that you analyse it thoroughly to find out what is its cause. It is important that you look at all the possible causes before acting on one. You find that if you make a decision to act on the first cause you may find that there is another cause that you may have missed. A good example would be the problem where there is a downturn in sales in a certain market that the company is selling to.
After analysing the problem a possible cause of a downturn in sales could be attributed to a lack of adequate sales training. However, under further analysis it could be found that the market being sold to is not a buyer’s market. That is why it is important to keep searching for the possible cause to ensure the real one is found and dealt with.