Free Custom «What Is Management, and why Is It so Hard to Do It Well?» Essay Paper

Introduction

Management can be defined as the process of the organization that encompasses strategic planning, managing resources, setting of objectives, deploying financial and human resources required to attain the set objectives, and evaluation of the end results. Also, management includes the process of storing and recording of information and facts to use in the organizations and others to use later. Management comprises of functions that cannot be limited only to supervisors and managers. Therefore, each member in the organization has a responsibility to do reporting and management functions as a component of the job (Thompson & Strickland 2000, pp. 47-51). This essay discusses why it is hard for managers to carry out their managerial roles effectively.

The management of a business irrespective of its size is a huge task. Usually, the world around us is dangerous and complex and change constantly occurs. Therefore, due to continuous changes in the organization, surprises occur regularly. Thus, there exists no unending pressure for people in managerial levels or with managerial roles to perform effectively whether times are bad or good.  On the other hand, companies too are complex. The bigger the company or an organization becomes, the more intricate they tend to become. Therefore, coordinating the efforts of complex companies and organizations becomes a challenge to managers. Company executives face dilemma that lack easy answers. Furthermore, their task keeps on getting longer. The vast process of management creates agendas that compete resulting to the wearing down of managers. In addition, managers get bogged down with video conferences, meetings, emails and phone calls, the majority of them have grueling travelling schedules. As a result, time becomes a scarce resource for managers to utilize (David 2005, pp. 107-111).

The difficulties that arise in management start from managers who become too tough on skills of technical nature and not tough enough on entrepreneur or managerial skills. Usually, technical skills enable a manager to develop a great service or product, a skill that the majority of people perceive is the most vital for a business to succeed. Therefore, the majority of managers who tend to embrace and lay emphasis on technical skills find it hard to delegate. However, when the people in charge have managerial skills, they possess the potential to utilize the company resources and make several accomplishments. Managerial skills enable managers to train others, establish accountability in other people, assess compliance, change and evaluate procedures to produce better results. Therefore, for managers to effectively and efficiently manage an organization and produce appealing results, they ought posses the two fundamental skills, managerial and technical skills (Zenger & Folkman 2002, pp. 115-117).

The majority of managers are poor in management due to the imbalance of managerial and technical skills. Such managers tend to  be extremely technically skilled  and managerially unskilled, even though they tend to believe that the outstanding technical skills makes them eligible to be good organizational managers. Usually, managers who are well equipped with technical skills have a habit of abdicating instead of delegating. This implies that such managers offer their subordinates tasks to perform on a scale that is limited without supervision, proper training, feedback and evaluation. Eventually, when they check the work done, they discover that it has been done opposite to the expectations. These managers fail to realize that it is the lack of their skills in management that led to the situation in which a person does not have the potential to reconstruct their work. As a result, they become unsatisfied with the task, and since they lack managerial skills to amend the situation, they are compelled to do the work themselves (Drucker & Maciariello 2008, pp. 34-39).

Those managers who exhibit the character trait that has been highlighted above are the ones who get unsatisfied and overworked because they fail to trust their subordinates to do a task for them. They lack the ability to concentrate on entrepreneur and managerial tasks in the organization and become unsuccessful to grow or operate in an efficiency that is maximum. The major fault as to why it is hard to manage a business starts from company or organizational owners and bosses. The majority of the bosses and owners have excellent technical skills. However, these bosses fail to train their managers properly to manage the organization instead of working. On the other hand, those who have excellent technical skills tend to be promoted instead of those who have excellent managerial skills. This results to the failure of the organization. To become an effective manager and effectively delegate authority within the organization demands more managerial skills than technical skills (Flynn 2006, pp. 143-147).

Management is a leadership skill that is extremely critical. It offers managers time to perform the task that they have been hired to accomplish, just as it develops people underneath. However, it becomes hard to delegate when two things are in existence, doubt and ego. When managers have doubt, they tend to believe that their subordinates, as well as employees lack the skills to perform managerial tasks. On the other hand, ego tends to compel managers to deem that no one can perform tasks like they can do, they tend to believe that they can perform managerial roles vastly and effectively more than anyone else. However, people who have managerial roles in the organizations and upholding ego and doubt find it hard to delegate. The main purpose of being a company manager or leader is to develop those around us. Managers ought to share responsibility and work within the organization (Robbins & DeCenzo 2001, pp. 90-93).

Usually, becoming a manager does not seem to be that complex. The majority of aspiring managers tend to believe that being a manager and becoming a leader and a supervisor entails commanding people to complete some tasks. However, it is apparent for those who have been to managerial positions that management is more than just combining production, people and policy. It is hard to do management well because some people have experienced poor leadership examples in their lives. Management is just like parenting in several ways. Therefore, those who find it hard to delegate authority well might merely be following the previous leader example. On the other hand, not every person can be an excellent manager; therefore, some people unfortunately pass their awful managerial habits down through several organizational levels (David 2005, pp. 116-119).

It is also hard to manage well because the process of management involves people who pose a challenge to the manager. Usually, some workers fail to become motivated in the work place, whereas others come with emotional issues to the place of work. Therefore, it is the role of the manager to figure out the employees who possesses an agenda, the one to trust, the one who is composed under pressure, as well as the employee who is highly likely to create unrest among other workers. This implies that the manager has to be a group or an individual therapist in a professional sense while maintaining a professional distance levels from the rest of the employees. On the other hand, the managers must build rapport and be approachable, in spite of the continuous reality that relationship in power must exist (Thompson & Strickland 2000, pp. 63-71).

Management becomes difficult when managers are compelled to make hard decisions. Usually, the right decision in the organization is not clear always, and in the majority of cases, a person can have a glimpse of more than one outcome value. As a result, it makes people to become shy in making major organizational decisions, merely because they desire not to fail. However, failure of a manager to make decisions can worsen the state of the organization. This is the major reason as to why the majority of people avoid managerial positions, merely because they want to avoid being faced with tough scenarios. Management presents several surprising hurdles that frustrate the majority of expectations and preconceptions. Therefore, the process of organizational management can only become easily and quickly to the managers who comprehend the managerial challenges (Drucker & Maciariello 2008, pp.43-47).

The process of management is very diverse. Therefore, for a person to be extremely effective becomes hard due to the huge gulf that divides management work from individual perfumers’ work. The majority of managers initially think that delegating other people will become an extension of delegating themselves. They tend to assume that they will be performing what they performed previously, as well as exercise more delegation over their tasks and the task of others. However, they discover that they ought to make a shift into a strange and new work environment. This is true, more especially if one is a producing manager who combines the responsibility of a manger, as well as an individual contributor (Flynn 2006, pp. 150-154).

Bureaucratic theory by Max Weber’s advocates for management that is based on expert and thorough training, written records, official activity being given the first precedence over other activities. In addition, the theory also purports that the management of organizations should adhere to knowable and stable rules. Management is difficult because when a person becomes a manger, it requires personal transformation and learning. Becoming an efficient and effective manager desires that a person not only gains new knowledge and skill, but also, for the person to experience hard personal transformation. Therefore, those people who become managers ought to learn to perceive themselves, as well as their work in a different way. Thus, they ought to establish deeper self-awareness, new values, increased maturity of emotions, and the potential to apply wise judgment. The majority of managers, for instance, get blamed of being management freaks since they lack delegation. On the other hand, the issue of identity in such managers controls their desires in delegating authority. They fail to change how they perceive themselves their contribution, as well as the value added by their role as managers (Schermerhorn 2002, pp. 12-19).

When one becomes a manager, changes that are personal and deep occur and require them to establish, usually years. The majority of managers find it hard to delegate well because when they are new, they begin receptive to learning and change due to their original discomfort in the new position. However, as they gain the concepts and skill of the process of management, they become extra confident and stop fearing eminent failure. As a result, they become complacent. Usually, each organization has layed down standard practices, policies, guidelines and rules. Once managers have learned, they get along well such that even new managers use their expertise to get along. Instead of tackling a problem of performance, they fill appraisal form and negotiate with the involved person. They aim in meeting the budget since its their requirement. As a result, they fail to think of what can be possible, as well as focus on what can be expected. With time they grow comfortable and their management worsens (Robbins & DeCenzo 2001, pp. 97-99).

Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management theory advocates that organizations should have a system that ensures managers are well trained in handling their practices as opposed to permitting them personal prudence when handling tasks. Moreover, he alleged that managements should share the workload evenly among the workers and perform the role of instructing as workers provide the labor and each group performing what it is best suited to do. Furthermore, Taylor’s theory also believed that complex tasks would be broken down into subtasks so as to ensure optimum performance of each subtask.

Conclusion

Management is the process of the organization that encompasses strategic planning, managing resources, setting of objectives, deploying financial and human resources and evaluation of the end results. From the essay, it is apparent that several factors contribute to the difficulties experienced in the process of management such as doubt, ego, imbalance of managerial and technical skills, delegations of authority, as well as learnt knowledge and skills. In order for managers to be effective in their management practice, they ought to apply theories formulated by Frederick Taylor and Max Weber.