Through times, the role of a manager
has been experiencing changes. This was caused by the changes of consumer
behavior, evolving organizational structures, and last but not least, rapid
technology development. Managers had to accommodate to every changes in either
of the three to be able to do their job decently. The same today, a lot of managers
are in position where they have to chose whether to alter their current
techniques or not, because the market and the adjacent areas of sale are
changing very quickly.
The major change in an organization
consists in inclination towards customization versus standardization. As
competitiveness grows, more rivals want to obtain bigger market shares. This
way, customization becomes a very powerful tool that attracts customers much.
In such an approach, managers have to take into account not customers’ needs
and wants, as they used to before, but rather they should consider each
customer separately. Of course, there are organizations that have to work for
every customer individually, like advertising agencies, or barber’s shops, they
literary cannot provide one and the same good or service for all customers,
their business would then become unprofitable. Such kinds of organizations do
not count. Great example of the ones that do count would be companies that
produce clothes. Nike, as well as Levi’s has changed their approach
tremendously over last years. Their intrinsic life of organization has been altered
by the consumers’ demand of customized tangible goods. As a result, managers’
function has also been changed and has become more customer-driven. Prominent
examples of customization were evident when both of the listed above companies
offered unique services for every customer. One can observe at their website
that every customer can pick his own color for shoes, not choose out from the
offered list, and then have his name or unique id written on the side of each
shoe.
Another change that most of the organizations,
as well as managers, experience is the change of the organizational structure.
Since the primary tasks of an organization change, as discussed above, inner
structure of the company also has to be changed, and that is where managers
must perform the best they can. In order to manage employees properly, the
basic step they have to implement is pick the most appropriate theory of
organization, the model that suits their companies the most. This is usually
not an easy task because one might consider contingency theory to be the most
appropriate, while actually the best model in the situation would be systems
theory. Furthermore, management theorists have developed another organizational
theory that a manager would be likely to choose in today’s extremely
competitive business world, and that is chaos theory, which is mostly on the
natural randomness and chaos, or as it is often referred to enthropy.
It is
clear that in today’s world there are no very successful businesses that do not
have a solid management. A manager is a position that has high importance and
they help their respective companies run as smoothly as possible. Without this
position it would take longer for things to get done because they are the
executive position in the company, which means that they take care of the
entire system and they do not worry about individual tasks in the workplace.
Instead of doing all the work themselves they create the efficient way for a
group of people to do it the fastest way possible. There is a countless number
of characteristics that would help make the ideal manager but it is nearly
impossible for a manager to cover all of them. The best managers use all the
resources to make sure they have a plan and the fastest way of achieving it.
After learning all of the characteristics, techniques and theories, I now know what I could do best to become a good manager. One thing that I found very important was to have cultural intelligence. Almost every business has a good amount of diversity and there has to be a way of dealing with that. Cultural intelligence basically means that a manager has to be able to come up with a response after dealing with a situation where the manager has to interpret unfamiliar gestures. It can be hard to understand someone because of a cultural difference but a manager has to see past that and be able to deal with the situation at hand. Adaption to other cultures becomes necessary if a job was acquired and happened to be in another country. Managers should be able to understand the local customs, norms and beliefs of the location they work in. Cultural intelligence includes the fact that you have to pick out clues from a situation or misunderstanding and be able to respond in an appropriate way.
After learning all of the characteristics, techniques and theories, I now know what I could do best to become a good manager. One thing that I found very important was to have cultural intelligence. Almost every business has a good amount of diversity and there has to be a way of dealing with that. Cultural intelligence basically means that a manager has to be able to come up with a response after dealing with a situation where the manager has to interpret unfamiliar gestures. It can be hard to understand someone because of a cultural difference but a manager has to see past that and be able to deal with the situation at hand. Adaption to other cultures becomes necessary if a job was acquired and happened to be in another country. Managers should be able to understand the local customs, norms and beliefs of the location they work in. Cultural intelligence includes the fact that you have to pick out clues from a situation or misunderstanding and be able to respond in an appropriate way.
