In all business and human organizations, management plays a vital

role in today’s complex society. Everyday new organizations are born and
each of these organizations requires managing. Managers are frequently
obliged to plan, organize, lead or direct and control an organization for the
purpose of accomplishing goal. With this, managers are required to continue
to do these jobs.

However, managerial jobs are of different task. Not all managers

perform exactly the same activities or face the same problems. These
differences are to be expected because management is not a closed system.
With the different environments we have such as demographic, economic,
natural, social, political, and technological in which organizations operate;
managers are compelled to deal with it.

Regardless of the above differences, all managerial jobs share certain

aspects. Managers are responsible and accountable for the activities of the
people they direct.

Through this, management is simply the act of getting people together

to accomplish and obtain desired goals and objectives. It is a process of work
that that involves guidance and direction of a group of people toward
organizational goals.

Management is both art and science. It is the art of influencing and

making people more effective and efficient than they would have been
without a manager. The science is how manager do that. There are four
basic management pillars: planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling.

Planning. One of a manager’s important jobs is planning. Good

management starts with good planning. Without a plan, the organization will
never succeed. Planning can be defined in different ways. We say we are
planning when we list our activities for the day or when we plan for an out-of-
town vacation trip by next year. However in management activity, planning
involves selecting missions and objectives and deciding on the action to
achieve them; it requires decision making that is choosing a course of action
from among alternatives.

In today’s competitive environment, managers must evaluate the

present position of his organization to see where it is goes and set specific,
practical and quantifiable objectives to develop plans to achieve his goals.

Basically there are three types of planning widely used in today’s

management: strategic, tactical and operational. Strategic planning is the
type that is generally performed by top level management. It is concerned
with the position of the whole firm considering the external environment that
affects the organization. It usually has a long-term planning horizon. Tactical
planning, on the other hand, is the type of planning that is generally
reserved for middle management. It concerns with determining the task to
be done, establishing responsibilities and accountabilities, setting measures
for each task both quantitative and qualitative, implementing the planned
actions and existing controls. Whereas operational planning, is the type of
planning that is performed by lower level management. It determines what
specific workgroups or individuals will support tactical plans.

Organizing. Organizing is a necessary and important function of

management. Once the plans have been completed, it is essential to
organize all required resources, primarily people, so that goals set can be
achieved successfully. This involves analyzing and classifying the activities of
the organization and the relations among them, then separate manageable
activities from individuals ones and staff the organization with qualified
persons, that means the right person for the right job. Therefore organizing
can be defined as the process of grouping of people and activities necessary
to attain common objectives of the enterprise. Accordingly, organizing is
basically a process of division of labor accompanied by appropriate
delegation of authority. Proper organizing results in a more effective use of
resources.

The reason for organizing is to establish line of authority. Clear lines of

authority create order within a group. Absence of authority almost always
leads to chaotic situations where everyone is telling everyone else what to
do. In addition, organizing improves efficiency and quality of work
particularly when individuals or group work together to produce greater
output than a single person can do.

Motivating. Although organizations have been staffed properly and

laborers are trained to determine their capability of performing a good job,
the role of a manager as a leader has just begun. Positive response on his
subordinates’ performances does not necessarily satisfy an organization.
There is always a possibility that the quality and quantity of their work may
fall short and target goals may not achieve. Generally, all workers are
capable of performing better or poor on their jobs. When properly motivated,
expect that workers will perform their jobs better. For that reason,
motivation is the process of stimulating people to take action and contribute
their maximum effort toward the accomplishment or organizational
objectives.

Various researches and studies were made but no particular rules have
been formulated that can solve the problem of motivation in all cases.
Therefore, motivating is not an easy task, simply because human behavior is
unpredictable in all circumstances.

The fact that motivating people is a complex task to do, manager’s

leadership capability will attest. In order to achieve the organizations’ goals,
a manager needs to establish a clear line of communication to his
subordinates to determine what are their strength and weaknesses and the
opportunities and threats they are facing. In the end, the most important
thing for the manager to remember is the fact that “no book learning can
substitute for a sincere interest in the welfare of others.”

Controlling. If the functions of planning, organizing, motivating are

properly made, there will be little need for controlling. Controlling is the
measurement and correction of performance in order to make sure that
enterprise objectives and the plans are accomplished. More specifically,
controlling consists of sequential actions taken by management to establish
performance standard, measure and evaluate performance, and take
corrective action where indicated.

Controlling is absolutely essential for effective planning. Management

must know how it is performing in order to make the most effective use of
scarce organizational resources. Performance standards are powerful
managerial tool for the control of the business. Management must decide
what performance to measure, when to measure, and how to measure it.
The guiding principles in deciding the frequency of measurement is what is
required by the nature of business activity.

Performance may be measured in quantitative or qualitative ways. The

nature of the goal set determines whether measurements should be made
on a short or long-term basis. Feedback is information about job performance
derived from the jobs itself that is used to indicate management where and
in what form corrective action is needed.

If performance standards are not met, management may conclude one

of two possibilities: (1) the standards are set too high and therefore the
responsibility lies within the standards themselves, or (2) the standards are
realistic and the workers are responsible for not meeting them.
 Therefore, with the above functions of management, the success of the
organization would come from: a good and strong foundation of planning,
proper organizing and staffing, understanding the needs and wants of the
workforce, and strict and correct implementation of organizational controls.