The managerial process

The managerial process: regroups a set of functions and activities that managers engage in to direct the organization towards achieving its goals.

This process Consists of 4 functions that are indispensable to manage a business:
   – Planning: is a proactive process of setting objectives, determining the means necessary to achieve them and defining the steps to be taken. It is a guide allowing each member of the organization to situate and orient his actions in relation to the general objective. Planning concerns the long term as well as medium and short term programs or budgets.  In fact, the planning stages can be broken down into four stages:
. Definition of activity sectors.
.Formulation of a strategic plan: choice of objectives, policies and resources
. Establishment of medium and short-term action programs
.Revision of the general plan.
   – Organizing: is the most visible part of management because it makes it possible to define the roles to be fulfilled, the tasks to be accomplished and to establish links of subordination, cooperation, information and monitoring.  In fact, organizing is limited to grouping together the activities necessary for the achievement of objectives and  entrusting each group of activities to a framework possessing sufficient authority to ensure their execution. Thus, this function consists in determining the tasks which should be accomplished, assigning them to the right members and also identifying at what level they should be done.
  – Leading: is a function which relates mainly to interpersonal relationships of a responsible-subordinate nature.  The goal of leading is to animate the members of the organization in particular those who have the formal power in order to ensure the good functioning of the organization. The principles of leading can be summarized as follows:
. Alignment of objectives: The personal goals of employees must fit into the objectives of the company.
. Clarity and integrity of communications: the information to be communicated must be clear, accessible and revolve around social cohesion and organizational involvement.
. Leadership: promotion of the principles of participation and the spirit of initiative for managers and the responsibles
    –Control: is a guiding operation, verifying the results and monitoring behaviors.  In general, the purpose of control is to ensure that the result of activities conforms to the objectives of the organization.  Three essential phases are found in any managerial control process.
. The selection of the standard: determination of the types of objectives to be reached and its level.
. The comparison between the observed result and the standard: which allows to know the amplitude of the variation of the result compared to the objective to be reached.
. Corrective action: the implementation of all means to bring the result back to the level of the desired objective or possibly to revise the initial objective.

These functions don’t happen in a particular order, it actually happens all at once, so managers are constantly shifting gears between planning, organizing, leading and controlling depending on what the need is at any given point in time to achieve their goals.

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