Principles and Practices of Management Behaviour - Personal Statement Example

The Developing Manager The key to effective and efficient management is to "establish and deploy corporate performance management office and officer"according to Paladino (2004). As a team leader of a leading company in London, my role can be seen as the mediator and communicator to the line staff and to motivate them to achieve organisational objectives. This is a challenging role as it entails my ability to use a combination of management style, leadership characteristics and effective communication to establish a culture of customer service excellence. My take on this challenge is to develop a creative, responsive and innovative team with the drive to achieve maximum customer satisfaction and repeat visitation. In this endeavour, my first task is to decide which management style to adopt which will be conducive to managing such a team of individuals. Principles and Practices of Management Behaviour While I understand there are many different styles of management, my preference would be organic management. Based on Tom Peters and Robert Watermans In Search of Excellence (Morden 2004), I believe management’s responsibilities towards the organisation is to ensure enterprise operations are connected with the customer and the people who serve them. In this case it would be my team and how they serve their customers. Furthermore, the team members need to be innovative in their approach to meet the high demands of customers to meet market needs. In a competitive market of conference and banquet management such as London, service is the competitive benchmark as well as the edge. I would need to develop a team of highly motivated and creative members to achieve output excellence in customer service quality (Morden 2004). Yet at the same time I realise that my department is a part of a whole organisation with certain aims and objectives. It is also a part of an industry which is highly competitive. To remain in this environment, modern organisations like ours have to adopt horizontal management structure and approach. The one management style which is most conducive to such an environment is participative management. Participative management is a concept of management which transfers the authority, responsibility and autonomy of operations and processes to employees entrusting them with the organisational goals and objectives to be achieved. Employees are not mere personnel but associates, colleagues, and resources who contribute to the organisational performance. They must be treated as internal customers with certain rights to service, benefits and advantages that the organisation enjoys (Denton 1991). Thus, respecting them for their vision, aspirations, and motivation should be the priority of a manager. Moreover, as part of management, my individual professional goals would be to contribute towards the organisational overall objectives. These should reflect its performance and efficiency in operation. According to Paladino (2007), organisations can establish best practices in order to improve performance. Some of the practices that I endeavour to implement include: - Prioritise improvement projects through operational initiatives to improve performance in terms of financial, customer, process, constituents and people. - Leverage customer service processes through recalibration of processes and change management to meet customer needs. - Leverage process improvements for maintaining performance through effective problem solving approaches, lean methods and six sigma strategies. - Realise the value of benchmarking processes to improve core and support processes. - Create performance improvement culture in the organisation to develop a community of practitioners for effective and efficient coordination and optimisation of efforts (Paladino 2007). Having established the management style and strategy that I would be adopting for my team, now I need to establish my role and responsibilities as a manager. Roles and responsibilities of a Manager Organisational Culture Culture is a complex phenomenon in organisational situations but can be a powerful element in driving change, operations and performance. According to Schein (2004) organisational culture refers to people and their espoused values and credo of an organisation. A manager may develop the right kind of culture depending on the environment he aims to harbour - culture of quality, culture of customer service, culture of performance etc. The value the manager espouses forms the basis for effective performance. Likewise, hospitality culture can be developed through certain performance expectations and values. These shall be the best practices which shall form the basis for my teams performance and output while their individual performances can be harnessed through improvement measures. I realise best practices and performance improvement also require training and development. According to Anthony Mullins of President and Coach for the Elite Coaching Alliance (2005), there are eight principles upon which associates can be trained to internalise best practices to establish a customer service culture: - Customers are the reasons for work, not interruption of work. - Continuous training. - Empowering associates to serve customers. - Make service personal. - Support staff to make customer service decisions. - Treat problems as part of the process for resolution. - Recognise associates outstanding service. - Always get feedback from customers (Mullins 2005). Communication Strategies for Change Management Culture, as the amalgam of people and values, require effective communication. Groups of individuals when exist in a community need understanding, acceptance, tolerance, and capacity to resolve conflicts. Even at the organisational level, cultural integration needs communication to change and adapt behaviours of the team members. For this reason, I believe an effective communication strategy is imperative. As a team leader of the group, first of all I need to establish that communication problems lead to misunderstanding and group disparity and inevitably to poor customer service. Opening up channels of communication through open door policy, feedback, and regular team building sessions would help air out conflict situations (Schein 2004). Working with a group of individuals with diversified background requires understanding of each others culture. A shift in perspectives, tolerance, and equal opportunities must be established through tolerance, acceptance and understanding. But most of all a culture of change must be communicated to the team members. Elements which breed conflicts in people management include racial discrimination, sexual harassment, diversity programs and mentoring and promotion methods should clearly be communicated to the individuals working in the team so that every one is comfortable in their capacity to contribute to the teams performance (Daft 2009). Moreover, working in the capacity of a manager of the front office, I realise I need to be more learned regarding the customers and learn of their needs in order to communicate to my team. This requires a lot of learning on my part to empower, share and disseminate information to my team members who are working directly with the customers. As a organisational development and change agent, I need to transfer my knowledge and approach to customer service. For a small group, the best intervention and communication method would be as follows: - Demonstrate importance of change to performance. - Encourage innovation and creativity in approach. - Allow individual change efforts to take root through effective preparation, acceptance and commitment to the process of change. - Empower associates to take leadership roles - Communicate and share information (Daft 2009). Clearly, the capacity of a team leader is not limited to management functions, decision-making and control only. I need to demonstrate effective leadership skills as well. Leadership Characteristics and Management Leaders according to Schein (2004): - Espouse values - Form policies and ideological principles - Develop culture and climate for members to socialise and behave - Inculcate skills in group members - Inhabit thinking, mental models and communication - Share the meaning and understanding of organisational objectives - Form rituals and celebrations for performance Being a manager does not necessary mean that I shall have leadership skills. I believe that when leadership skills are not inherent naturally, they can be learned. In this endeavour I would need to learn and develop what is called global leadership skills. Global leadership skills according to DuBrin (2009) refer to "the ability to influence people who are dissimilar to the leader and stem from different cultural backgrounds." (p.425). These may include the ability to influence corporate performance b increasing profitability and productivity; continuity and efficiency; commitment and morale; and adaptability and innovation. I, therefore, need to learn to lead behaviours towards successful accomplishment of shared goals and objectives through these leadership skills. Individuals need to be motivated and empowered to achieve goals in life. For this purpose, I need to develop an empathetic attitude, with a keen ear for listening to my teams personal grievances, and respect their individuality yet at the same time establish beliefs and values to conduct them accordingly. A leader needs to also understand complex environmental issues such as market environment, trends, and innovations prevalent in the industry to induce change and innovation in his/her own organisation. This requires investment in change management techniques and learning how to transfer them to team members through knowledge authority, participative learning, and empowerment. A strong sense of tolerance, patience and acceptance of learning levels and performance is required to encourage team members to approach me for any type of limitations that they feel may hinder their output (DuBrin 2009). Overall, my contribution to the team as its leader would be to ensure that the organisational objectives are achieved by providing the maximum level of comfort, tolerant, and communication to my associates. This is only possible through effective and efficient management. References Daft, R.L., 2009. Organization Theory and Design. Cengage Learning. Denton, D.K., 1991. Horizontal management: beyond total customer satisfaction. Lexington Books. DuBrin, A.J. 2009. Leadership: Research Findings, Practice, and Skills. Cengage Learning. Morden, T. 2004. Principles of management. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Mullins, A. (2005). Customer Service Skills Training. Elite Coaching Alliance. Online accessed on 31 May 2010 from: http://www.impactfactory.com/p/customer_service_skills_training_development/friends_122-3106-63527.html Paladino, B. 2007. Five key principles of corporate performance management. John Wiley and Sons. Schein, E.H. 2004. Organizational culture and leadership. John Wiley and Sons. Read More