Contents
- 1 Nature of Management and Its Responsibilities
Nature of Management and Its Responsibilities
As a new manager, your change from specialist to leader role brings with it challenges and great opportunities. Management is not merely being in charge of people or giving instructions; it is concerning the attainment of organisational objectives through successful planning, organising, leading, and controlling resources. This essay will familiarize you with the very nature of management and your main responsibilities, particularly in light of resource optimisation, management functions, coping with changes within and outside the organisation, and exercising the required managerial skills (Botha, et.al. 2002).
Understanding Management and Resource Optimisation
Organisations reach their goals with maximum efficiency and effectiveness by utilizing both human resources and other organizational assets through management practices. Your primary duty will be to optimize all scarce assets including time and human capital and finances along with technology. Organisations aim to achieve the highest possible results through reduced expenditures while maintaining successfully executed operations. The finance department of our organisation reaches resource optimisation through financial reporting automation which reduces repetitive work to make employees available for analysis and planning. Successful management requires managers to accomplish two goals – effectiveness through doing right things and efficiency by doing things right (Robbins and Coulter, 2016).
Fig 1: Four Functions of Management. Source: Monday.com
The Four Functions of Management
As a guide for your actions and decisions, management is typically seen through four core functions: planning, organising, leading, and controlling. The functions are mutual and cyclical, as described below:
The Four Functions of Management
- Planning – establishing objectives and deciding on the best course of action.
- Organising – putting together resources and tasks to carry out plans.
- Leading – inspiring, directing, and otherwise affecting people.
- Controlling – checking performance and making changes as necessary.
Your managerial actions toward planning require the establishment of quarterly performance goals for your team along with organizing through the distribution of responsibilities and communication of individual duties. Your leading duties appear as the most prominent aspect of your role when you involve your team members and direct them towards resolving conflicts. Through control you monitor department progress while performing the required corrective adjustments (Samson, Donnet & Daft, 2020).
Delivering Value Through Output
A successful manager needs to produce offerings which fulfill marketplace requirements. Value creation along with relevance plays an equal role in addition to quantity in this process. Our organisation’s client service division maintains continuous assessments of service delivery information from customers to guide their service modifications. Introducing a new digital self-service platform both enhanced customer satisfaction and cut down our call center activity levels. Sustainable organizational performance directly benefits from ethical decisions based on core values which produce outputs that meet stakeholder expectations according to Duska (2022).
Managing Change in Dynamic Environments
Organisations experience nonstop transformations within their internal and external operating environments. Your organization can experience internal modifications of team design together with systems and procedures. The business needs quick adaptation to external factors which include changes in macroeconomics as well as technological progression and evolving regulations. Managers need to find and translate external changes so they can initiate the necessary responses.
Our marketing division experienced the rapid digital movement which forced us to train staff differently and distribute finances effectively and adjust our customer relationship methods. Grant (2016) indicates that managers need adaptive capabilities especially in uncertain situations because organizational strategic development determines future business success.
Essential Managerial Skills
Success in the newly assigned position requires you to enhance three fundamental skill categories.
- The essential feature of technical skills involves proficiency in specific job-related information like budgeting methods and data analysis procedures.
- Effective teamwork and staff management demand human (interpersonal) abilities from managers. They must learn to lead others through the workforce.
- Organizational understanding through conceptual skills means viewing the whole structure and observing how different sections create the whole system.
Human skills represent the most important competencies for staff who work as junior and middle managers. A newly appointed manager needs to learn effective methods for delegating work together with methods for giving feedback and resolving conflicts in a productive manner. Your ability to conceptualize things progresses in importance when you gain more managerial authority for strategic decisions. According to George and Jones (2014), outstanding managerial success stems from understanding how department actions respond to organizational influences while being shaped by the whole system context.
Conclusion
Accomplished managers use more than directive functions because their duties extend toward system establishment and personnel engagement while connecting work activities with company objectives and delivering changes. Your new management role requires you to optimize resources while performing the four management functions to deliver valuable outputs in response to both internal organizational needs along with external factors using suitable organizational competencies. The development of such skills will lead to current role success but simultaneously enable you to excel in leadership roles in the future.
Critique of Classical and Contemporary Management Approaches
Management thought has evolved parallel to the changing conditions of the business world. Management theories from classical times during the industrial period concentrated on standardization together with hierarchical management while focusing mainly on increasing organizational internal efficiency. Present-day management approaches concentrate on adaptable structures together with quick reactions and awareness about outside influences. Modern management approaches give external factors stronger attention than classical management methods because of present-day business conditions that entail drastic globalization and high-speed operations. This paper evaluates the statement by applying the comparison method to our organization while demonstrating practical significance of modern management approaches (Khunedi, 2025).
Overview of Classical Approaches
Frederick Taylor (Scientific Management) together with Henri Fayol (Administrative Theory) and Max Weber (Bureaucracy) established management theories that mainly paid attention to internal organizational elements. Standardization and formal organization structures combined with containment measures represented their main objective for productivity growth. The theories presumed a fairly constant situation which allowed organizations to maximize internal efficiency and order. In the view of Okolie and Oyise (2021) the classical approaches adopted an organizational model that treated workers like machine parts while disregarding their social and economic and political contexts as dynamic whole people.
The foundation of modern management was established by classical approaches yet these methods tended to ignore exterior environmental elements like customer demands and marketplace competition along with technological transformation. The internal perspective which was sustainable in past times has lost its effectiveness in present-day operations.
Contemporary Approaches and External Focus
The contemporary management approaches including systems theory together with contingency theory and total quality management (TQM) and strategic management provide organizations with advanced open systems models. These methods recognize organizational influence from outside sources which include socio-political environments along with technological developments and environmental sustainability together with worldwide economic elements.
Specifically, systems theory considers the organisation as a system of interconnected elements that interact with the environment. Managers must observe environmental cues and adjust operations in response. This is specifically seen in our organisation’s product development strategy. For example, a change in consumer demand for environmentally friendly packaging led the operations department to source new suppliers and modify production procedures to stay competitive and compliant. As stated by Ouedraogo (2007), strategic responsiveness among African companies is greatly shaped by local and international market conditions, and firms’ capacity to make their strategy correspond to outside facts often determines whether they are long-term sustainable.
Application in My Organisation
Within our organization, which is in the ICT industry, the ever-changing nature of technology and consumer behavior has required a departure from traditional, classical structures to more adaptive, flexible, and market-driven strategies. For instance, our project management office no longer depends solely on top-down command. Instead, it utilizes agile methodologies that are based on team work, speedy feedback loops, and customer feedback—factors that are the essence of modern management thinking. The strategic planning team employs environmental scanning tools to evaluate risks and opportunities in external areas like cybersecurity threats, changes in economic policy, and global demand for cloud services. All these external elements have a critical impact on decision-making processes, reflecting the high applicability of modern methods.
Wheelen et al. (2018) defend this external approach, contending that organisations should constantly scan and interpret environmental information to develop strategies that guarantee competitiveness in the long term. For us, this means regular adjustments to our market intelligence systems and strategic dashboards to monitor trends influencing the ICT environment in Southern Africa .
Future-Oriented Skills and the Global Context
Complex changes in external environments require managers to develop skills that focus on future outlooks. The World Economic Forum (2023) reports that technological alterations together with climate transformation and geopolitical movements create new jobs while reforming business direction. Our organisation implemented scenario planning together with risk management practices throughout all departmental strategies. Through these practices organizations maintain their ability to handle unexpected disruptions including future rules about artificial intelligence and varying energy expenses.
The session highlights the need for ongoing educational growth and technological competence which requires managerial support for skill improvement among their workgroups.
Conclusion
Modern management currently emphasizes the external environment over classical approaches to a degree that explains today’s managerial practice correctly. Classical managerial approaches deliver foundational principles useful for structure and efficiency but they fall short when used individually. Modern practices enable organisations to react better to external pressures and challenges. Within our organisation, methods borrowed from systems theory, strategic management, and behavioural science clearly reflect a high level of external awareness and responsiveness. As the environment keeps changing, adopting modern management philosophy will be critical for long-term success.
