A good manager need to know how to motivate their employees and deal with other people

A good manager motivates their employees to strive and achieve

A good manager keeps his or her employees motivated and this can be accomplished through the magic of encouragement. A person rewarded for their work and contributions, similar to a trained animal, will be motivated and encouraged to repeat this same behaviour and internalize it into their systems. Everybody likes the positive reinforcement that encouragement brings to us.

You have to be comfortable dealing with people

As a manager, people form your greatest resource and your main task is to utilize your resources to skilfully accomplish the shared task. As such, you have to be comfortable when dealing with people.
Part of a manager’s role is the delegation of tasks. A good manager has to be skilled as well as comfortable in the delegation of tasks. He has to empathically feel out the situation and carefully analyse potential outcomes before making the correct task allocations.

Some tips on how to delegate more comfortably without arousing any resentment will be to perhaps ask questions before giving direct orders. This will make the task appear to be the employee’s idea, and will result in the employee being more accommodating and perhaps even enthusiastic to perform to the task assigned.

More about Management: 
The First-Time Manager

Questions That Get Results: Innovative Ideas Managers Can Use to Improve Their Teams' Performance

The New Manager's Tool Kit: 21 Things You Need to Know to Hit the Ground Running

Questions That Get Results: Innovative Ideas Managers Can Use to Improve Their Teams' Performance

HOW TO BE A GREAT MANAGER AND A GREAT LEADER BOTH AT THE WORK PLACE & AT HOME (Vols. 1-10) (How to be a great leader)

Hooters

read more

Performance Appraisal

Performance appraisal serves over a dozen different organizational purposes as below:

Providing Feedback: Providing feedback is the most common justification for an organization to have a performance appraisal system. Through its performance appraisal process the individual learns exactly how well she did during the previous twelve months and can then use that information to improve her performance in the future. In this regard, performance appraisal serves another important purpose by making sure that the boss’s expectations are clearly communicated.

Facilitating Promotion Decisions: Almost everyone in an organization wants to get ahead. How should the company decide who gets the brass rings? Performance appraisal makes it easier for the organization to make good decisions about making sure that the most important positions are filled by the most capable individuals.

Facilitating Layoff or Downsizing Decisions: If promotions are what everybody wants, layoffs are what everybody wishes to avoid. But when economic realities force an organization to downsize, performance appraisal helps make sure that the most talented individuals are retained and that only the organization’s marginal performers are cut loose.

Encouraging Performance Improvement: How can anyone improve if he doesn’t know how he’s doing right now? A good performance appraisal points out areas where individuals need to improve their performance.

Motivating Superior Performance: This is another classic reason for having a performance appraisal system. Performance appraisal helps motivate people to deliver superior performance in several ways. First, the appraisal process helps them learn just what it is that the organization considers to be ‘‘superior.’’ Second, since most people want to be seen as superior performers, a performance appraisal process provides them with a means to demonstrate that they actually are. Finally, performance appraisal encourages employees to avoid being stigmatized as inferior performers (or, often worse, as merely ‘‘average’’).

Setting and Measuring Goals: Goal setting has consistently been demonstrated as a management process that generates superior performance. The performance appraisal process is commonly used to make sure that every member of the organization sets and achieves effective goals.

Counseling Poor Performers: Not everyone meets the organization’s standards. Performance appraisal forces managers to confront those whose performance is not meeting the company’s expectations.

Determining Compensation Changes: This is another classic use of performance appraisal. Almost every organization believes in pay for performance. But how can pay decisions be made if there is no measure of performance? Performance appraisal provides the mechanism to make sure that those who do better work receive more pay.

Encouraging Coaching and Mentoring: Managers are expected to be good coaches to their team members and mentors to their proteges. Performance appraisal identifies the areas where coaching is necessary and encourages managers to take an active coaching role.

Supporting Manpower Planning: Well-managed organizations regularly assess their bench strength to make sure that they have the talent in their ranks that they will need for the future. Companies need to determine who and where their most talented members are. They need to identify the departments that are rich with talent and the ones that are suffering a talent drought. Performance appraisal gives companies the tool they need to make sure they have the intellectual horsepower required for the future.

Determining Individual Training and Development Needs: If the performance appraisal procedure includes a requirement that individual development plans be determined and discussed, individuals can then make good decisions about the skills and competencies they need to acquire to make a greater contribution to the company. As a result, they increase their chances of promotion and lower their odds of layoff.

Determining Organizational Training and Development Needs: Would the organization be better off sending all of its managers and professionals through a customer service training program or one on effective decision making? By reviewing the data from performance appraisals, training and development professionals can make good decisions about where the organization should concentrate company-wide training efforts.

Validating Hiring Decisions: Is the company hiring stars, or is it filling itself with trolls? Only when the performance of newly hired individuals is assessed can the company learn whether it is hiring the right people.

Providing Legal Defensibility for Personnel Decisions: Almost any personnel decision termination, denial of a promotion, transfers to another department—can be subjected to legal scrutiny. If one of these is challenged, the company must be able to demonstrate that the decision it made was not based on the individual’s race or handicap or any other protected aspect. A solid record of performance appraisals greatly facilitates legal defensibility when a complaint about discrimination is made.

Improving Overall Organizational Performance: This is the most important reason for an organization to have a performance appraisal system. A performance appraisal procedure allows the organization to communicate performance expectations to every member of the team and assess exactly how well each person is doing. When everyone is clear on the expectations and knows exactly how he is performing against them, this will result in an overall improvement in organizational success.

read more

The Value of Management

Value management concerns defining what those who commission projects mean by value, in terms of the expected benefits and then applying certain structured techniques, throughout the life of the project, to maximize the delivery of the benefits, while minimizing the use of resources.

The British Standard describes it as a management approach to help maximize the overall performance of an organisation. The standard recognizes that this is achieved through the application to projects at strategic, tactical or operational level.

‘Definitions’ abound; however, in the authors view it is not practical to capture all the nuances of value management in one or two succinct sentences, any more than it is possible to ‘define’ project management in a few words. Value management is about more than simple cost reduction. While it is a very effective way to do this, it does much more. Essentially, value management:

1- Provides a means to define projects clearly and unambiguously in terms of the client’s and end users’ long-term business needs.

2- Supports crucial decision-making based upon maximizing value.

3- Encourages innovative solutions.

4- Facilitates the optimization of the balance among initial design costs and construction costs, running and maintenance costs, and the costs of operating the business conducted within the facility.

5- Provides a means of measuring value and demonstrating that optimum value for money (VfM) has been achieved.

read more

Business Administration

In business, administration consists of the performance or management of business operations and thus the making or implementing of major decisions. Administration can be defined as the universal process of organizing people and resources efficiently so as to direct activities toward common goals and objectives.

The word is derived from the Middle English word administracioun, which is in turn derived from the French administration, itself derived from the Latin administratio — a compounding of ad ("to") and ministratio ("give service").

Administrator can serve as the title of the general manager or company secretary who reports to a corporate board of directors. This title is archaic, but, in many enterprises, this function, together with its associated Finance, Personnel and management information systems services, is what is intended when the term "the administration" is used.

In some organizational analyses, management is viewed as a subset of administration, specifically associated with the technical and mundane elements within an organization's operation. It stands distinct from executive or strategic work.

In other organizational analyses, administration can refer to the bureaucratic or operational performance of mundane office tasks, usually internally oriented and reactive rather than proactive.

The world's first business school, the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris, France, was established in 1819. The first business school in the United States, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was founded in 1881. Anecdotically, top French business school HEC was also created in 1881, while Harvard Business School, founded in 1908, was born just one year after France's prestigious ESSEC Business School.

Administrative functions

Administrators, broadly speaking, engage in a common set of functions to meet the organization's goals. These "functions" of the administrator were described by Henri Fayol.

Planning is deciding in advance what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and who should do it. It maps the path from where the organization is to where it wants to be. The planning function involves establishing goals and arranging them in logical order. Administrators engage in both short-range and long-range planning.

Organizing involves identifying responsibilities to be performed, grouping responsibilities into departments or divisions, and specifying organizational relationships. The purpose is to achieve coordinated effort among all the elements in the organization. Organizing must take into account delegation of authority and responsibility and span of control within supervisory units.

Staffing means filling job positions with the right people at the right time. It involves determining staffing needs, writing job descriptions, recruiting and screening people to fill the positions.

Directing is leading people in a manner that achieves the goals of the organization. This involves proper allocation of resources and providing an effective support system. Directing requires exceptional interpersonal skills and the ability to motivate people. One of the crucial issues in directing is to find the correct balance between emphasis on staff needs and emphasis on economic production.

Controlling is the function that evaluates quality in all areas and detects potential or actual deviations from the organization's plan. This ensures high-quality performance and satisfactory results while maintaining an orderly and problem-free environment. Controlling includes information management, measurement of performance, and institution of corrective actions.

Budgeting, exempted from the list above, incorporates most of the administrative functions, beginning with the implementation of a budget plan through the application of budget controls.

read more

Effective Team Building

How to build effective team?

Team building is crucial in improving the collective performance of a group or organization and it is a powerful tools for a leader to use to increase the chances of success for himself or his group.

Although team building is often talked about and believed to be practiced, it can often be ineffective for several reasons: there is a lack of commitment in the group to a shared common goal; the team building activities practiced are too generic to add any lasting value and there is a lack of proper assessment of the team.

The Foundation of Team Building:

The most important factor to successful team building is a commitment to shared common objective or goal with their team. This is the foundation that all good team building is built upon without it; a lot of energy can be expended with very little result.

Remember that, most people are committed to their own objectives over and above everything else therefore, it is important that they see the collective group objective as important as their own, otherwise they will not invest time and energy in team building activities.

Group vs. Team?

Many people make the mistake of assuming that a group of people automatically forms a team. In fact, a group is simply a set of people who happen to share a workplace or be a part of the same organization unit. The people within the group will all have individual objectives which may converge and is the same as the group objective, but may also be distinctly different and even competitive.

By contrast, a team is a group made up of individuals who have committed to working towards a single, common objective. Naturally, they will still have their different, individual objectives but these will contribute towards a higher collective one.

For example: In a marketing team, one person may responsible for direct mail campaign, another person responsible for client liaison and another for sponsorship-but they are all united in the overall objective of improving brand awareness and image and therefore, not judged solely on their individual objectives.

Read more in: Team Building Strategic

read more

Team Building Strategic

There are various kinds of team building strategies which can be employed to enhance relationships between members of a group, as well as improving the collective performance of the group. These can be divided into:

- Individual strategies: this involves the development of individual skills and gaining familiarity with the shared process.

- Relationship strategies: this involves creating a sense of common purpose and commitment and improving the unconscious dynamics within the group

- Between Group Strategies: this involves tackling the barriers between different groups and organizational units

- Cultural strategies: this focuses on creating a teamwork ethos within the organization.

Shared Commitment:

Regardless of the strategy chosen, it must be focused ultimately in establishing a shared commitment to common goals. Without this foundation for good team work, any kind of team building strategy will only have limited impact and influence. So before rushing a group into any kind of team building activity or looking at relationships within a team, it is important to first establish this foundation of shared commitment.

Shared commitment can be encouraged by clarifying the team goals and identifying any issues which may inhibit the team from reaching these goals. Building ownership of these goals across the team is also vital, as well as putting team processes in place which have the correct sequence to help the team make progress along the “ladder of achievements”

Teambuilding: 

Can help eliminate these negative actions by fostering respect among employees. Teams should be created that give team member s the responsibility and power to solve problem, plan, and make decisions.

Solving problem makes member feel like they are needed, while planning help member learn techniques to employment various solution. The power to make decisions help employee realize their importance to the company.

This feeling is importance increases morale. It also improves attendance rate because this feeling of importance make the employee feel like the company really needs their presence. In order for teambuilding to work properly, the teams must be lead by someone with a facilitating nature.

Facilitating leaders help team members feel empowered, think things through thoroughly, and utilize their individual talents. Team members with these skills will work well together and feel as though they are part of an important whole. People working together in a team also needed. Feeling needed promotes a sense of responsibility, and people who feel needed tend to have better attendance rates.

Read more in: Effective Team Building

read more

Why successful projects need value and riskmanagement?

Value and risk management enables organisations to succeed in the delivery of ambitious projects by defining their desired outcomes and then exercising processes that maximise value and minimise uncertainty. This applies equally to strategy and business change projects as it does to those in the built environment.

A successful outcome requires that the value to the business is maximised through the delivery of a facility that gives them the benefits they need at a price they can afford at the time when they need it and to a quality that fulfils their expectations. It requires that the outcome is clearly defined and communicated to those who deliver
it (the project team). It also requires effective delivery processes that minimise the impact of the unexpected and uncertainties.

Value management provides an effective process to maximise value in line with the owners’ and end users’ requirements, and fulfils the first of these requirements. Risk management fulfils the second requirement as part of effective project management, by providing a process for managing risk. Both processes should be applied on every significant construction project. This does not always happen. This chapter explores why this is and provides arguments for their systematic use.

Read more in: 

*Fundamental of Management "What Is Manager Do? 

*What is supervisor do? 

*Problem Solving and Decision Making 

*Approach to Risk Management  

*Planning

read more

10 Tactics For Finding New Business Ideas

There are some tips for your own business ideas.

1. Expect to have ideas. If you believe you’re incapable of coming up with ideas then you won’t come up with any. Put aside any negativity about yourself or you creativity and expect to have ideas.

2. Keep and open mind. Ideas can come from anywhere and some of the best ideas will seem daft or impossible based on your current knowledge, experience and assumptions. Try to be prepared to explore new ideas and to change your view of the world.

3. Keep a written record of your ideas, ideas that inspire you or ideas that are new to you - When you write things down you are more likely to remember them and if you don’t you’ve got a record to refer back to. I keep a record of all the ideas I see, read/hear about or have and I review it regularly. My written record has also evolved into this blog full of ideas.

4. Try to learn something new every day. Talk to other business people, talk to your friends and neighbours, talk to anyone that looks interesting and will talk to you. Read websites, magazines, books whatever medium you prefer try to read something that will expand your knowledge everyday. I enjoy business/entrepreneurs biographies and histories especially those that explain where the business or idea for it came from.

5. Talk about your ideas. Talk about your ideas to anyone who will listen, more often that not it’s my wife who has to listen to my ideas, if she’s not around however I’ll talk to myself! Failing that write down what you’d say to someone to explain the idea. The point is that in explaining the idea you’ll usually spot flaws or areas for improvement thus making the idea better.

6. Ask questions and listen to peoples problems, hopes, dreams and aspirations. As a small business consultant I always ask people what problems, issues or challenges they face in their business (or job), there are often good business opportunities in solving those problems. Peoples hopes, dreams and aspirations can provide ideas for example a business like Red Letter Days helps people fulfil their dreams by providing experiences such as driving a supercar or flying a plane. Weight Watchers appeals to those hoping to loose weight.

7. Research see what else is out there that is similar. Evaluate potential competition and keep notes on what you find. Use the search engines to look for similar ideas, businesses or products and take notes on them.

8. Draw a mind map. A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

9. Synthesise ideas. Put two or more unrelated ideas together. One way to do this is to brainstorm with your team. You’ll get the best results if you’ve followed steps 1 - 6 first as you’ll have a larger pool of ideas to combine.

10. Sleep on it. Go away for a while and think of something else, often your subconscious mind will continue to work on the problem and will come up with new ideas or refinements on the ideas you already have.

Read more in:Fundamental of Management "What Is Manager Do? 

What is supervisor do? 

Problem Solving and Decision Making 

Approach to Risk Management  

Planning

read more