Requirements of Successful Managers

Management roles are defined by the capacity to motivate and leverage human capital in the organization to achieve efficiency in operations.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Describe how general managerial functions gain leverage in the workplace and how this relates to motivation

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Key Points

• While there are different ways to view the concept of gaining leverage as a manager, the underlying principle should be one of synergy.
• Managers are responsible for planning, organizing, staffing, directing, monitoring, and motivating employees to create leverage in an operational system. Leverage primarily revolves around effective delegation and motivation.
• Effective managers must have a thorough understanding of each employee's strengths and weaknesses, as well as their aspirations and motivators, to appropriately carry out essential tasks.
• Through combining delegation and motivation skills, managers effectively leverage human capital to achieve high levels of efficiency and employee satisfaction.

Key Terms

• incentives: Ways to promote a desired action.
• leverage: A technique used to multiply gain or loss.
• Synergy: Benefits resulting from combining two different groups, people, objects, or processes.

Why Leverage Matters

Management roles are defined by the capacity of the manager to motivate and leverage the human resources in the organization to achieve efficiency in operations. As a result, effective managers are capable of optimizing the time and effort of employees to attain the highest possible value. This optimization requires a thorough understanding of basic managerial functions and the way in which incentives can be applied according to motivational theories in the workplace.

Although there are different ways of understanding the concept of gaining leverage as a manager, the underlying principle should be one of synergy. The concept of synergy emphasizes that one additional employee's output is greater than an arithmetic expectation. More simply put, synergy means that 1 + 1 > 2 (a common adage in business for synergy is 1 + 1 = 3). Leverage, therefore, is about getting more out of a system than is put in, resulting in a value-added proposition.

Design management: Teams can create solutions through integration, giving the manager the ability to solve problems more complex than one individual can handle.

Managerial Functions and Leverage

Managers are responsible for planning, organizing, staffing, directing, monitoring, and motivating employees through the use of highly developed decision-making and interpersonal skills.

Delegation

Planning, organizing, and staffing are the preliminary steps to carrying out a project, setting schedules and constructing a team with the appropriate skills to execute the project effectively. This half of the managerial responsibilities falls largely within the decision-making realm, which correlates to a manager's ability to organize tasks and delegate these tasks effectively to gain leverage.

The concept of delegation enables managers to minimize their own time commitment to specific elements of a process, as well as improve quality and efficiency through the use of specialists (managers are typically generalists). Delegation therefore allows managers to optimize team structures and skill-set distributions to allow for synergy in operations. Effective managers are able to juggle a number of teams of specialists, empowering their autonomy and controlling the workflow in a way that aligns with organizational objectives. Delegation sounds easy on paper, but it requires a number of intrinsic skills such as communication, organization, multitasking, and the ability to "zoom out" and observe the bigger picture (and identify the critical components that enable it).

Motivation

Planning, organizing, and staffing are followed by the more interpersonal elements of management: directing, monitoring, and motivating the staff. At this point, managers face the challenging task of assessing the skills of employees, assigning relevant tasks, monitoring progress, and providing incentives to drive productivity. Managers must have a thorough understanding of each employee's strengths and weaknesses, as well as aspirations and motivators, to appropriately carry out these tasks. As a result, understanding motivational theories is at the heart of effectively managing employees.

Motivating employees to leverage the human resources within an organization is central to a manager's responsibilities; it is achieved by understanding what drives productivity. Generally, positive incentives far outweigh negative ones in leveraging employees. To gain leverage, managers must ascertain what opportunities will drive the highest level of productivity in their work groups.

By effectively combining this motivational understanding with the expectations and responsibilities of managing employees, managers effectively leverage human capital to achieve high levels of efficiency and employee satisfaction.

EXAMPLE

A business with high liquid capital may invest in information structure to reduce the cost of production and increase automation. These changes will ultimately achieve a higher productivity.