Functions of Management the Four

¶ … Functions of Management

The four functions of management are planning, organizing, leading and controlling. The planning process is central to management. During this process, the manager must make an assessment of where the company stands. It is at this point where the firm's objectives are also set. Then, the tactics and strategies are devised that bring the company from where it currently is to its objectives.

With Xerox Corporation, the company had struggles earlier in this decade. Xerox technologies had become uncompetitive and their profits suffered as a result. The company needed to embark on a turnaround project. This required management to be able to not only undertake an honest assessment of their situation, but to take a vision of the future. It is a critical element in planning, if the plans are to be successful, that they fit with a vision of the future that actually occurs. In the case of Xerox, the company had struggled because its plans were tied to a vision of the future that did not occur. The turnaround plan necessitated a new vision from which new plans could then flow.

Once the plans have been developed, the firm's resources need to be organized. The firm's resources will already have been assessed during the planning phase, to ensure that the plans are realistic. The organizing phase then involves management making decisions with regards to the deployment of different resources. Activities included in this function can include determining the directional configuration (who will be responsible for what), establishing relationships to set up communication flows, and assigning resources to specific tasks.

Xerox's turnaround strategy involved the redeployment of scarce financial resources. Management needed to organize their finances so that they could meet a variety of goals including new product development, acquisitions, debt repayment and stock buybacks (Ackerman, 2008). Employees also needed to be organized, to move from their less productive former tasks towards more productive new product development tasks. One of the most important elements of organizing is making the trade off between different uses for given sets of resources. For example, CEO Anne Mulcahy needed to make decisions regarding the choice to purchase companies to give Xerox access to new technology, or to develop such technology in-house.

Leading is another role of management. When the firm has plans and has organized its resources towards meeting the objectives in those plans, it still needs managers to lead the other employees towards that goal. Often, the goals are far away, and it is difficult for employees to see that the outcomes of their support those goals. Motivation can wane and focus can slip. This is what makes leadership such an important part of management. One way or another, managers need to make sure that employees do what they are supposed to. When plans are made and resources are organized, the plans can only work if the different employees do what they are supposed to. If they perform their roles and the company still falls short of objectives, that is a fault with the planning or organizing. However, often those steps are performed well and the failure results as a failure of leadership.

Leadership was a major issue at Xerox. When the company was collapsing, the managers responsible for leading the company were putting out fires instead of inspiring their workers to great heights. When Mulcahy arrived, the leadership style at Xerox underwent a dramatic change. One of the leader's key activities is to instill vision. Xerox had no vision in the early part of this decade, but Mulcahy's team created one. The workers all had goals, but with no vision they had lost sight of those goals. What Mulcahy did was restore that vision, so that she could successfully lead the employees towards the goals she was setting (MIT Sloan, 2009).

The final role of management is controlling. This refers to tracking the progress of the plans that have been made, to ensure that they remain on track. Even the best plans will tend to deliver results that were not intended, due to unforeseen changes in the internal and external environments. As a result, it is imperative that the management team always have a sense of where the company is in relation to where they should be at that point in the process. If they do, they can make adjustments to their plans, to the way they have organized the resources or to their leadership initiatives.