What is personal task management system? In short, the best personal task management system enables you to focus more on the tasks and less on creating the to-do lists for various units as well as worrying about deadlines and last-minute projects. There are eight, all focused on what makes management different from leadership: Leadership is about getting others to follow; management is about delivering results.
Functions of management is a systematic way of doing things. Management is a process to emphasize that all managers, irrespective of their aptitude or skill, engage in some inter-related functions to achieve their desired goals.
4 Functions of management are planning, organizing, leading and controlling that managers perform to accomplish business goals efficiently.
First; managers must set a plan, then organize resources according to the plan, lead employees to work towards the plan, and finally, control everything by monitoring and measuring the effectiveness of the plan.
Management process/functions involve 4 basic activities;
1. Planning and Decision Making – Determining Courses of Action
Looking ahead into the future and predict possible trends or occurrences which are likely to influence the working situation is the most vital quality as well as the job of a manager.
Planning means setting an organization’s goal and deciding how best to achieve them. Planning is decision making, regarding the goals and setting the future course of action from a set of alternatives to reach them.
The plan helps to maintain managerial effectiveness as it works as a guide for the personnel for future activities. Selecting goals as well as the paths to achieve them is what planning involves.
Planning involves selecting missions and objectives and the actions to achieve them, it requires decision-making or choosing future courses of action from among alternatives.
In short, planning means determining what the organization’s position and the situation should be in the future, and decide how best to bring about that situation.
Planning helps maintain managerial effectiveness by guiding future activities.
For a manager, planning and decision-making require an ability to foresee, to visualize, and to look ahead purposefully.
2. Organizing – Coordinating Activities and Resources
Organizing can be defined as the process by which the established plans are moved closer to realization.
Once a manager set goals and develops plans, his next managerial function is organizing human resource and other resources that are identified as necessary by the plan to reach the goal.
Organizing involves determining how activities and resources are to be assembled and coordinated.
The organization can also be defined as an intentionally formalized structure of positions or roles for people to fill in an organization.
Organizing produces a structure of relationships in an organization and it is through these structured relationships that plans are pursued.
Organizing, then, is that part of managing which involves: establishing an intentional structure of roles for people to fill in the organization.
It is intentional in the sense of making sure that all the tasks necessary to accomplish goals are assigned to people who can do the best.
The purpose of an organization structure is to create an environment for the best human performance.
The structure must define the task to be done. The rules so established must also be designed in light of the abilities and motivations of the people available.
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Staffing is related to organizing and it involves filling and keeping filled, the positions in the organization structure.
This can be done by determining the positions to be filled, identifying the requirement of manpower, filling the vacancies and training employees so that the assigned tasks are accomplished effectively and efficiently.
The managerial functions of promotion, demotion, discharge, dismissal, transfer, etc. Are also included with the broad task “staffing.” staffing ensures the placement of the right person in the right position.
Organizing is deciding where decisions will be made, who will do what jobs and tasks, who will work for whom, and how resources will assemble.
3. Leading – Managing, Motivating and Directing People
The third basic managerial function is leading it is the skills of influencing people for a particular purpose or reason. Leading is considered to be the most important and challenging of all managerial activities.
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Leading is influencing or prompting the member of the organization to work together with the interest of the organization.
Creating a positive attitude towards the work and goals among the members of the organization is called leading. It is required as it helps to serve the objective of effectiveness and efficiency by changing the behavior of the employees.
Leading involves several deferment processes and activates.
The functions of direction, motivation, communication, and coordination are considered a part of the leading processor system.
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Coordinating is also essential in leading.
Most authors do not consider it a separate function of management.
Rather they regard coordinating as the essence of managership for achieving harmony among individual efforts towards accomplishing group targets.
Motivating is an essential quality for leading. Motivating is the function of the management process of influencing people’s behavior based on the knowledge of what cause and channel sustain human behavior in a particular committed direction.
Efficient managers need to be effective leaders.
Since leadership implies fellowship and people tend to follow those who offer a means of satisfying their own needs, hopes and aspirations, understandably, leading involves motivation leadership styles and approaches and communication.
4. Controlling – Monitoring and Evaluating Activities
Monitoring the organizational progress toward goal fulfillment is called controlling. Monitoring progress is essential to ensure the achievement of organizational goals.
Controlling is measuring, comparing, finding deviation and correcting the organizational activities which are performed for achieving the goals or objectives. Controlling consists of activities, like; measuring the performance, comparing with the existing standard and finding the deviations, and correcting the deviations.
Control activities generally relate to the measurement of achievement or results of actions that were taken to attain the goal.
Some means of controlling, like the budget for expenses, inspection records, and the record of labor hours lost, are generally familiar. Each measure also shows whether plans are working out.
If deviations persist, correction is indicated. Whenever results are found to differ from the planned action, persons responsible are to be identified and necessary actions are to be taken to improve performance.
Thus outcomes are controlled by controlling what people do. Controlling is the last but not the least important management function process.
It is rightly said, “planning without controlling is useless”. In short, we can say the controlling enables the accomplishment of the plan.
All the management functions of its process are inter-related and cannot be skipped.
The management process designs and maintains an environment in which personnel’s, working together in groups, accomplish efficiently selected aims.
All managers carry out the main functions of management; planning, organizing, staffing, leading and controlling. But depending on the skills and position on an organizational level, the time and labor spent in each function will differ.
Planning, organizing, leading, and controlling are the 4 functions of management; which work as a continuous process.
Learning Outcomes
Prior to the early 1900s, there was no management theory as we think of it today. Work happened as it always had—those with the skills did the work in the way they thought best (usually the way it had always been done). The concept that work could be studied and the work process improved did not formally exist before the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor.
The scientific management movement produced revolutionary ideas for the time—ideas such as employee training and implementing standardized best practices to improve productivity. Taylor’s theory was called scientific because to develop it, he employed techniques borrowed from botanists and chemists, such as analysis, observation, synthesis, rationality, and logic. You may decide as you read more about Taylor that by today’s criteria he was not the worker’s “friend.” However, Taylor must be given credit for creating the concept of an organization being run “as a business” or in a “businesslike manner,” meaning efficiently and productively.
Frederick W. Taylor![]()
Frederick Taylor (1856–1915) is called the Father of Scientific Management.
Before the Industrial Revolution, most businesses were small operations, averaging three or four people. Owners frequently labored next to employees, knew what they were capable of, and closely directed their work. The dynamics of the workplace changed dramatically in the United States with the Industrial Revolution. Factory owners and managers did not possess close relationships with their employees. The workers “on the floor” controlled the work process and generally worked only hard enough to make sure they would not be fired. There was little or no incentive to work harder than the next man (or woman).
Taylor was a mechanical engineer who was primarily interested in the type of work done in factories and mechanical shops. He observed that the owners and managers of the factories knew little about what actually took place in the workshops. Taylor believed that the system could be improved, and he looked around for an incentive. He settled on money. He believed a worker should get “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”—no more, no less. If the worker couldn’t work to the target, then the person shouldn’t be working at all. Taylor also believed that management and labor should cooperate and work together to meet goals. He was the first to suggest that the primary functions of managers should be planning and training.
In 1909, Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management. In this book, he suggested that productivity would increase if jobs were optimized and simplified. He also proposed matching a worker to a particular job that suited the person’s skill level and then training the worker to do that job in a specific way. Taylor first developed the idea of breaking down each job into component parts and timing each part to determine the most efficient method of working. Soon afterward, two management theorists, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, came up with the idea of filming workers to analyze their motions. Their ideas have since been combined into one process (called time and motion studies) for analyzing the most productive way to complete a task.
Scientific management has at its heart four core principles that also apply to organizations today. They include the following:
Taylor designed his approach for use in places where the work could be quantified, systemized, and standardized, such as in factories. In scientific management, there is one right way to do a task; workers were not encouraged (in fact, they were forbidden) to make decisions or evaluate actions that might produce a better result. Taylor was concerned about the output more than worker satisfaction or motivation. Taylor’s work introduced for the first time the idea of systematic training and selection, and it encouraged business owners to work with employees to increase productivity and efficiency. And he introduced a “first-class worker” concept to set the standard for what a worker should be able to produce in a set period of time. Scientific management grew in popularity among big businesses because productivity rose, proving that it worked.
Today, an updated version of his original theory is used by such companies as FedEx and Amazon. Digital Taylorism is based on maximizing efficiency by standardizing the tools and techniques for completing each task involved with a given job. Every task is broken down to the smallest motion and translated into an exact procedure that must be followed to complete that task. Because everyone is operating in the same mechanistic way, it increases predictability and consistency while reducing errors. It is relatively easy for managers to replace workers and retain the same productivity. The criticism of this type of management approach is similar to that of Taylor’s original theory: It reduces worker creativity; it requires management to monitor all aspects of employee behavior; and it is unforgiving to workers who don’t meet the standard.
Frank and Lillian Gilbreth
Two more pioneers in the field of management theory were Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who conducted research about the same time as Taylor. Like Taylor, the Gilbreths were interested in worker productivity, specifically how movement and motion affected efficiency.
Lillian Gilbreth. The book and film Cheaper By the Dozen were based on her and Frank’s experiences raising twelve children according to their theories of time and motion studies.
As stated above, the Gilbreths used films to analyze worker activity. They would break the tasks into discrete elements and movements and record the time it took to complete one element. In this way, they were able to predict the most efficient workflow for a particular job. The films the Gilbreths made were also useful for creating training videos to instruct employees in how to work productively.
Taylor and the Gilbreths belonged to the classical school of management, which emphasized increasing worker productivity by scientific analysis. They differed, however, on the importance of the worker. Taylor’s emphasis was on profitability and productivity; the Gilbreths were also focused on worker welfare and motivation. They believed that by reducing the amount of motions associated with a particular task, they could also increase the worker’s well-being. Their research, along with Taylor’s, provided many important principles later incorporated into quality assurance and quality control programs begun in the 1920s and 1930s. Eventually, their work led to the science of ergonomics and industrial psychology. (Ergonomics is the study of people in their operating environment, with the goal of increasing productivity and reducing risk of work-related injury.)
You can watch some of the Gilbreths’ films below to get an idea of how they documented their time and motion studies in an effort to increase efficiency and safety.
Henry Gantt
Henry Gantt (1861–1919) was also an associate of Taylor. He is probably best known for two key contributions to classical management theory: the Gantt chart and the task and bonus system.
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The Gantt chart is a tool that provides a visual (graphic) representation of what occurs over the course of a project. The focus of the chart is the sequential performance of tasks that make up a project. It identifies key tasks, assigns an estimated time to complete the task, and determines a starting date for each element of a task. Gantt differentiated between a terminal element that must be completed as part of a larger task. The related terminal elements together created what he called the summary element.
The Gantt chart has multiple benefits for project management:
Let’s apply the Gantt chart principles to a simple project. Imagine that you want to paint a room. The summary element is the finished, painted room. The individual terminal tasks might include calculating the square footage of the room, preparing the walls, choosing the paint, purchasing the paint, putting down the drop cloth, taping the windows, applying the paint, and final cleanup. Some of these elements are independent, and some elements are dependent upon others. Purchasing the paint is dependent upon knowing the square footage and choosing the paint color. Before painting can start, the walls must be prepared and the paint must be purchased. But purchasing the paint is not dependent upon preparing the walls—these tasks could be started at the same time.
There are several distinct tasks involved in painting a room.
Gantt also promoted the task and bonus plan that modified Taylor’s “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” premise. Gantt wanted to establish a standard (average) time for a piece of work or task. Then, if a worker took more that the standard time, his pay was docked. But if he took less time, he was paid for the additional pieces of work and a bonus of up to 20 percent more. Also known as the progressive rate system, this plan was preferred by workers who were willing to work harder for additional wages.
Although Gantt is not the best known of the classic management theorists, many of his ideas are still being used in project management.
Key Points
Scientific management was the first widespread promotion of rational processes to improve efficiency. The goal was to develop a standard against which work performance could be measured. Training became an important part of the management process. By the 1930s, however, many unions and workers were suspicious of the intentions of scientific management.
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