The Vital Functions of Management

THERE ARE several vital functions of management that determine the success or failure of the executive. The “vital functions concept” comes from medicine and physical health. It is an original and helpful way for you to look at your activities in your career.

Suppose you went to a doctor for a complete physical checkup. The doctor tells you that you have a series of potential medical problems. You are overweight and have high blood pressure; you are not physically fit and are eating the wrong foods and engaging in poor health habits.

If you want to be genuinely healthy, you are going to have to make modifications and changes in each of these vital function areas. The vital functions themselves are your heart rate, temperature, blood pressure, brain wave activity, respiration rate, and other physiological measures. Each is a clinical definition of life or death. If you are lacking any one of these vital signs, you are clinically dead.

Armed with information, you decide to make a series of changes in your health habits. To begin with, you decide to go for a walk for thirty minutes a day, or approximately 210 minutes a week, which is the ideal number of minutes for you to eventually enjoy excellent physical health. But when you start walking thirty minutes a day to reduce your weight, what happens to your heart rate, your blood pressure, and even your brain wave activity?

The answer is that as you improve in one area, you simultaneously begin to improve in every other as well.

It is the same in management. As you improve in each of the important functions of management, this improvement spills over and brings about an improvement in other areas as well. By focusing and concentrating on improving one particular management skill, you simultaneously begin to improve across the board in all your management skills.

You actually create a multiplier effect that can lead to rapid overall improvement in your skill level and in the value of the contribution you make to your company.

Seven Vital Functions of Management

In management, you must perform at an adequate level in each of seven areas if you want to be able to do your job in an excellent fashion. The absence of any one of these seven vital functions of management can lead to your failure as an executive.

MAKE PLANS

Planning is a key management skill and the first vital function. Your ability to plan carefully everything that you want or need to get done, in advance, allows you to accomplish vastly more than a person who is working without a plan.

The rule for success in management is to “think on paper.” Write down your objectives and become absolutely clear about the goals you wish to achieve. Make detailed lists of every step that you will have to take to achieve those goals. Make checklists of those activities in chronological order to create a recipe or a blueprint that you can follow, step by step.

The greater clarity that people have about goals and plans, the faster they can get to work and the better they can do their jobs.

GET ORGANIZED

The second vital function of management is organizing. Once you have done the planning, you need to bring together the people, money, resources, and facilities necessary to turn the plan into a reality.

The very best executives are excellent at planning and organizing. As a result, they can bring together and coordinate the activities of large numbers of people to achieve extraordinarily complex tasks.

At both the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 1984 and the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002, the Olympic Committee had descended into confusion, and huge financial losses were expected by both cities. Then, Los Angeles hired baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth, and Salt Lake City brought in Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for president.

In both cases, these extremely talented executives immediately went to work planning, organizing, and coordinating tens of thousands of people over vast geographical areas, dealing with thousands of details, and each man pulled the games out of the financial fires. Because of the planning and organizing skills of these two men, the games went from huge projected losses to high levels of profitability and enormous success from the point of view of the participants and spectators.

Again, the key to organizing well is to “think on paper.” Discuss what has to be done with everyone who will be essential to carrying out the plan. The more time you spend planning and organizing before you take action, the more likely it is that you will be successful.

FIND THE BEST PEOPLE

The third vital function of management is staffing or recruiting. Your ability to select the right people to help you to achieve the goals you have set is central to your success as a manager. In many cases, one weak or incompetent person in a key job can lead to the failure of the enterprise. The financial press frequently has stories about senior executives who have made bad decisions and almost bankrupted huge companies.

To make your most valuable contribution, you must interview and hire the best people for the job. Simultaneously, you must dehire people who are not capable of doing excellent work in the achievement of your goals.

LEARN TO DELEGATE

The fourth vital function is delegating. Delegation is an essential skill that you want to learn because it enables you to maximize the productivity and elicit the very best contribution from the people who report to you.

KEEP ON TOP OF THE WORK

The fifth vital function in management is supervising. Supervision requires that people be absolutely clear about what it is that you want them to do, and to what standard of performance. You then regularly check with them to make sure that the job is being done on time and to the standards that you have agreed upon.

When people know that you care about the work enough to check its progress on a regular basis, they are far more likely to do excellent work and to do it on schedule.

KEEP PEOPLE INFORMED

The sixth vital function of management is reporting. When you do a good job, or even when you have problems and difficulties, it is essential that people around you know what is going on, either good or bad.

Be sure that communications between you and your boss are clear and consistent. Establish a regular routine of one-on-one, face-to-face meetings to keep your boss fully informed about what you are doing and how it is going.

It is also essential that you communicate with your peers and colleagues, those people over whom you have no control but who need to know what you are doing in order to do their jobs to an acceptable high standard.

Finally, practice open-door management with your staff. Tell your staff everything that is going on: the good, the bad, and the ugly. According to “Great Place to Work” interviews and studies conducted annually, happy employees working for an organization say that they always feel “in the know” about the things that affect their work and their company.

SET CLEAR STANDARDS

The seventh vital function of management is measuring. As mentioned previously, this is where you set clear standards for what you want done so that all employees know exactly how to measure their performance.

You have heard the saying, “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.” Force yourself and your staff to put a number on every activity. The good news is that all business activities can be measured, usually with financial numbers. If not financial numbers, they can be measured with some other number. Your job is to help people select the correct number to measure the performance of a job in a particular area, and then to focus on meeting or exceeding that number.

So, commit today to improvement in the vital functions of management—planning, organizing, hiring, delegating, supervising, reporting, and measuring—and then dedicate yourself to continuous and never-ending improvement in each area.