Exploring the Complexities of a Managers Job
Table of Contents
Page
Title Page 1 Table of Contents 2 Summary 3
1. Introduction 3
2. Investigation (Background) 4
2.1 Organization Chart 4
2.2. Manner of Conducting the Investigation 4
3. Main Body 4
3.1 Job Requirements of a Senior Product Line Manager 4
3.2 Intra and Inter-Group Interaction 6
3.3 Impact of Intra and Inter-Group Interactions 7
3.4 Evaluation of the Effectiveness and Efficiency
of the Interdependency 10
3.5 Enhancing the Effectiveness, Efficiency and Satisfaction
of the Interdependent Group 11
4. Changing Nature/ Contemporary views/ Modern Views 11
5. Interview 12
6. Findings/Conclusions/Discussions 12
7. Recommendations 13
Summary
A manager’s job is complex because of the wide-range and long-term implications of their work arising from the context of the various parties and interests that they have to address simultaneously. As such, the development and maintenance of good working relations with these various parties enables managers to ensure that the various needs of business operations receive due attention through the dependable linkages with internal and external players. To establish and maintain these valuable business relationships, managers need to consider understand the various motivating factors for different parties and find effective ways of capitalizing on this knowledge to achieve results.
1. Introduction
The manager’s job transcends different business areas. All these areas need to operate towards a single direction using common standards and strategies (2005). However, since these areas face similar and differing issues or problems, managers of the various departments need to adhere to general standards while at the same time develop creativity and innovativeness to ensure that the unit is able to handle effectively issues. Knowledge management and continuous learning constitute core competencies (2005). As such, to meet the rigors of the job, managers need to develop multi-level relationships. All these wide-ranging areas complicate a manager’s job. As such, best practices in various management areas serve as important means of creating practical knowledge to enhance the knowledge and skills of managers and ease the complexities of their jobs.
Based on the recognition of the various relationships that managers handle, the aim of the report is to describe the manner that managers handle these relationships by looking at the case of the Senior Product Line Manager. To obtain data, the investigation collected both secondary and primary data with secondary data obtained from books and primary data obtained from an interview with a Senior Product Line Manager.
2. Investigation (Background)
2.1 Organization Chart
2.2 Manner of Conducting the Investigation
The investigation proceeded by first looking into a number of theories covering the topic of investigation. After determining the appropriate theories, the investigation focused on the case of a Senior Product Line Manager to determine the manner that the manager develops and maintains different relationships with different parties within and outside of the organisation using the theories.
3. Main Body
3.1 Job Requirements of a Senior Product Line Manager
The job of a Senior Product Line Manager involves formal and informal requirements, with the formal requirements encompassing the technical description of the job contained in the job qualifications during hiring and employment contract of the manager while the information requirements involve the personality requirements that constitute the context for the management attitude, behaviour and style of manages.
The diagram above shows the coordinating task of the Senior Product Line Manager and the various departments or business units that the manager need to build working relations. This is necessary in effectively meeting the demands of handling product strategies in order to ensure the development of innovative services that would contribute in meeting the demands of customers as well as financial and competitive goals of the company. As such, the Senior Product Line Manager handles the establishment and coordination of cross-functional working teams for the different products. This is necessary to cover all areas of product strategy to ensure successful implementations.
Specifically, the Senior Product Line Manager focuses on all the various stages of the life cycle of different products commencing with the generation of product ideas until the actual production and marketing of these products up to the demise of products. Job expectations include the 1) optimization of product development investments, 2) effective communication skills, 3) clear understanding and application product strategy, and 4) task management.
Since the job description of the Senior Product Line Manager involves various skills, the personality requirements important in effectively handling the job, based on Schwartz’s values model (2007), includes values leaning more towards openness to change encompassing the values of stimulation and self-direction. In terms of the personality dimensions, the ability to balance dependability, flexibility, and an extrovert personality is important in handling the position of Senior Product Line Manager. This is because the manager handles new issues and problems requiring openness and flexibility. Communication and coordination involves a certain degree of extrovert personality. Embodying core values and standards necessary in making guided decisions represents dependability.
3.2 Intra and Inter-Group Interaction
In holding the Senior Product Line Manager position, the manager engages in both internal and external interactions. Internal group interactions involve the manager of the different departments for coordination in developing product strategies for the various product lines. External group interactions revolve around the various linkages necessary in obtaining external knowledge, skills and resources and ensuring compliance with registration and other regulatory standards especially for innovative or new products and product ideas.
3.3 Impact of Intra and Inter-Group Interactions
Intra-group interactions have important outcome and job performance implications to the Senior Product Line Manager. The Vice President handling business development constitutes the immediate supervisor of the Senior Product Line Manager so that key decisions or made decisions are consulted with the Vice President for approval and endorsement when the product strategy has been approved and sent down to the different departments for actualisation. As such, the Vice President for business development is the final assessor of all the product strategies and all related major decisions. Good working relations have to be developed with the Vice President together with a full understanding of the value direction of business development goals in order to ensure congruence with the these goals in making product strategies and decisions. The team leader of the product development and engineering department constitutes the first chain of command in handing down decisions or the implementation of product strategies for particular product lines as well as the direct communication line in obtaining information regarding new products or product re-engineering. As such, cooperative relationship and open-communications are important elements in this area of group relations. The senior manager of the marketing department holds key market data necessary to support the decisions on product strategies so that it is important to develop good working relations with the senior manager of the marketing department to obtain updated data on changes in market demands and trends in customer feedback of newly introduced and existing products and product lines. The senior manager of the accounting department provides information on the availability of funds for investments in product strategy and the release of the budget for this management area. As such, close coordination with the accounting department not only facilitates the release of necessary funds but also the organised auditing of the money appropriated for product strategies. The senior manager of the operations department handles the actualisation of the product strategy so that close coordination with the senior manager in-charge is necessary to ensure that the strategy is actualised as intended and that issues arising during the course of implementation are efficiently and timely addressed.
Inter-group interactions cover the relations established by the Senior Product Line Manager with external groups especially suppliers and regulatory bodies. Since the company is engaged in ICT product, service and idea development, the company commonly engages in various suppliers of IT tools and services to support its product strategy needs including network linkage partnerships. These groups determine the ability of the manager to ensure that all the tools and expertise necessary in developing and implementing product strategies are in place. Relationships with regulatory bodies such as the IP Department and the Trade and Industry Department relate to the development of innovative products and systems by the company that involve regulation in order to protect the exclusive appropriation by the company and distribution to other companies in different countries at a price that supports a respectable return on investments.
The Senior Product Line Manager fulfils the job description by developing dependable working relations with these internal and external groups revolving around interdependencies. Pooled interdependence (2007) generally describes the cooperative relationship arising between the Senior Product Line Manager and internal groups because of the need to combine valuable contributions. Sequential interdependence ( 2007) generally develops in the relationship with external groups because of the need to undergo sequential steps and actions before the actualisation of objectives.
3.4 Evaluation of the Effectiveness and Efficiency of the Interdependency
In terms of the intra-group relations, the mutual pooled interdependency results to the efficient completion of the work of the Senior Product Line Manager as well as the tasks assigned to the different departments. This is because the completion of the responsibilities of the manager coincides with the direction of tasks of the different departments while information and feedback obtained from the different departments supports decision-making and strategy formulation by the manager. As such, efficiency is achieved through the development of a coordinative attitude among the groups involved. The effectiveness of the interdependency lies in the need to cooperate in order to produce outcomes.
With regard to intra-group interdependency, the relationship with regulatory bodies is highly unilateral and serves the interest of the company and the manager although compliance with regulation supports the interests of these regulatory bodies. The relationship with the freelance IT consultant is also unilateral since the consultant provides services to a number of companies so that the strength of the relationship with the manager and the company depends upon additional incentives. Relationships with the ICT tools and systems development suppliers constitutes a more mutual relationship since these rely upon long-term and exclusive supplier relations with many companies in order to achieve business interests so that establishing a good supply chain relationship with the manager and the company falls under the interest of these suppliers.
3.5 Enhancing the Effectiveness, Efficiency and Satisfaction of the Interdependent Group
Key to ensuring and enhancing the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of interdependent groups largely depend upon context. In the case of intra-group interdependencies, the key aspect of relationship building is working under unified objectives, relying and developing values and attitudes necessary in ensuring cooperation, and building upon tools to support collaboration such as having open communication channels. The area that needs improvement in the company is more on the appreciation of the need for information sharing based on the achievement of common goals instead of competing to come-up with the desired department output. In relation to inter-group dependencies, regulatory bodies assumed as neutral bodies pose no problem to the company even if the company holds greater dependence on these bodies. Relationships with freelance consultants need to involve incentives to ensure quality of service and the fiduciary nature of the working relationship with the company. The interdependence with IT suppliers should revolve around both dependability and flexibility to support the product strategy of the company.
4. Changing Nature/ Contemporary Views/ Modern Views
The perspective on people and relationship management have taken a turn towards the building of valuable external relations especially since the internationalisation of business firms have resulted to the need to rely on externally sourced tools and expertise to support automation and IT transformation especially for firms that add value to their products and services using IT tools. Business concepts such as outsourcing and B2B emerged to capture such relationships. As such, developing external relations has become as important as maintaining internal relations.
5. Interview
The interview focused on the major problems encountered by the manager in dealing with both inter and intra-relations together with ways that these issues were addressed. Major problems encountered manager included the differing priorities and perspectives of the parties involved in the development of product strategy such as the accounting department taking a cautious stand about supporting innovations while the products development department encourages the company to support a promising product strategy. This is because of poor knowledge sharing. The best way of dealing with such conflict is to determine a point of consensus by getting the product development team to understand the perspective of the accounting department and provide strong support for their proposal and vice versa.
6. Findings/Conclusions/Discussion
Easing the complexity of the manager’s job involves processes and tools. Processes in easing the manager’s job involves the scientific process of understanding what needs to be done or what problems need solutions, determining options and available tools, assessing the relative merits of these different options and tools, and selecting the best possible solution. This may sound elementary but complexities are worsened further by the inability or failure of managers to fully understand the value of intra and inter-relationships and apply the best possible means of developing and maintaining these relationships. Key tools in relationship building and maintenance involve open communications environment and ICT tools. These are necessary to support communications necessary in building collaborative intra and mutually beneficial inter-part relationships.
7. Recommendations
- Develop a system of identifying and assessing the possible expectations of different parties and best ways of ensuring that these expectations are met together with the objectives of the company.
- Develop open communications in the workplace to ensure that members of the organisation and external partners recognise the value of communications.
- Enhance knowledge management particularly information sharing.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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