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» System Approach to Management
» System Thinking
» Critical Systems Thinking
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» Roles and Responsibilites of Manager

Manager

Manager may refer to as anyone who uses management skills or holds the organizational title of manager. A manager is the person responsible for planning and directing the work of a group of individuals, monitoring their work, and taking corrective action.

Division of Managers (business)

- A manager of a department in an organization.
- General manager, for managing both the revenue and cost elements of an organization.
- Project manager, for individual projects.
- Team manager/leader
- Manager (baseball), wresting etc. in other sports coach.
- Talent manager.

Manager may direct workers directly or they may direct several supervisors who direct the workers. The manager must be familiar with the work of all the groups he/she supervises, but does not need to be the best in any or all of the areas. It is more important for the manager to know how to manage the workers than to do their work well.

A manager may have the power to hire employees or to promote them. In larger companies, a manager may only recommend such action to the next level of management. The manager has the authority to change the work assignment of team members.

A manager’s title reflects what he/she is responsible for. An accounting manager supervises the accounting function. An operations manager is responsible for the operations of the company. The manager of design engineering supervises engineers and support staff engaged in design of a product or service. A night manager is responsible for the activities that take place at night. There are many management functions in business and, therefore many manager titles. Regardless of title, the manager is responsible for planning, directing, monitoring and controlling the people and their work.

Duties of a Manager

There are many specific duties that will vary widely depending on what type of activity the manager is responsible for. But in general terms, managers are usually responsible to ensure that the people assigned to them are doing their tasks correctly. The definition of correctly is where there is a good degree of variation from job to job, but it usually involves managing a budget for the people assigned to the manager, ensuring that the tasks of those people are completed on whatever schedule has been established, working through personnel issues like training if necessary, salary issues, bad performance etc.

Environment

Environment may refer to:

• Built environment, constructed surroundings that provides the setting for human activity, ranging from the large-scale civic surroundings to the personal places.

• Natural environment, all living and non-living things that occur naturally on earth.

• Environment (biophysical), the physical and biological factors along with their chemical interactions that affect an organism.

• Environment (series). A series of LPs, cassettes and CDs depicting natural sounds.

• Environmental art.

• Environmental determinism.

• Environmental policy.

• Environmental psychology.

• Environmental quality.

• Environmental science, the study of the interaction among the physical, chemical and biological components of the environment.

• Social environment, the culture that an individual lives in, and the people and institutions with whom they interact.

Business Environment

The ICFAI center for management research state that the global business environment can be defined as the environment in different sovereign countries, with factors exogenous to the home environment of the organization, influencing decision making on resource use and capabilities. This include the social, political, economic, regulatory, tax, cultural, legal, and technological environments.

The political environment in a country influences the legislation and government rules and regulation under which a foreign firm operates. The economic environment relates to all the factors that contribute to a country’s attractiveness for foreign businesses.

Every country in the world follows its own system of low. A foreign company operating in that particular country has to abide with its system of low as long as it is operating in that country. The technological environment comprises factors related to the materials and machines used in manufacturing goods and services. Receptivity of organizations to new technology and adoption of new technology by consumers influence decisions made in an organization.

As firms have no control over the external environment, their success depends upon how well they adapt to the external environment. A firm’s ability to design and adjust its internal variables to take advantage of opportunities offered by the external environment, and its ability to control threats posed by the same environment, determine its success.

System Approach to Management

We have heard the phrase systematic approach used in life, in many different capacities such as sales, business management, and even training. One may have heard that you need to approach this systematically yet one may ask what is systematic approach?

It can be argued that a systematic approach is more of a philosophy than a technique. It’s the way one approach in life, as opposed to the specific solution that exist.

Given a certain problem, one has many choices as to how to solve it. However, approaching the problem haphazardly may or may not solve the problems. But approaching the problem with the analytical approach, one is more likely to find the solution to the problem.

How one can approach the problem analytically, or systematically, depends on how one views the problem. This is what is often called analysis and is really the same thing as breaking the problem down, sometimes referred to as divide and conquer.

By breaking down a problem, one can see the various aspects of the problem, and how they inter-relate, and by isolating the causative factors in the problem, one can find the solution to the problem.

A systematic approach can be used in many areas, such as, system analysis, software development ( which are part of the software development life cycle) internet site design, web optimization, hosting, business management and consulting, sales, and training.

Six reason for the systematic approach to management:

- issue complexity
- cross silo collaboration
- strategic uncertainty
- operational change
- relational confusion
- externally induced change

System Thinking

System thinking is any process of estimating or inferring how local policies, action, or changes influences the state of the neighboring universe. It is an approach to problem solving that views problem as part of an overall system, rather than reacting to present outcomes or events and potentially contributing to further development of the undesired issues and problem. Systems thinking is a framework that is based on the belief that the component parts of a systems, rather than in isolation. The only way to fully understand why a problem or element occurs and persists is to understand the part in relation to the whole. Standing in contrast to Descartes scientific reductionism and philosophical analysis thinking concerns an understanding of a system by examining the linkages and interactions between the elements that compose the entirety of the system.

System thinking attempts to illustrate that events are separated by distance and time and that small catalytic events can cause large changes in complex systems. Acknowledging that an improvement in one area of a system can adversely affect another area of the system, it promotes organizational communication at all level on order to avoid the silo effect, systems thinking techniques may be used to study any kind of system- natural, scientific, engineered, human, or conceptual.

The concept of a system

Both systems thinkers and futurists consider that

- a system is a dynamic and complex whole, interacting as a structured functional unit.

- Energy, material and information flow among the different elements that compose a system.

- A system is community situated within an environment.

- Energy, material flow from and to the surrounding environment via semi-permeable membrane or boundaries.

- System are often composed of entities seeking equilibrium but can exhibits oscillating chaotic, or exponential behavior.

A holistic system is any set (group) of interdependent or temporally interacting parts. parts are generally systems themselves and are composed of other parts, just as systems are generally parts of other systems.

System and the application of systems thinking has been grouped into three categories based on the techniques used to tackle a system.

- Hard systems - involving simulations, often using computers and the techniques of operations research. Useful for problems that can justifiably be quantified. However it cannot easily take into account unquantifiable variables (opinions, culture, politics, etc) and may treat people as being passive, rather than having complex motivations.

- Soft system - for systems that cannot easily be quantified especially those involving people holding multiple and conflicting frames of reference. Useful for understanding motivations, viewpoints, and interaction and addressing qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions of problem situations. Soft systems are a field that utilize foundation methodological work developed by peter check land, Brian Wilson and their colleagues at Lancaster university. Morphological analysis is a complementary method for structing and analyzing non-quantifiable problem complexes.

- Evolutionary system - Bela H Banathy developed a methodology that is applicable to the design of complex social systems. This technique integrates critical system inquiry with soft systems methodology. Evolutionary systems, similar to dynamic systems are understood as open, complex system, but with the capacity to evolve overtime. Banathy unique integrated the interdisciplinary of system research including chaos, complexity, cybernetics, cultural anthropology, evolutionary theory, and others.

The systems thinking approach incorporates several tenets

• Interdependence of objects and their attributes- independent elements can never constitute a system.

• Holism- emergent properties not possible to detect by analysis should be possible to define by a holistic approach.

• Goal seeking- systemic interaction must result in some goal or final state.

• Inputs and outputs- in a closed system inputs are determined once and constant in an open system additional inputs are admitted from the environment.

• Transformation of inputs into outputs- this is the process by which the goal are obtained.

• Entropy- the amount of disorder or randomness present in any system.

• Regulation- a method of feedback is necessary for the system to operate predictably.

• Hierarchy- complex wholes are made up of smaller subsystems.

• Differentiation- specialized units perform specialized functions.

• Equifinality- alternative ways of attaining the same objectives( convergence).

• Multifinality- attaining alternative objectives from the same inputs (divergence).

Applications

System thinking is increasingly being used to tackle a wide variety of subjects in fields such as computing, engineering, epidemiology, information science, health, manufacture, management, and the environment.

Some examples

• Organizational architecture
• Job design
• Team population and work unit design
• Linear and complex process design
• Supply chain design
• Business continuity planning with

Critical Systems Thinking

Critical systems thinking is a recent systems thinking framework, that wants to bring unity to the diversity of different systems approaches and advises managers how best to use them.

Overview

System thinking is traditionally occupied with two themes

• The first design focuses on finding out how systems are best coordinated and controlled with feedback mechanism patterned to organize information carrying in the system.

• The second debate deals with finding out how sets of purposeful activity and peoples differing viewpoints can be systematically reconciled or accommodated.

Critical system thinking aims to combine systems thinking can develop as a tolerant and reflexive enterprise in which these knowledge constructions become accommodated.

Critical systems thinking aims to combine systems thinking and participatory methods to address the challenges of problems characterized by large scale, complexity, uncertainty, importance and imperfection. It follow nonlinear relationship, feedback, hierarchies, emergent properties and also so on to be taken into account and critical system thinking has particularly problematized the issue of boundaries and their consequences for inclusion, exclusion and marginalization.

The early approaches to using systems ideas in an applied manner, were operational research systems analysis and systems engineering. These approaches were suitable for tackling certain well defined problems but were found to have limitations when faced with complex problems involving people with a variety of viewpoint who are frequently at odds with one another. Systems thinkers responded in the 1970s with approaches such as systems dynamics, and organizational cybernetics to tackle complexity although this term is used more loosely than its mathematical sense.

At the leading edge since the 1980s critical system thinking has provided something more a bigger picture that allowed systems thinking to mature as a trans discipline (the mix of disciplines is a typically not defined), and sets out a variety of methodology, methods and models often used in an un structured manner for intervention in complex organization and applications to social problems. There is no grounding in any social science and theory in this type of work often amounts to little more than diagrammatic treatment of linkages based on box and line drawings.

Responsibilities of Management and Directors

Each Director or Manager of an affected department is responsible for:

1- Implementing and maintaining compliance standard and policies and procedures and manuals specific to their departments providing training to all his or her employees in compliance standard, policies, procedures, laws and regulations applicable to employees of the department.

2- Enforcing this program, the code of ethical conduct, medical centre policies and procedure and applicable laws and regulation.

3- Investigating reports or responsible indication of violation of this program the code of ethic conduct, medical centre process and policies.

4- Reporting to the compliance officer any report or responsible indication of violation of applicable law or regulation by any member of the department.

5- Initiating or implementing corrective or disciplinary action in the event of violation of the compliance program the code of ethical conduct, medical center policies, procedure and applicable laws and regulation.

Roles and Responsibilities of Manager

A manager makes a organizational decisions and handles a variety of problems that arise on a daily basis. You have to identify the problems, create choices and alternative courses of actions.

The daily routine of making decisions include determining how to approach an employee who is not performing or lacking progress and how to bring about change to the organization and its team.

It involves thinking and planning out strategies on how to improve quality and also being cost conscious and effective.

Goal setting, planning and organizing

In order to achieve long term goals and commit to strategies for substantial earnings, the manager has to communicate the vision of the company to his subordinates. He breaks down and clarif is the goals that each team or individual have to perform and assign work schedules and strategies.

Having goals and planning out the directions allow for effective time management and saves cost and resources.

Guiding and giving directions

The role as the head of an organization is to guide and give direction so that the team can perform effectively. He offers on the job coaching, training and support. In order to meet the needs and objectives, they may need extra input, information or skills.

Empowering others

The performace of the team depends on the manager's abilities to empower them. How well a person performs depends on his motivation. Manager's task is to encourage and coach others to improve themselves and the quality of their work. The Manager instills in them the desire to excel and accept responsibility and self-management.

Communication and people skills

As the boss, the manager's ability to develop trust and confidence, resolve problems and issues will result in a productive, goal oriented work group. The Manager should encourage his team to ask for help, get involved and participate.

Practice empathy and respect their personal values, opinions and ideas. Listen and respond and offer praises and encouragements when they make progress. By doing that you will enhance their self-esteem and they will offer you the cooperation.

A manager is the middle person in between the top management level and the team that reports to him. He has to ensure that communication is smooth and conveyed clearly to avoid misinterpretations and dissatisfaction.

Evaluating and analyzing

A Manager should have the capacity to evaluate and examine a process or procedure and decide on the best choice to produce an outcome. He has to look at the importance, quality and values and then take the best approach.

He is also expected to track the progress of each individual's activities and effectiveness, review them and offer feedback and counselling.

Provide satisfaction among the staff and the customers

The subordinates are happy when they know that their supervisors provide them with the necessary tools and resource. They feel secure if the management puts priority on health, safety and cleanliness issues.

You satisfy customers by giving good quality of service or product and take care of their needs.

Being an exemplary role model

Managers who set high standards or goals and achieve them are great leaders by examples. The ability to tolerate stress and remain poised under job pressures and still maintain a high activity and energy level are contagious.

You should set the example by being accountable for your own activities and performance. Work harder on your personal growth and you will become a respected and efficient leader.