Management Skills 101
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Management Skills 101
Ken Daugherty
Ronald Sprague
MGT 330
University of Phoenix Online
Monday, May 05, 2008
Management Skills 101
Pastor Causey was mortified by what he was hearing. Max’s explanations on why the church was over budget on the bathroom remodeling project rumbled on and on like a single engine plane using cheap gas. Pastor Causey glanced over at Boudreaux who was calling Mr. Burns a mugwump and began to shake his head in disbelief. Boudreaux was supposed to provide everyone involved in the project a list of the contractors and their scheduled time and day of arrival to do their portion of the remodeling. He forgot, so, everyone showed up at the same time on the same day and it was like watching WWF Saturday night wrestling as to who had rights to the area first. The other board members were reminded how Max influenced the board to agree to spend ten thousand dollars since he assured everyone ten grand was more than enough. Now, back paddling, Max was unraveling about how the price of fuel had driven the cost of construction materials up and because the timing fiasco with the contractors, caused by Boudreaux, the church was being hit with back-charges. Mr. Burns was hot and furious! How did a budget of ten thousand magically turn into twenty-two thousand and the painters were not even finished painting yet? Mr. Green secretly grinned and thought to himself, “If only the pastor had listened to meвЂ¦Ð²Ð‚Ñœ Pastor Causey knew he had dropped the ball on this one. A post mortem meeting after this mess would definitely conjure a psalm of imprecation rather than a psalm of praise for any unity of the brotherhood.
The above short story is an analogy of the pitfalls of poor ineffective leadership. Planning, organizing, leading and controlling define broad and general concepts that relate a type of cross function communication system where the vision will lead the visionary or visionaries and transform the vision from the invisible to the visible. When the vision, objective or mission is painted and described with detail and clarity, the collective efforts of upper tier and lower tier constituents allows the equal parts of a whole to make emotional intelligent and educative judgments on whether they are achieving the objective. A title might afford you power but influence is the key to persuade and accountability is the door that can open or close with control. Managers should focus on what is to be managed; people. When a collective group has agreed upon whom their leader is what their objective is and how they intend to get to that objective, then success can be measured by results and achievement. Both successful and unsuccessful companies and corporations start with something of a mission or purpose in mind. Communication of course sets the tone for the good or bad and can create the atmosphere of clarity for great success, or the message of chaos that gets everyone into the misinterpretation zones that cause catastrophic failure.
Since verbal, written, and visual communication become major channels to convey a message it becomes important to have an action plan and to be organized into smaller actions or goals that can be easily measured, modified and accomplished.
Organizing allows us to relate our thoughts and ideas to one another in a systematic form and allows us to measure accomplishments one step at a time. Effective leadership provides the inspiration and the influence needed to infuse one another with the momentum to engage in individual or collective activities that