Art of Management – Episode 2: Introduction to Classical and Modern Management

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Art of Management – Episode 2: Introduction to Classical and Modern Management

"Management is nothing more than motivating other people." - Lee Iacocca
“Management is nothing more than motivating other people.” – Lee Iacocca

In previous post, I was discussing attributes of managers with differences between classical and modern management qualities and duties of managers. In this post I will discuss the first quality of modern management “Energizing Employees”.

Getting the best of your employees cannot be achieved by simply asking them to do their best. The only way to do this properly is through energizing employees. This is achieved through unleashing the passion of their work and allowing their talents to soar. Energizing employees is a major catalyst for change management. I am listing below a set of techniques that can be utilized for energizing employees.

1- Develop a clear vision for employees and whole organization – it depends on your management position. You need to enlighten the road for your employees. Communication plays a major role here.

Japanese management style relies on building consensus among groups of employees. It is management by group rather than individual management. Japanese management relies on specific concepts.  some of those concepts became later the core of modern management.

This style of management includes: long-term employment, slow employment promotion and evaluation, non-specialized career paths (relying on breadth of knowledge), implicit control mechanism (rather than explicit supervision), collective decision making, collective responsibility (organization is divided into circles of teams who are responsible for their success with less dependency upon other circles), and finally looking at employees as persons respecting human factor very much. You can refer to the forum of Japanese Management.

2- Seek and Listen to Employees Ideas and Suggestions – not only this but engage them in decision making process. Let them feel with ownership of their activities and decisions,

3- Make sure employees’ environment is conductive – this will encourage them to do their best without asking,

4- Manage by Example – be very sensitive to your employees. Always manage people the same way you want to be managed. Be humble to your team. My advice is to do things that your team may think they are inferior. This will make politics among team members to the minimum. If they see their managers can do anything at anytime for the sake of success, nobody will think twice about doing anything for the same objective,

5- Do not prison yourself in the office – this is a manager’s tomb! Regularly meet your employees and mingle with them,

6- Be honest and truthful with your employees at all times – this is how power teams are constructed. Even if truth is hard, do not hide it to soften things,

In coming posts, I will focus on other modern management qualities, namely, empowering, supporting, and communicating with employees.

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