Management. Educational aid

Situation 5. The head of the organization decided to find out which of his employees belongs to the “thinking” category, and decided to install electronic listening devices at their workplaces.

Do you think the director of the enterprise will be able to achieve his goal in this way?

Situation 6. The head of the Vikhr company, having completed advanced training courses, decided to take into account the individual characteristics of each employee, so he allowed his employees to independently set the start time of the working day.

Do you think the decision of the head of the company in this case is sufficiently justified? Express your opinion.

Situation 7. Eight people worked in the Metel organization. After increasing the staff to 28 people, it turned out that the insufficient equipment of workplaces with computers (there is only one computer for two employees) led to the fact that sometimes it was necessary to simultaneously perform two urgent tasks on one computer. This resulted in the work not being completed on time. The organization does not yet have funds to purchase computers.

What should a manager do in this situation?

Situation 8. At the Vostok enterprise, the head of the department, Petrov, gives an assignment to his subordinate Morozov, who works in his department. At the same time, another department head, Sidorov, gives the task to Morozov, since he is part of his working group on the project. A subordinate cannot complete all tasks at the same time.

What do you think are possible actions for Morozov and heads of departments?

Situation 9. You were invited to a company as a consultant. After analyzing the situation, you discovered that the enterprise lacks not only a system for taking into account rational proposals and stimulating the

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development of know-how, but also assessing the effectiveness of the organization of processes, operations and procedures.

Give reasons for your possible actions in this situation.

Situation 10. Markin was appointed as the head of the West company. Before his arrival, retraining of personnel was not practiced in the organization. He decided to allocate funds for retraining, seeing in this event not an opportunity for increased costs, but long-term investments in the development of human capital. Most employees did not see the need to make such a decision; they believed that it would be better to spend the money on bonuses; they were already doing their job well, and business at the West company was going uphill.

Do you think there was a need for the manager to make such a decision?

EXERCISES

Exercise 1. Choose a modern leader (a person you know personally or about whom you have read articles in magazines, newspapers, or seen on television).

Answer the following questions:

1.What character traits does this leader have?

2.How does a manager try to motivate his subordinates?

3.To what extent does he allow his subordinates to participate in decision making?

Exercise 2. A manager, especially a high-level one, should always have a deputy. The success of the business largely depends on their joint activities and interaction. Below are the basic commandments that should guide the business relationship between the manager and his deputy.

Commandments for the leader:

1. Mandatory full informing of the deputy about the state of affairs.

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2.Loyalty to the deputy. The manager must not only support his deputy, but also defend his interests.

3.Providing all assistance to the deputy: he must have access to information and valuable experience.

Commandments for a deputy:

1.Act in the spirit of an absent leader. One should not see deputyship as a chance to pursue one’s own policy.

2.Loyalty to the absent leader. Neither in relation to the leader of his

“boss”, nor in relation to his subordinates, the deputy should not carry out his own tactics.

3.Secrecy. It is necessary to remain silent about all incidents in the unit. Of course, the deputy is not obliged to hide facts related to criminal offenses that have become known to him.

4.Honesty and nobility. The deputy should not use the information he received during his work for the sake of his own career.

5.Orientation towards the end of the terms of the deputy position. The deputy must record in the work diary (other similar documents) all significant matters and fully inform the manager about them upon his return, so that he can begin work without delay [14, p. 38–39].

Answer the following questions:

1.Do you agree with all the commandments?

2.What else do you think needs to be added to the commandments to benefit the cause?

3.Which commandments, in your opinion, can or should be abandoned and why?

4.If you were appointed a top manager, would you be guided by the recommendations given earlier in your relationship with your deputy? Explain your position.

Exercise 3. Develop management principles for a conventional service organization.

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Exercise 4 (using the Internet).

Most companies engage in the professional development of their employees so that at the right time they are able to take on certain leadership positions in the company. Find such a company on the Internet.

How are employees trained to take up leadership positions? What qualities of leaders are valued in the company?

CASE

Case “Progress has slowed down”

The Progress management company was founded by two Russian managers with significant experience working in Western hotel chains. For about a year now, the partners have been offering their three-star hotel management services to domestic investors who are planning to invest in hotel construction. But so far their efforts have not been rewarded: the managers have not received a suitable offer.

Give it three stars. The first of the partners, Stanislav Ivashkevich, has been in the hotel business for more than ten years. He started in 1993 at the Marco Polo Palace Hotel as a cleaner of public premises. He worked at Metropol as a night auditor, opened the Marriott Tverskaya hotel, and interned in Los Angeles. In recent years, he has already managed hotels, for example, he headed the reception service at Holiday Inn, and served as general director of the Sretenskaya Hotel. In addition, Mr. Ivashkevich is one of the few Russians who is a member of the Hotel and Catering International Management Association, a leading organization in the hospitality industry.

His partner is also not new to this business, but specializes in financial issues.

The founders of Progress Management Company believe that their existing experience allows them to offer a completely competitive product on the market. And they offer management of three-star hotels. According

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to Stanislav Ivashkevich, bringing it to the “three stars” standard is not at all an easy task. The future “star quality” of a hotel is often compromised even at the stage of a construction project. Stanislav Ivashkevich: “We recently talked with an investor. He is confident that he is building a three or four star hotel. I don’t know how he formulated his wishes, but when we opened the project made by Italian architects, it immediately became clear from the plans that this was a good five-star hotel with more than three hundred rooms. People are building a huge, expensive hotel, like in Hong Kong, and don’t even know it!” For a hotel to meet its standard, it must have a very specific number of rooms of the required size at a certain price (for “three stars” this is $50–100 per room per day).

In addition to checking the construction project, Progress Management Company undertakes to adapt the standards of Western networks to Russian conditions. For a project to be commercially successful, it is necessary to optimize all costs — for equipping the hotel, for staff, for operating the hotel. Stanislav Ivashkevich: “Misunderstanding of the material base leads to many mistakes. This is how economy class hotels appear with a jacuzzi in every room, an “Olympic” swimming pool, and some incredible casinos and restaurants. This hotel will never pay for itself. There are other mistakes — for example, they try to build a five-star hotel, spending pennies on it. Such a project is also doomed to failure from the very beginning.” According to the partners, there are no small details in the equipment. For example, a three-star hotel can easily afford to keep dispensers in the rooms instead of separate bottles of shampoo and bars of soap, which significantly reduces costs on this item.

To operate a managed hotel, the partners promise to engage costeffective operating and cleaning companies themselves, as well as to use their own ticket booking chain. There were even agreements on the possibility of joining the future hotel under the management of Progress to one of the Western chains.

The partners came up with the slogan for their product: “Worldwide quality, taking into account the Russian soul,” and are now thinking about creating their own brand.

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However, such developments are not very helpful yet. The company sees the main problem leading to the fact that Progress does not have effective contacts with investors as follows: the level of understanding of the hotel business among investors is very low: “It all comes down to what should be beautiful, marble walls and beds in Empire style But no one thinks about how it will pay off and whether it will work.” And although three-star hotels have long been talked about as the most promising hotel format, almost no one has any idea what they really are.

Reputation problems. Another big problem is the prejudice of investors towards Russian managers. It belongs both to foreign financiers and domestic ones. You can also understand why the International Finance Corporation (IFC) chooses trusted Western partners. Russian investors, according to Mr. Ivashkevich, look at the management of Western networks rather out of a habit that has become entrenched over the last decade. In the first years of the new economy, there was no alternative to inviting a Western team to a new Russian hotel. Stanislav Ivashkevich: “For example, twenty Americans came to open the Marriott Tverskaya hotel. They took everything they needed to equip the hotel and meet the stated standard with them in containers.” Now investors have an alternative — Russian managers who have gone through a good school in Western hotel chains.

“We offer a much cheaper option with the same level of quality,” says Stanislav Ivashkevich. — For example, “Westerners” do not deviate one iota from the standards of their own network. Every room is supposed to have Dove soap — and it is there on all continents, even if you have to deliver it by plane. As a result, some commonplace BIC pen will cost the hotel $1 (with a price of several cents) — this is a real example.” Thus, in large and small ways, a critical mass of expenses is accumulated, which may well make the project unprofitable in principle. And Russian managers, knowing local conditions, can significantly reduce costs, which is important when it comes to cost-effective formats. In addition, Western management demands Western standards of remuneration. At the same time, as Mr. Ivashkevich’s partner says, a clause is “hammered” into the

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contracts, guaranteeing them this payment, even if there is no corresponding income. This could be, for example, payment as a percentage of revenue and only a part, and a smaller one, as a percentage of profit.

Progress Management Company is ready to take on management tasks for significantly less money. According to Stanislav Ivashkevich, where seven Americans worked with a salary of $7 thousand, you can get by with one Russian manager worth $5 thousand.

Recently, the number of competitors has increased. Several Western consulting companies have entered the market. Although they do not try to manage hotels, they are rivals of Progress when it comes to providing advice.

Over the past six months, the Management Committee has held a series of negotiations that have led nowhere. Their failure was not always the result of the success of competitors (some projects died on their own), but the negotiations always had to compete with proposals from Western networks (for example, with Accor, which manages the Novotel network). Investors are not yet at all convinced that choosing Russian managers is more preferable. Progress doesn’t yet know how to win them over to their side.

Common problems. There are also industry-wide issues plaguing the entire hotel industry. For example, one of these problems is the long payback period for hotel projects. Let's assume that a developer has the opportunity to build a building with an area of 5 thousand m2. What to build: a hotel or an office complex? The hotel will pay for itself in five to eight years, and the offices will be sold in two years. So far, developers are more often choosing an office center because it provides a quick return on money. The fact that a hotel is capable of bringing in much more money for a long time (up to 40% of the proceeds can go to income for the investor) is not yet taken into account by them.

The search for suitable projects is also difficult due to the peculiarities of business in the capital. Discussions about the need to open three-star hotels in Moscow on the eve of the tourist boom have been

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going on for a long time. The mayor of the capital has already stated that he has found about two hundred plots for hotels. However, upon closer examination, it turned out that almost all of these areas are burdened with houses standing on them, which must first be resettled. Experienced developers avoid such problems, and the three-star hotel construction program is still stalled.

In February of this year, the Rezidor SAS group announced its intention to invest $400 million in Russian three-star hotels. But so far, interested observers do not see the continuation of this high-profile project. So it’s not only Progress that is unlucky so far. No one in the market doubts that the time for three-stars will come — just when? The main thing is to meet this moment fully armed in order to take advantage of all the advantages of the pioneers of this market [6].

Questions for the case:

1.What is the essence of the internal and external environment of the organization?

2.What are the general characteristics of this organization?

3.What levels of management and management skills are used in this example?

CONTROL QUESTIONS

1.What is meant by process approach?

2.How would you characterize the systems approach?

3.Define the situational approach.

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2. FUNCTIONS AND METHODS OF CONTROL

A function in management is a special type of management activity through which the subject of management influences the managed object.

There are general management functions: planning (selection of goals and an action plan to achieve them), organization (distribution of tasks between departments or employees and establishment of interaction between them), control (correlation of achieved results with planned ones), motivation (stimulating performers to implement planned actions and achievement of set goals), coordination (ensures compliance and consistency between various parts of the managed system by establishing rational connections). All management functions are united by connecting processes of communication and decision making. General management functions take place in any management process.

Next, we will consider management methods, which represent the impact of various techniques and methods on the controlled object to effectively achieve the goals. Typically, management practice uses a set of methods that complement each other.

Let us highlight three main management methods.

Administrative methods are implemented through direct influence of managers on subordinates. Methods of administrative influence are based on the power of managers and are, in essence, methods of power motivation, based on real coercion or the possibility of coercion.

The essence of economic methods is to influence the economic interests of workers using economic levers. These methods are based on the use of economic incentives that provide for the interest and responsibility of management employees for the consequences of decisions made and encourage employees to proactively achieve assigned tasks without special orders.

Social and psychological methods consist in using an effective work mechanism by influencing the non-economic interests of workers and economic counterparties.

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Methods influence the needs and interests of an individual and a group, their hierarchy, activate creative or performing activities, and communication. These methods involve the use of moral incentives, special methods and conditions of communication.

Modern management activities are impossible without the widespread use of socio-psychological management methods. They always complement both administrative and economic management methods.

SPECIFIC SITUATIONS

Situation 1. A breakdown of the latest equipment occurred at the enterprise. It would take about a week to resolve it: you need to submit an application, etc. One worker, risking his life, quickly fixed the problem in two days, without having any special repair qualifications. The shop manager, having learned about what had happened, decided...

What would you do if you were the shop manager?

Situation 2. Every day the head of an organization finds errors in the work of his subordinates. Despite the fact that the work is done very well, he will always find an opportunity to blame his subordinate for the failure of the assigned work. The employee feels guilty, begins to apologize, and often develops the belief that it is impossible to complete the work in accordance with the requirements of the manager.

Do you think the leader is doing the right thing? What consequences might there be for the manager and the organization as a whole?

Situation 3. Managers often pay special attention to the demands of

“scandals.” While managers are busy satisfying the needs of the dissatisfied, the majority of “normal” employees feel discriminated against, reasonably believing that such an “unusual” attitude towards “scandals” is difficult to classify as examples of justice.

The head of the Meteor company, V. Petrov, found himself “between two fires.” Trying to reduce the feeling of dissatisfaction among the

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