Management. Educational aid

“scandals,” the manager risks inviting the “fire” of the broad “masses” upon himself. But if he ignores manifestations of dissatisfaction, the

“infection” from the “scandals” can turn into an “epidemic” and spread to other employees.

What would you do in a similar situation?

Situation 4. Ivanov, the head of the Vityaz company, is concerned about the ongoing violation of the rules regarding tea breaks. He gave instructions that no more than the prescribed 10 minutes should be spent for this purpose and personally talked with individual violators. The employees seem to be resisting his efforts, which are getting nowhere.

What, in your opinion, needs to be done to improve the situation at the Vityaz company?

Situation 5. You gave an order to a subordinate on how to solve a problem at the enterprise. Your subordinate did not follow this order, but solved the problem in his own way, which led to a better result.

What might your actions be in this or a similar situation?

Situation 6. You are the head of an organization, you gave a task to the head of a department, who completed it. But you found out that he did not complete it on his own (his work was done by his subordinate). The head of the department, in connection with the successful completion of the task, asks for encouragement.

What are your actions in this situation as the head of the organization?

Situation 7. Your immediate superior, bypassing you, gives an urgent task to your subordinate, who is already busy completing your important task.

Describe the situation from your point of view and suggest ways to solve it.

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Situation 8. You are the head of the enterprise I. Sidorov, you entrust the task to your subordinate V. Vasiliev, knowing that he can complete it well. But suddenly you find out that he delegated the task to another person, as a result of which the task was not completed by the deadline [15].

What are your actions in this situation?

EXERCISES

Exercise 1. The elements of the management cycle that determine its essence are the functions of forecasting and planning, work organization, coordination and regulation, motivation, control, accounting, analysis. Give your own example involving the control loop.

Exercise 2. Find out which management methods are mainly used by the management of your organization (university, industrial enterprise, etc.).

CASES

Case 1. “Control in the organization”

Control at General Electric Credit Corporation. General Electric Credit Corporation (GEC) is an unconsolidated wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric. The company has more than 100 offices and 6,700 employees in the United States. It is the world's second largest lending company and is involved in 22 different economic activities. These 22 activities are organized into five main departments that centralize certain activities such as analysis, accounting, taxation and business planning.

DEK has several branches that search and develop financial opportunities. The company participates in the financing of many

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enterprises, from consumer lending systems (loans to pay for medical, educational and other services) to lending for oil exploration and well drilling projects.

The very nature of the lending business and the decentralized structure of the DEC would seem to make its management problematic. However, James R. Bunt, vice president and chief accounting analyst of the firm, notes that the company has three types of control levers, which make up the control system.

At the highest level, DEK uses the same economic levers as most large companies: control over the implementation of financial estimates, internal and external audits.

The second type of control levers is the analysis of all transactions. The number of levels in this analysis process depends on the size of the trade. Thus, a typical transaction may require two or three levels of analysis, while a truly large transaction is reviewed by the division's management or, in some cases, by the board of directors. This type of control is implemented by agreeing on the terms of the transaction at the required levels. For example, in order for a credit manager to issue a loan to an individual, it is necessary to obtain visas from the heads of the credit department and the department for working with individuals, and a transaction for issuing a large loan will also require approval from the head of the regional branch and the manager of the parent organization of the DEK, who oversees the credit work of the region.

The third type of control is applied at the lowest levels of the organization. The control system includes reports on income and losses at the department level using detailed budget matrices and reporting procedures [9, p. 304].

Questions for the case:

1.Determine the degree of applicability and simplicity of the threelevel control system.

2.Is control necessary for this form of business organization?

3.Determine what level of control is preliminary, current, subsequent.

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4. Does the three-level control system provide the basis for operational management and strategic control?

Case 2. “Broken connections”

Having opened branches in different countries, the Sun company divided into several “specific principalities”. If previously management initiatives were quickly delivered to departments, now information arrives after a few days and with distortions.

The Novosibirsk company Sun, which supplies large-format printers and consumables for the advertising market, made a noticeable breakthrough in its development back in 2004. Then the company opened a network of branches throughout Russia: in Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Irkutsk, St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don and Kazan. A year later, Sun began to pave the way to the East: it opened two offices in China. From the city of Shenzhen, equipment is supplied to South Africa and the Middle East; from Urumqi, equipment is sent to the CIS countries: Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.

“Recently, the list of our achievements was supplemented by the launch of Russia’s first production of solvent ink and the opening of Russia’s largest service center for servicing printing equipment,” says Natalya Stasiuk, general director of Sun. “This has made our company a market leader.”

But along with the status of a major player, the company also received a new “disease” — internal disunity. It manifested itself most noticeably at the branch level. Due to the slow exchange of information, several misunderstandings occurred between them. But similar symptoms, as it turns out, appear on a less global level: sometimes even departments within one business unit are not particularly interested in what is happening in another area.

Disconnected colleagues. A few months ago, Sun informed its partners that a new printer model for large-format printing was going on

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sale. The proposal aroused great interest. The commercial department accepted many applications, and then it turned out that it would not be possible to fulfill all orders. “Such complex equipment is always a piece production, — explains Natalya Stasiuk. — The supply department did not have time to disseminate information about the real capabilities of the manufacturer in time. As a result, we “sold” more than our partner had in stock.”

Another incident occurred in July, when Sun managers gathered for the largest exhibition of printing equipment in China. To understand what types of equipment should be included in the assortment, the company’s management invited about 80 partners from Russia, the CIS, Poland, and South Africa on a trip. The two partners did not have time to join the general group and flew to China on their own, but ended up not in Shanghai, but in Shenyang. As it turned out, they relied on inaccurate information from the commercial service. The spreaders of “false rumors” were fined, but the management began to wonder why such failures occur in the transfer of information and what the result of such ignorance of employees could ultimately be.

The “disease” cannot yet be called neglected: there have been no more glaring inconsistencies. However, the company is concerned that poor departmental coordination is slowing down work. For example, when ink of its own production appeared in the Sun price list, the service center did not centrally distribute a detailed description of the new product. As a result, some sales managers received the necessary information several days late.

Another consequence is that some valuable information remains

“overboard.” For example, the service engineer department is the last to communicate with customers. Thus, they collect the wishes of partners to optimize work or is the first to learn about plans to replace equipment. However, engineers are in no hurry to pass information further down the chain, despite the fact that their job descriptions oblige them to enter important information received from the client into the CRM system. In

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turn, sales and project support managers do not receive valuable

“intelligence” that can increase the company’s profits.

Incomprehensible changes. The company does not believe that staff treat their work dishonestly or are indifferent to the company. Rather, due to the rapid growth of the business, employees no longer understand what new goals the enterprise faces and how their work will help accelerate the achievement of these goals.

Other companies have many similar difficulties. The Sun became interested in the experience of the Ford Motor Company, whose offices at one time resembled small states with their own laws and ideas about effective work. “We received head office managers, listened to them carefully, but then we did everything our own way. We were a real appanage principality,” recalled the general director of the concern,

Jacques Nasser, who later became the ideologist of the concept of unification, in his interviews.

Jacques Nasser considered training to be the best way to restore broken connections between different units. He refused the services of outside consultants. To begin with, Nasser believed, every employee had to understand what was happening on the front line. For this purpose,

“leaders of change” were recruited from the top management. Their task was to explain what the company's market position is, what it is striving for and how important the coordinated work of all departments is. Then meetings were held with management and colleagues, and training seminars. Personnel rotation was supposed to broaden the horizons of managers and intensify the flow of innovative ideas on how to improve the business.

To make employees more willing to exchange information and imagine how work is going in other departments, some Western companies do not split the office into many offices, but place employees in an “open space.” They make it a rule to have regular meetings with management and brainstorming sessions, which are necessarily attended not only by top managers, but also by ordinary employees.

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“We selected the simplest and most effective tools and tried to establish internal communications,” says Natalya Stasiuk.

Recipe for friendship. Sun started by creating an internal website that loads like a start page. It is not very popular among the staff. The distribution of news about the life of the company was entrusted to the personnel department of the central office in Novosibirsk, which consists of three employees. But due to the increasing volume of work (by the summer the number of employees in Novosibirsk alone had grown to 150 people, and at the end of 2005 there were 130), managers often do not have time for internal communications.

The second step was meetings at the lowest level: management gathered technologists from their own plant and sales managers and asked them to ask questions for which employees could not get detailed answers earlier. The participants in the conversation later admitted that they had finally formed a clear idea of the assortment and technological intricacies of order fulfillment.

Regular centralized mailings have become another channel for prompt notification of management decisions, new products and services. But, according to management's observations, not everyone perceives these messages as truly important.

“We are going to launch a new, more friendly CRM system,” says Natalya Stasiuk. “Everything we used were effective tools, but I can’t say that we immediately overcame the difficulties in using them.” And I understand that their implementation requires a well-thought-out, integrated program of action.”

In recent years, many Russian companies, especially in the consumer market, have been faced with the fact that the quality of their internal infrastructure does not correspond to the scale of the company’s quantitative growth. The Sun company counts on the advice of those who have dealt with these problems. Where to start building a system that will force branches and divisions not to isolate themselves in their area, but to quickly share information with colleagues? How to make sure that the

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communication process is not perceived as an additional uninteresting responsibility [10]?

Questions for the case:

1.Where to start building the system?

2.How to ensure that branches and divisions share information?

3.How to improve the communication process?

CONTROL QUESTIONS

1.What is the essence of the general functions of management?

2.How do organizational, administrative, economic, sociopsychological management methods function?

3.What is the role of communication in the management process?

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3. ORGANIZATIONAL MANAGEMENT STRUCTURES

The organizational structure reflects an ordered set of subordinated and tightly interconnected elements that ensure the functioning and development of the organization as a whole.

Depending on the nature of the connections between the divisions of the organization, the following types of organizational structures are distinguished: linear, functional, linear-functional, matrix.

Linear organizational management structure is one of the simplest organizational management structures. In a linear structure, at the head of a production link at any level is a manager — a single commander who carries out all management functions and reports to a superior on all issues. This is how the vertical subordination of managers at various levels (line) develops, who simultaneously carry out administrative and functional management.

Functional organizational structure of organization management. The idea is that the performance of certain functions on specific issues is assigned to specialists, i.e. each management body (or executive) specializes in performing certain types of activities.

Linear-functional (staff) management structure. Specialists form a headquarters under line management that prepares data for them in order to competently resolve special issues. In this case, the functional bodies are subordinate to the line manager. Their orders are given to production units only after agreement with the latter. This makes it possible to resolve issues more competently. But with a linear-functional management structure, the load on the line manager, who must play the role of an intermediary between functional services and subordinate production units, increases sharply. He receives information flows from subordinate departments, gives tasks to functional services, develops decisions, and issues commands from top to bottom.

The matrix structure combines two types of structures: linear and program-targeted. The board is built vertically (linear structure) for

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individual areas of activity (production, supply, sales). Management of programs, projects, and topics is carried out horizontally (program-target structure). When determining horizontal connections, a program or project manager and his deputies for individual topics are appointed, a responsible executive in each specialized unit is appointed, and a special program management service is organized.

The work is ensured by creating targeted units where leading specialists unite to jointly develop the program. The program manager determines what should be done and when, and who and how will do this or that work is decided by the line manager.

SPECIFIC SITUATIONS

Situation 1. V. Perov is the director of the Vostok company, which employs 200 people. Since the company uses a linear-functional management structure, he often has to deal with the problem when decision-making is difficult due to the inconsistency of the actions of individual departments with each other.

What advice could you give to a manager in this situation?

Situation 2. You came to an organization that employs 100 people and uses a linear-functional management structure. There is a problem that information from the manager to the subordinates reaches very slowly.

You have been appointed as a consultant to a manager, what advice can you give him?

Situation 3. When developing a business plan for a new organization, a dispute occurred between A. Petrov and B. Serov on the topic: “Which organizational management structure is better?”

What organizational management structure would you recommend in this situation? What are the differences?

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