Table of Contents
In an organization, there are many challenges faced by the management, different people bring difference culture, different values and different method of motivation. To tackle these issues, it important to identify the main management issues or challenges, analyze and find a solution to archive goals set by organization or individual person. In this personal development portfolio, I will be discussing few management challenges, how I deal with these challenges, what are the strength and weakness of mine and how I improve to succeed to fulfil my goal.
One of the most important things is managers applying successful diversity in a work place. Basically, this mean people getting jobs without being discriminated. Having equal opportunity or chance regardless of his/her gender, age, religious belief, sexual orientation, ethnic, cultural background or racial background. In additional, workplace diversity means identifying the capabilities & worth of an employee and extracting mentioned qualities in a environment with different personalities to gain something from each to archive common goals. You may also refer these qualities like work experience, personality, educational background and experience in social & personal life as diversity (De Meuse and Hostager, 2001). To execute diversity fairly, management should find a strategy to bring different backgrounds, employee’s perspectives together to generate new ideas and techniques they can offer.
When organization are able to adopt to diversity and execute its benefits, they are tending to gain huge benefits. Some of these benefits include, able get different solution to problems by the diverse employees. They will bring individual talents, suggestions from the experience they gain from past work also they are able to adopt to the market necessities and requests of the manager and customers. This also increase varity of options available from multicultural skills, services and ideas. This will lead organization to be able to meet customer demands from different cultures. In addition, because of diversity, company will be able to encourage its employees to perform at their best while gaining high productivity ratio from motivated workers to succeed and gain profit.
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Even thought, help greatly to improve organization, there are some weakness or challenges too. Some of them are; communication issue, finding customized methods to adopt deferent kind of cultures, training for all will be expensive and some may find difficult to adopt to new change while sacrificing old and traditional ways. To extend mentioned issue, due to lack of communication, the employees will have difficult time to understand each other. As a result, it will lead direct impact on teamwork. Future more, they will get frustrated and will lead to decreasing the morals. Also due to not fully committed to adopt new ways of culture, people may remain silent to avoid change, which will lead organization to lose valuable expected input for progress. As you may know, training for each individual will be too costly for the organization and they may to be able to provide it to all of them. This will result in the employees not able to receive required training and not being able to successfully execute their actual experience at work place.
Future Career
In future career, I’m targeting to be a Manager at procurement department. As I have experience in both Commercial & Engineering Procurement field for over 5 years. Engineering Procurement is a field which required more technical side, as it is procuring items for Aircraft. Certain requirements are needed to be matched, analyzed. This unique experience to work as engineering procurement supervisor at Villa Air helped me to decide that I want to persuade my career in the procurement field. In the aviation industry, there are a limited number of local personals involves in Procurement field, I feel with right guidance & hard work, I will be able to future my career. As a second stepping stone, recently I have joined upcoming Domestic Airline in the Maldives called “Manta Air” as Procurement Executive to persecute new experience in setting up a new airline company. This step has been a really new experience for me and learning a great deal while learning how to manage high demand and huge pressure. As I have a great mentor to help me get through this, I firmly believe this opportunity to enhance my career.
Two Management Skills (how to apply skills to future career)
Communication
Communication is one of the most important management skills. To be a better manager, there need to be better communication between employees,
Secondly, the challenges facing managers today are focused on their communication style. It is clear that different rumors, hearsay, business memos, emails, business meetings, and individual counseling sessions provide communication in the workplace. If communication in the organization is on the low level, managers are not involved in the working process in a proper way and do not maintain awareness of the business situation in the market. Moreover, they are not in touch with the customers and suppliers who play a vital role in the business process. It is wrong.
Effective communication of managers is of great importance for the success of the business, as communication is used to send information, control behavior in the workplace and motivate employees. According to the numerous researches, effective communication always involves such overcoming communication challenges, as selecting proper methods of communication, information overload and becoming emotional in the workplace environment. That is why it is necessary for managers to prevent the above-mentioned challenges and to find appropriate methods for the improvement of poor communication in the organization. (Cranage)
Time Management
One of the most important management skills is time management. It required preplanning, organizing, executing.
It is considered one of the most important skills under the manger’s requirement. A proverb has been said ‘Once the time has gone it never comes again’. In this fast-moving world, time is precious and it’s been considered as money so time should be utilized in a proper way. The main features of the time management are to organize the work in a proper way and in a proper time, handling the meeting in a specific time period, to utilize the free time. In this business world, everyone is concerned about the time management to achieve their success. The time frame which is available in this world for each person is 24 hours. Thus it is not possible for every individual to achieve their goal in the specific time period if it’s not been managed properly.
Components of Time Management are as follow:
- The leader/manager should set their priorities as per the time frame and should try to achieve their goal in a specific time with proper monitoring and feedback.
- Prioritize goal according to their importance.
- A time log of daily/weekly basis should be made to utilize time effectively
- Leader/Manger should give motivate and should give guidance to their staff to develop and to achieve goals.
Mentoring
Another most important skill is mentoring employees to help to complete common goals or set of targets.
The origin of the term “Mentor” goes back to the 8th/9th century BC to the tale of “Odysseus” by Homer. Mentor was a faithful friend of Odysseus, and when Odysseus was leaving to fight in the Trojan War, Mentor’s job was to guide Odysseus’s son’s, Telemachus’ development. It was important for him to be prepared to rule the kingdom.
Today a mentor is generally defined as a wise and trusted adviser. One of the most often used definitions of a mentor says: “A mentor is someone in the organization, usually older, more experienced, and in a higher-level position, who sponsors or supports another employee (a protégé) who is in a lower level position in the organization” (Robbins and Coulter, p. 530).
“Mentoring aims to support individual development through both career and psychosocial functions” (HBE, p. 76). Sponsorship, coaching, protection, exposure, and challenge are all the career functions of mentoring. These are the activities to boost protégé’s capabilities and position in the organization. Personal psychosocial functions address the inner self of the person, his behavior, workplace values, dilemmas in personal life and sense of acceptance by the group. Career functions enhance the learning process, and psychosocial functions improve the individual’s sense of competence and clarity of identity. Both functions together help the mentee to accept the challenges of each career stage.
When comparing coaching and mentoring, coaching can be considered as a subset of mentoring. The main differences between coaching and mentoring are that coaching is mostly concerned about improving performance, correcting inappropriate behavior, etc., while mentoring is mostly concerned about the personal growth of the individual. Mentoring is provided voluntarily, and usually, it is recommended that mentor and mentee would be from different chains or departments in the organization. Coaching is sometimes provided not necessarily by volunteering. The coach is the boss of the individual that is being taught and the process is focused on the current problem solving and learning opportunities. These differences between the two methods are listed more clearly in Exhibit A attached. This table is taken from Harvard Business Essentials book about “Coaching and Mentoring” which concludes that coaching is about your job while mentoring is about your career.
Strength & Weakness of Two Skills
Time Management
One of my weakness includes unable to manage my time and end up lucking up work. Since management is so critical in this field. I find difficult to manage requirements from both Commercial and Engineering requirements to a startup company. As most of the requirements come in bulk with more than 500 items which need to be floated, accrue quotes, analyze, finalize and get approval from authorized personal.
Mentoring
I have the opportunity to train and mentor 3 employees with the guidance of my Manager. One of the employees is new to the work environment. So I believe I have good strength to mentor employees.
How to solve the weakness
I’m trying to find ways to manage time. It includes using current technology and apps. Furthermore, dividing task by prioritizing also
- Creating and keeping deadlines.
- Delegation.
- Goal setting and meeting goals.
- Decision making.
- Managing appointments.
- Team management.
- Project management.
- Making schedules.
The leader /manager has to know himself first mostly in terms of his weakness and the strength to perform the work in the proper way. Following are the practical methods of skills for developing or improving are as follow.
The proper time frame should be made to carry out work efficiently in a proper and organized way. By these, it becomes easily t carry out or to run the meetings easily and effectively.
With the help of logs like daily and weekly it becomes easy to identify the problems or the jobs which was carried out and with the help of logs it can be sorted out easily.
- Proper planning should be there to carry out work easily so that the stress will be get reduced.Normally work is been carried out as per the as per the individuals satisfaction.
- Proper planning or use phone calls or the internet should be specific so that there will be no delay for the work.
- Proper backup or the files should be saved in a computer data as if it becomes easy to sort out the problems.
If you scored between 89 and109 you have an effective managerial style. You are probably clear on your role as leader of your team and very aware of the impact of an effective manager on the team’s performance. You understand that being a manager is not about being liked, but about coaching and inspiring others to maximise their skills and thrive at work. There may be a few areas where you can improve your skills now you have a good grasp of the essentials of being a strong manager:
Encourage autonomy and delegate more. You should have a robust plan in place to ensure that team members are held to account for their contributions whilst at the same time building confidence in the team to do even better. You may need to be more sensitive and alert to potential conflict in the team if people are stepping up their game. Stay on top of regular face to face meetings with individuals to build greater trust and relationships. Meet with the team to facilitate working together effectively to avoid silos of knowledge or power. Sell the benefits of collaboration and shared knowledge and understanding. Nurture all of your staff to give of their best and reward progress. Stay calm, ensure that you have a good work/life balance and know that you are on the right track.
Concusion
In conclusion, it is necessary to say that today’s managers must be ready to find new innovative ways or methods to achieve the major organization’s goals in an ever-increasing competitive market. Moreover, they must be ready to take some unexpected risks in order to help the organization to take the leading position. Of course, those challenges which prevent to perform the major organizational tasks in a proper way should be taken into consideration by managers of all levels who work in different organizations because only serious relation to the duties and responsibilities, motivation, job satisfaction, and personal leadership can help managers to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace. As the main manager’s competences include planning, organizing, directing, and controlling, each manager should constantly develop appropriate skills which will help him to succeed in all areas of activity.
