Management Basics A to Z

Building a successful career as a manager is a bit like building a house. You need a solid foundation, quality construction materials, and a whole team of laborers and specialists to bring everything together to create the home you want. But before the first backhoe arrives at the home site, another key element must already be in place;the blueprint. That all-important document provides the information that is necessary to see the project through from start to finish. If you don't have a blueprint, you can't proceed with the job at hand. The same thing goes for careers, especially in management. You need to start with a blueprint that you can use to lay a solid foundation for success as you enter into your first management position, and you must have a working knowledge of the basic managerial job functions. Hiring, managing, and firing employees immediately come to mind when you think of management in any form. Providing leadership to part of a company (or an entire business), whether it's the sales department or an aspect of product development, is also an obvious management function, as is keeping track of budgets and profits. Not so obvious is the need to understand human nature, identify avenues of improvement within an established business, and see how to best fit all the various pieces of the management puzzle together in such a way that you're maximizing profits without sacrificing the quality of your products and services. That's all part of management, even when you're just starting out. As a new manager, or as a person who is seeking to enter a management career, you'll need to master a number of job functions and skills that may not be familiar to you;hiring, training, motivating, firing, logistics, scheduling, quality control, budgeting, inventory management, troubleshooting, customer service, and more all fit under the management umbrella. In fact, I can almost guarantee that you've got much to learn. I've managed multimillion-dollar franchises, a beer and wine wholesale business, a soft drink distribution company, and much more throughout my career. At the height of my entrepreneurial endeavors, the companies I helped to manage employed more than six hundred people in major markets in the United States. But I didn’t snap my fingers and become a skilled and successful manager overnight. I had to work at it, and you will have to work at it too. Almost none of the managers working with me over the years instinctively knew what to do and what not to do when they started out. They needed training. They needed a blueprint to follow as they went about fulfilling their job responsibilities. Likewise, not every middle or senior manager serving in the companies I've managed was able to impart the necessary knowledge to subordinates who were climbing the proverbial corporate ladder to ensure a smooth and efficient transition from staff to management. When you promote someone, you can't wave a magic wand and turn him or her into a top-flight manager overnight. It takes a refined management-training program, a talented employee, and lots of hard work to do that. I realized this long ago, and I began developing management-training documents specific to various aspects of management basics to use in my training programs. With enough real-world beta testing and subsequent tweaking of the content, I arrived at the basic management concepts, principles, and philosophies you will find in this book. As a new manager, you can look to Management Basics A to Z to help see you through your transition to a career in management. This book also contains ample information to assist you as your career advances and you take on additional responsibilities. You may have found Management Basics A to Z on your own, or it may have been given to you as part of the training materials you received upon your arrival in a new management position. Regardless of how you obtained this book, you should understand that the following pages will provide you with an all-important blueprint to success. I like to call that blueprint your business management design, but I’ll explain that in more detail later. Apart from giving you a good grasp of the core principles that go into working as a manager, this book will help you create a business management design of your own that you can follow as you build a successful career in management. The plan will be unique to you and your specific position, and it will evolve over time as you earn promotions. This book will also help you focus on areas where mistakes often occur, especially with new managers. Knowing where the traps are will help you avoid them. That alone will go a long way in shaping your success in the future, impressing your bosses with the confidence and skill you demonstrate in your new position. Many new managers go wrong by not taking active steps to create business management designs. They jump in with both feet and sometimes find they can't keep their heads above water. Believe me, this is more common than you think. As I've said, you need a platform to manage and lead from. You need to be prepared with a plan to guide you proactively through the anticipated and unexpected challenges you will surely encounter throughout your career. Consider all the work and research that goes into designing a car. Auto manufacturers spend fortunes in research and development for new models, and those companies that don't eventually come up with a superior design usually fail in the marketplace. Managers operating with a poor business management design, or no plan at all, are not likely to perform as well as their counterparts who operate with a solid base of knowledge in management job functions and techniques, and with a sound plan to guide them. If you are an aspiring manager, then you're on your way to learning what you need to know to break into an upwardly mobile career path. Management Basics A to Z will be your guide. If you've just been promoted into management or you've just been hired as a manager for the first time, this book will give you the start you need to avoid mistakes and build a successful career in management. Feel confident in your ability to manage, and recognize that someone in your world believes in you and your abilities; you would not have been given the opportunity otherwise. Behind all successful managers was someone who once took a chance on them and their abilities to lead and manage. These seasoned managers also went through the experience of having to work their first days as new managers at some point in their careers. They made it up the corporate ladder, and you can too! What Good Managers Do Management is a very broad term, but basically it is the process of achieving company objectives through the cooperative efforts of your team. In other words, you've got to be good at getting people to do their jobs, which isn't always easy. But management means much more than that. You are managing a part of a business or an entire business; that's going to entail more than an ability to work with and motivate your subordinates. Let's take a look at what a manager of a restaurant does. You'll see that he or she has to deal with much more than making