First Level Leadership

What is Business Management?

What is business management? What do managers really do?

This may seem a strange question to ask;

well if you stop and think for a moment, you will soon realize that if we are to understand what skills do managers need to be trained in, then it is necessary to know what managers do, and what constitutes managerial behavior.

So what do manager do?

Managers, irrespective of their specific job description, perform a fundamental task of getting the work done with and through others.

Therefore, the world in which managers have to manage is complex,

uncertain, changing, chaotic, and ambiguous. Defining business management is not simple. It is not reducible to a few bullet points. The complexity of management is in part, revealed through a typical statement such as:

Business management is facing complex issues that require –

1. Decisiveness

2. Creativity

3. Managerial Control

4. Visionary Leadership

5. Technical Skill

6. Integrity to conflicts

What can you conclude?

When you observe managers in their workplace, they appear to be responding and adapting to complex demands. To cope with these pressures, they work in fragmented and superficial ways.

However, because they do not spend sufficient time solving the deep-rooted problems,

many of these problems keep coming back and the pressure is actually intensified in the end.

A vicious circle is established - What is business management in these organizations?

Nevertheless, what should it be? To answer these questions you need to observe managers in your organizations in a variety of contexts, it would not take long to build up a list of the types of activities that engage managers.

Another aspect that you may be interested in is this - What should Mangers do?

This is a more challenging question because in order to answer any such type of question, it is essential to have a conceptual framework of what management should do based on a view of the functions within organizations.

One organization's list will be different from the other

In order to understand what business management is - another basic question will emerge – What is managerial competence? We will discuss the dimension of managerial competence on another occasion.