The profile of an effective manager

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Motivation of employees

Communication skills

Developing trust inside the organization

We will give a description of each characteristic including some important theories.

Decision Making Skills

Mangers are at the same time the decisions makers. It is easy to make decisions, but making the right one is difficult. What criteria should an effective manager have upon the decision-making aspect? Let’s start with a simple review of the decision making process.

Decision-making is formally defined as the process of identifying and solving problems. The process containing 2 major stages: problem identification and problem solution. According to the rational approach, there are 8 steps for each stage:[8]

Figure 2: Decision-making process

The point of rational approach is that manager should try to use systematic procedures to arrive at good decisions. Actually in practice, there are many uncertainties when applying this model to make decisions due to the following type of information constraints imposed up people:[9]

Limited attention

Limited memory

Limited comprehension

Limits to communication

These, plus other factors, have given rise to the notion that rational process indecision is bounded. Herbert Simon, in this regard, has proposed that, “within bounded rationality, individuals and groups often base their decisions on satisfying the search for what is good enough in the circumstances, rather than optimizing.”[10]Often, managers have to face vast number of information and required to make a decision in a short time, it is impossible for him to analysis each problem and weigh each alternatives from the limited mental capacity. [11] Therefore there is a limit to how rational a manager can be.

Many models are built upon the uncertainty of the solution searching steps, while in all actuality managers are not making the decision in a vacuum. They can use formulas or models to aid their decision making process. Therefore, it is important for an effective manager to pay attention to the following points when making the decisions:

The intuitive decision-making process always plays an important role in combination with the rational process. Managers build up long experience with organizational issues, which provides them with a gut feeling or hunch about the correct response. The large organizational decisions are not only complex, but also ambiguous. In such a situation; previous experience and judgment are needed to incorporate intangible elements. Most of the time, without solid proof that problems exist, the intuition will tell the managers that there is or could be a problem that requires him to act before he is able to sit down and analyze the problem.

An effective manager knows how to cooperate with the internal and external resources. Of course, as decision-makers, the manager should not become an “autocrat”. Voice from internal will be listened, and sharing the opinions and having joint discussions to reach the interpretation of the goals and problems accordingly the agreement will be easier to reach and find solutions to the problem. External comments or reactions have great impact on decisions makers. On one hand, managers are easily misled by the hypothesis given from the external environment and can forget to look broader and further. On the other hand, proactively utilizing the external resource can help managers to see better and further; therefore, objective evaluation of those opinions will be helpful to generate wide range of the problem solving approach.

Creativity is vital to search for more alternatives during the crisis moment. When there are few possibilities to solve the problem, people can easily stick to the first seeming possible solution and start to convince themselves that there is no other better ones. Therefore they are stuck in the corner and forget to look for the other alternative. Dynamic thinking and radioactive mentality will help the manager to look the situation from a different view, there fore create the new approach.

Реферат опубликован: 16/05/2006