Discussion Topic 1: The 4 Management Functions

Whether you are a manager, a potential future manager, or an employee within an organization, you will benefit from becoming competent in the four functions of management.

Robbins and Judge (2013) discussed the four functions of management in the POLC model: Planning, Organizing, Leading, and Controlling. You also practiced with these four functions in your Learning Activity. Think about a time in your work, or in your personal or school experience where you have used all four functions of management. You may choose different experiences if no one experience covered all functions.

Checklist:

• Describe that experience to your classmates using research support from the text or another viable source (you may not use Wikipedia).
• Which function do you believe managers use most often?
• What could have made the leadership function a better experience?

Review an example of an initial posting in response to the checklist items above. Read about leadership by clicking on the

According to Robbins and Judge (2013) managers spend most of their time engaged in the POLC functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. I have engaged in those functions as follows:

Planning: I planned a bake sale with over 100 volunteers across four churches in my community. Robbins and Judge (2013) stated planning involves determining both short and long term goals. I created a short term plan which focused on the actual sale based on the 6 months we had until the sale. I also created a long term plan for the next five years on how we might achieve additional revenue through activities like the bake sale. I coordinated/organized people into committees between four churches with a reporting delegate that came to each of our bake sale meetings. I was nominated as the bake sale drive leader and during our meetings I successfully led our team to realize our monetary goals by providing an extra incentive of a field trip for the Sunday School class at the winning church if certain goals were met. This spurred each church in friendly competition which motivated our teams to succeed (Robbins & Judge, 2013). A member of our congregation was an accountant and kept careful accounting of all monies while we included both a code of ethical behavior for the process as well as online periodic updates so as to keep control of both individual actions and the process.

I believe that managers use controlling most often, because I believe this is what gets an organization to the “finish line.” As far as my leadership is concerned, it was a pleasurable experience, if a bit overwhelming since I had never coordinated so many people. I do think that I could have improved the communication process in the leadership function by doing more frequent checks with each church so that volunteers were not left with questions that did not get answered for several days.

Reference

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2013). Organizational behavior (15th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

 document attached below.