Management in the 21st century



Management in the 21st century

Introduction

It is rather difficult to define what management is and the best method of its application. Actually, management is not just something that we commonly learn and afterwards apply. It is a mix of both formal and informal methods of people management. However, also it is something that is more sensitive; you need to have some personal skills, some feelings or instincts which can not be taught(Crawshaw, 2003). Moreover, the environment of the work very much influences the form and the efficiency of the management which is applied. Indeed, there were a lot of changes in the way of managing people, because the structure of the company has changed (restructuring, re-engineering, downsizing...), the market has changed as well (globalization, decentralization, and deregulation), the culture has changed (feminization; psychological contract). The manager has to internalize all these variables to be able to produce a greater managerial work, adapted to his/her audience. The achievement of the objectives depends, to a great extent, on the way the management is applied. We analyzed and evaluate the different methods used to manage people.

Management Development Methods

Some schools have different approaches to management development. For the Classic school, the management development is the planning and the management of people's learning (Reid & Barrington, 1994). They privilege a more formal, more structural approach. Others see management development as a skilled professional process (this approach is more informal) The skilful provision of learning experiences in the workplace in order that performance can be improved. (Harrisson, 1992)

Formal model

Through this, management development is seen as a planned, formalized and highly structured process. In fact, the key features are the clarification of the objectives, the planning, the organization, the direction and the control (Mullins L., 2002). We can highlight two types of formal managerial tools: the 'on- the-job' ones and the 'off-the-job' ones. According to Mumford, there are three types of 'on the job' learning:

Changes in job (promotion, secondment, job rotation).

Changes in job content (responsibilities, project work, membership of committees and junior broads).

Within the job role (coaching, counseling, mentoring, modeling, feedback but also through managerial and technical literature).

Informal model

Managers need more that formal methods to manage people. The problem is that sometimes there is no clue of how to solve a problem, perhaps because it is the first time that this problem occurred. The formal methods can not bring a solution because we can not always transfer knowledge into practice. For that reason informal learning processes become more and more important. These methods are based on the accidental learning process. They try to be more flexible and experimental. This model associates two major methods of management development:

The retrospective one

The prospective one

This scheme explains that experiences (any ones) are learning opportunities. Sometimes people stock on the concrete experience but in fact they just act, make their task and not learn from. In the retrospective methods, there is a important work on the past experience, which create new learning. Every time, we learn from our ...