Designing Your Healthy Administration - A Management Overview
By Karin Syren

Management or Leadership?

Simply stated, management ensures that things get done, in accordance with accepted policies, based on the reality of a situation. It involves deciding the how, and the when and often the who. The who can be a cross-over factor in the initial stages. It is doing it right, creating process and systems and insuring efficiency. A manager manages both the process and records the efficiency of the individual’s performance within the process.

Leadership revolves around concepts, ideas and effectiveness, enunciating what is the right avenue, establishing direction, insuring individual and team success, and necessarily implies a following. It is discerning and articulating the what, the determination of what is the right thing and often who is the right person or team. Teaching, an integral part of the process, enables a targeted team to do the right things and do them right.

For an administrative plan to be effective, we must first determine what is the right thing to do. Next we approach the who, how, and when to do it; and finally we must make certain each individual and team is enabled to do, to accomplish it. In other words, we manage the process and we lead the people, educating them as necessary.

Management functions have been classically stated as Planning, Organizing, Leading and Controlling (POLC). Much controversy has arisen surrounding these principles and they have been revised largely depending on the focus of the organization. I would like to offer a perspective based on 6 elements, making room for management and leadership coexistence, each undeniably valuable in the success of any administrative plan. They are establishing objectives, organizing & planning (combined as one element of the process), motivation, communication, employee development, and finally, measurement and analysis.

Each must be addressed in any administrative venture, whether building or rebuilding, or merely tweaking your administration, from the smallest detail to the most comprehensive reorganization. And since there is nothing new on the planet, merely a reshaping of what already exists, each will be familiar to you. Management issues and direction can be effectively delineated based on these six basic functions inherent in the management/leadership process. Each is pertinent to guiding the design, or redesign and implementation of administrative proce-dures.

Establishing Objectives