Business and Management

A manager has many roles of course, and needs to be proficient in many areas in order to be considered an effective leader who is able to keep their employees motivated so that they are all performing at their very best. I have often times heard people say that one person or another was a natural born leader. Although this may be true to an extent, I tend to agree more with what Hill had to say in her article about how managers tend to learn from experience and that managers are made and not born (Hill). I believe it is absolutely possible for managers to learn how to be effective leaders by learning from their on the job experiences and being mentored by their superiors. I think that educating people in a classroom on how the world of management works is great, but learning about management and actually becoming a manager are two very different things. I felt the same way about law school. I don’t think law school taught me how to practice law, but it gave me the stepping-stones I needed to think like a lawyer. It wasn’t until internships and real life legal experiences did I truly learn how to practice law. I am of the opinion that this will be the same should I decide to pursue a career in management in the future.

In my opinion, it is very important for a manager to know all of the ins and outs of their business. I have worked in jobs before where the manager didn’t know how to perform some of the basic tasks he was requesting his employees to perform. It was hard to want to follow and implement his list of demands when it was quite clear he wasn’t even sure what he was requesting the employees to do. I agreed with what Sedder’s article had to say about educating oneself as a manager and wanting to have employees who were continuously educating themselves on their jobs and how to improve the business. It is the manager’s job to keep the employees motivated so that businesses aren’t stuck in a rut doing the same things that were done years before because everyone was afraid of change. I have worked in jobs before where some of the other employees had been in the business for many years. They were very resistant to my ideas and put roadblocks in my way when I tried to implement new ways of doing things simply because that wasn’t the way it had always been done. It is the manager’s job to ensure everyone on the team is willing to make changes to better how things are done, especially when those changes will make the business system run smoother.

Do you think the definitions given in the assigned articles and the video describe the role accurately based on your own experience?

Systems thinking is a new concept