Text 4.The Management Process

Read the text and sum up three basic skills every manager should have:

Managers at every level plan, organize, lead, and control. But they differ in the amount of time devoted to each of these activities. Some of these differences depend on the kind of organization in which the manager works, some on the type of job the manager holds.

Managers of small private clinics, for example, spend their time quite differently from the way the heads of large research hospitals spend theirs: Managers of clinics spend comparatively more time practicing medicine, and less time actually managing, than do directors of large hospitals. The technical supervisor of research physicists at AT&T Bell Labs will have a job that in some respects is quite different from that of a production supervisor on a General Motors assembly line. Yet both are first-line managers. And yet there will also be important similarities in the jobs of all these managers.

Other differences in the ways managers spend their time depend upon their levels in the organizational hierarchy. Robert L. Kats, a teacher and business executive, has identified three basic kinds of skills: technical, human, and conceptual. Every manager needs all three. Technical skill is the ability to use the procedures, techniques, and knowledge of a specialized field. Surgeons, engineers, musicians, and accountants all have technical skills in their respective fields. Human skill is the ability to work with, understand, and motivate other people, as individuals or in groups. Conceptual skill is the ability to coordinate and integrate all of an organization’s interests and activities. It involves the manager’s ability to see the organization as a whole, to understand how its parts depend on one another, and to anticipate how a change in any of its parts will affect the whole.

Kats suggests that although all three of these skills are essential to a manager, their relative importance depends mainly on the manager’s rank in the organization. Technical skill is most important in the lower levels. Human skill, by contrast, is important for managers at every level: because they must get their work done primarily through others, their ability to tap the technical skills of their subordinates is more important than their own technical skills. Finally, the importance of conceptual skill increases as one rises through the ranks of a management system based on hierarchical principles of authority and responsibility. It depends mainly on the manager’s rank in the organization.

Task 1. Match the jobs and departments with their Russian equivalents:

1. Board of Directors 1. Отдел маркетинга

2. Chairman 2. Директор-распорядитель

3. Managing Director 3.Коммерческий директор

4. PRO (Public Relations Officer) 4. Главный управляющий по информации

5. Chief Accountant 5. Отдел информационных систем

6. Sales Manager 6.Бухгалтерия

7. CEO (Chief Executive Officer) 7.Плановый отдел

8. Sales Department (Dpt.) 8. Главный администратор

9. Finance Dpt. 9.Председатель

10. CIO (Chief Information Officer) 10.Начальник транспортного отдела

11. Accounts (Accounting) Dpt. 11.Сотрудник отдела по связям с общественностью