Introduction
Through strategic management, organizations can achieve the best result and surpass their closest competitors. In general, strategic management aims to plan and integrate the operations of a company’s many functional departments to accomplish long-term corporate goals. (Kennedy et al., 2020). This can be achieved if an organization develops strategic plans and policies, allocate resources for goal implementation, have a proper workforce management strategy, and monitor and appraise progress to ensure it is on the right track.
The Role of the Overall Management
Traditionally, effective management is considered the anchor of a successful organization. Leadership is an integral part of management and proper leadership leads to good management. An organization that is run by good leaders at the helm can achieve its strategic goals effortlessly. There are five primary functions of management that make an organization achieve its goals. These functions consist of planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling (Kennedy et al., 2020). Planning helps specify an organization’s direction; thus, it is future-oriented. A good planning program unifies the result of both internal factors and external factors like changing workforce patterns and shortage of resources.
Organizations also require an organized, formal structure of authority and efficient flow of information to enable subdivisions of work. The subdivisions should work in a unified and consistent style to attain the organizational goals (Kennedy et al., 2020). Broadly, it involves identifying tasks, assigning to different personnel, putting in mind their authorities and responsibilities, delegating authorities to employees, and coordinating all these activities. Proper staffing is also an indication that the goals are achievable. Staffing involves employing, training, and retaining a qualified workforce, both managerial and subordinate.
Staffing should be done effectively since different people have perform traits like skills, intelligence, experience; it is critical and determines an organization’s future. Staffing ensures that qualified individual are hired for the right role, resulting in optimal performance and greater productivity (McGlashan, 2018). Human capital demands is also an important component of staffing. Since it is the management’s role to assess and predict the labor requirements, it is imperative to develop and train current staff for career progression. Improving staff competence will enable the organization to meet its future needs and remain competitive.
How Marketing Fits in the Scenario
Marketing plays an essential role in planning, making a decision, and controlling marketing aspects in the management of an organization. To introduce a new product, an organization needs to identify a target market and analyze it (Kennedy et al., 2020). This will further help identify the consumers’ needs, hence achieving the organizational goals. It also helps boost sales of a company. Proper marketing management helps in making first-class marketing helps in making decisions in a business. This might be short-term or long-term. Having proper marketing management helps to determine the consumer’s buying pattern and the trends in marketing. This helps greatly in making decisions in an organization.
It helps a company receive honor and esteem, which is crucial to attracting more customers. Through proper marketing, a company increases its visibility and brand recognition that helps motivate and achieve better results. Marketing also helps in building a competitive spirit which can lead to advancement. The analysis that goes into successfully executing strategic marketing management ultimately leads to a deeper insight of a target market (Kennedy et al., 2020). Through analyzing the market patterns and behaviors, marketing helps in focusing on the areas that other competitor companies do not use well, leading to improving the result. As a result, a company can surpass other competitor companies and become the best company. Marketing management helps in transferring, exchanging, and moving goods and services. Thus, it helps the company to avoid unnecessary losses and hence achieve the company’s set goals.
How Managerial Economics Support the Process
Managerial economics is a branch of economics that deals with applying different theories, concepts, and methodological analyses of economics to solve problems in a business organization. According to Kennedy et al. (2020) it is instrumental in finding solutions to problems in an organization. Managerial economics is used to find solutions to different problems like cost, demand marketing, and production, making it very important for future planning. Due to scarcity of resources, Managerial economics helps make decisions concerning customers, competitor companies, and suppliers in an organization which is very helpful in achieving the future goals of an organization.
Managerial economics helps in testing and formulating policies. Policies are very helpful in guiding every activity in an organization and are formed after testing. Economics helps in testing organizational policies hence making it helpful in an organization. It also helps to analyze the price, product, risk, capital budgeting, and determination of demand, which is very helpful in an organization. This helps an organization to determine which direction to follow for maximum achievement.
It is a critical tool in measuring efficiency in a business field and helps in organizational management. Managerial economics aids in determining the outcome of each resource used in business fields. This can easily help determine which field gives the best outcome, putting the quantity of the resources used in mind and measuring efficiency (Pathak, 2020). This further allows for the avoidance of unnecessary losses hence achieving the goals of an organization.
Functions of Data Analysis in the Process
Data analysis is also fundamental in organizational management. It helps managers understand how their organizations are moving and the specific areas that need attention. Through skilled data analysts, the right software, and infrastructure, an organization can identify and explain the reasons for success in a specific area and failure in another area (Power, 2016), Data mining using artificial intelligence and machine learning helps collect data and process information that helps an organization determine the behavior of their customers and trends. This helps the organization change or maintain its trends in marketing (Ferretti, 2021). Data analysis is valuable for strengthening a business as it encourages disciplined thinking. This also helps in making decision-makers stay focused.
Through data analysis, problems can be early and easily detected. This greatly helps an organization to think fast and make the right decision hence avoiding unnecessary loss. It helps an organization understand their business better by knowing the areas that waste finance and the areas that need a lot of finance. This helps in avoiding wastage, and hence it leads to maximum profit. It also aids productivity, revenue growth, and efficiency are easily seen; hence it indicates where to optimize in a business, and as a result, goals can easily be achieved. Power (2016), argues that as strategy-planning becomes more reliant on analytics, the organizational imperative to find a middle ground between decision-makers and data scientists grows exponentially. In other words, organizations need to hire and train more data scientists. This will helps manager to get ideas on the future trends in business.
Accounting and Finance Tools
Accounting is also useful in management in that through the accounting tools, organizational management can attain the best results hence achieving its set goals. Through financial planning, an organization can achieve its objectives. According to Kennedy et al. (2020), a well-defined financial plan helps in maximizing profit that leads to better results. Financial statement analyses are analyzed for different periods, and they also involve loss and profit for a business which helps in knowing the rate at which a business is growing, thus helping in future planning. A management report is crucial in an organization; it helps prepare reports that are very helpful in calculating loss and profit. This helps an organization to know the direction it is moving in. This can also help in foreshadowing the future and hence proper planning. It is also useful in determining the weakness and strengths thus useful in making decisions that lead to achievement.
The decision-making tool in accounting helps solve problems that might arise in an organization. This is achieved through choosing any of the best, most profitable alternatives. To choose the best alternative, their relative costs must be compared, and thus accounting information is very useful in solving business problems in an organization. The standard costing tool, which is used as the measuring line in business management, is straightforward to calculate the actual performance (Weygandt et al., 2019). Therefore, the possible reasons for deviation can be easily outlined. Fund flow analysis helps in determining the flow of funds in different years. This helps an organization calculate the difference in fund flow for different years and thus identify the year in which more funds were used compared to the previous years.
Workplace Diversity as a Consideration in the Management
Workplace diversity is an essential factor to consider in management. It can be achieved by creating a common goal, focusing on inclusive hiring of the workforce, resolving problems impartially, and eliminating racial or ethnic stereotypes. Since different people have different characteristics and need to work together to achieve a common goal, workplace diversity aims to address all the different issues related to ethnicity, language, nationality, race, and color (Kennedy et al., 2020). Through proper training on diversity, every employee can work with each other regardless of the different traits.
It helps to identify and emphasize the good side of the employee, what they can bring to the organization and what they are best at rather than focusing on the disadvantages brought to the organization. It helps an organization seek out, respect, and embrace the appropriate results from different workforces and not just tolerate the results. It also helps build a genuine understanding that can be accessed by all employees rather than setting lists of rules that guide the employees’ behaviors. This builds confidence in employees and hence good results.
Furthermore it also helps in making all employees feel included. This boosts the morale of the employees. When morale is high, all employees become part of a shared effort hence best performance. An organization that promotes workplace diversity and fairness will have productive employees (Kennedy et al., 2020). This can also boost loyalty in an organization, increasing expertise in the workforce. This helps in reducing the cost used in recruiting and training personnel regularly. This also leads to high achievement by an organization.
How Strategic Management Promotes Cross-Functional Teams and Collaboration
Management can provide cross-functional teams that can work together to benefit an organization in many ways. When the teams are correctly managed, they communicate appropriately, meet the deadlines, and produce the best. The teams can be developed by understanding their weak points. When an organization understands the weak points of its workforce, the right expectation is achieved hence determining the results. Moreover, research has shown that leveraging the diverse backgrounds of employees allows for views to be collected and being presented from various levels within the business (Koeslag-Kreunen et al., 2018). This also helps in developing confidence in the workforce
Team identity should be built, including establishing shared values and goals before work starts. According to Koeslag-Kreunen et al. (2018) team goals should be determined by all key departments rather by a single dominant division. This helps build a good team for the best performance of an organization. Assigning leadership and responsibilities is also crucial in making a good team that can work in unity for the benefit of an organization; hence assigning the correct leadership leads to achieving the organizational goals. This can only be achieved by conducting regular meetings and encouraging community within the employees and the management at large.
It is believed that forming a cross-functional team is a smart venture for organizations looking to increase productivity. This is due to the fact that a cohesive team generates fresh ideas, which leads to innovation. Cross-functional teams is proven technique that stimulates creative minds and allows organizations to collect insights that differentiate them from their competition (De Oliveira et al., 2016). When various brains in different jobs combine, they come up with new ideas to produce much superior outcomes. When individuals think in inventive directions, they are more likely to make wise decisions, undertake informed risks, and foster creativity and innovation.
Conclusion
Creating and executing a solid decision-making framework is a complicated task that is difficult to master. This underscores the importance of organizations to employ management tools particularly developed to assist leaders in understanding and developing an effective decision-making process. This way, the managers can clarify roles and functions, and set clear objectives for future decision making; thus, developing a more strategic and holistic approach to business.
References
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Ferretti, T. (2021). The ethics and politics of artificial intelligence. LSE. Web.
Kennedy, R. B., Jamison, E., Simpson, J., Kumar, P., Kemp, A., Awate, K., Manning, K. (2020). Strategic management. Blacksburg: Virginia Tech.
Koeslag-Kreunen, M., Van den Bossche, P., Hoven, M., Van der Klink, M., & Gijselaers, W. (2018). When Leadership Powers Team Learning: A Meta-Analysis. Small group research, 49(4), 475–513. Web.
McGlashan, G. K. (2018). A strategic model of temporary staffing. Routledge.
Pathak, R. (2020). What is managerial economics? Definition, types, nature, principles, and scope. Analytic steps. Web.
Power, D. J. (2016). Data science: Supporting decision-making. Journal of Decision systems, 25(4), 345-356. Web.
Weygandt, J. J., Kieso, D. E., Kimmel, P. D., Trenholm, B., Warren, V., & Novak, L. (2019). Accounting principles, Volume 2. John Wiley & Sons.
