Principles of Management - Research Paper Example

I was previously a member of SOS villages and found it to be an effective team. SOS villages are represented online by their website1 and are a non profit venture designed to accommodate the needs of children in distress around the globe. The team at SOS are committed to providing fulfilling childhoods to children who are stormed by crises such as parental abandonment, abuse or neglect. The overarching objective is to support distressed children when they are destitute as well as physically and spiritually traumatised by providing individual support and to lead them from childhood to adulthood. The team further believes that childhood is critical to adulthood and only fulfilled children can become responsible adults. SOS has a global presence imbued within a local presence. One of the greatest successes of SOS villages has been its ability to adapt well to local conditions and customs. The local teams for SOS villages are composed based on four concerns which are mother, brothers and sisters, a house and a village. The contention is that children require a mother as well as brothers and sisters to support them. Children are broken down into manageable groups better known as families and each family is given a house in the SOS village. The mother of the family is usually a nanny or a paid volunteer. Multiple nannies in a village are responsible to the head of the village who is also responsible for overseeing all other local functions. The head of the village delegates other tasks such as the provision of food, clothing, education and managing finances to other officials reporting directly to them. Most members of the team are paid volunteers who display a high level of integrity and ethical as well as moral behaviour. Roles and tasks are carried out in a relaxed atmosphere and there is not much difference of protocol between village heads and other team members. Most people in the team are kept together by personal motivation offered by the work as well as by management commitment to promoting work satisfaction. Conflicts within the team are managed by dialogue alone and often conflicts are far and few in between. Most conflicts are easily resolved within a few days at most. The team does not display serious conflicts of any kind because all the members are on one page. The local team’s head reports to the regional head who in turn reports to the head office. Team heads and regional heads meet at least twice a year to ensure that all SOS villages are heading in one direction. The SOS team provides an effective management model to learn from. The team relies largely on motivating its members effectively by providing them a significant measure of leverage in their day to day tasks. Moreover members are encouraged to take initiative and are praised regularly for their efforts to keep them motivated. Delegation of tasks to members of the team ensure that tasks are carried out uninterrupted and efficiently. The friendly and supportive work environment encourages team members to tackle tasks on their own. Moreover the team members are not pitted in head on competition and this ensures that the working environment remains healthy. This also encourages team members to display a high level of personal integrity and ethical as well as moral behaviour. Conflicts are also largely avoided in such an atmosphere and synergy is promoted. Moreover the larger global team shows that constant coordination between team heads ensures that the entire organisation is headed in one unified direction to achieve its objectives. Lower level employees are being increasingly encouraged to set organisational direction by involving them in control. At my workplace the floor supervisor (often an executive) decides how incoming objects should be stacked to promote storage efficiency. However the floor presence of floor supervisors is markedly lower than that of floor employees. In this regard floor employees can often decide better where new incoming material should be stored. It is common practice to consult more experienced floor employees as per placement of incoming materials but it is not a necessity. Managers often have to deal with less than useful information. The manager is at times out of choices in extracting information for want of physical resources or due to time based constraints. Such cases force the manager to utilise the available information as best as possible even if it is less than perfectly useful. The manager can increase the usefulness of the information by banking on prior experience or through consultation with colleagues as well as with experienced lower level employees. At times when certain shipments are delayed due to unforeseen circumstances I am provided with less than useful information by my line staff as to the reason for the delay. Often I have to rely on previous experience to discern what the problem in this case might be. Consultation with experienced floor employees also provides useful insight to the specifics of the reason(s) behind the delay. Lower level employees often have highly useful information that managers could utilise to plan and manage affairs better. Employees are often not adequately prepared to provide such feedback to managers due to inexperience in reporting and the lack of attention to specific details. To make things better it is often up to the manager to extract information out of employees in a manner that allows the use of information to plan better effectively. A manager can always validate information through consultation. Interrogation is hardly a fitting method to validate or make information more useful. The best strategy in this regard is to promote a healthy atmosphere where the employee is encouraged to talk to the manager freely and to answer questions accordingly. Imperfect information could be useful too at times because of estimation errors by the manager. Moreover it is easy to interpret information in more ways than one unless the point of view of the reporter is not clear. Bibliography Hill, C. W., & McShane, S. L. (2006). Principles of Management. New York: McGraw Hill. SOS. (2011, August 20). Welcome. Retrieved August 20, 2011, from SOS: http://www.sos-childrensvillages.org/pages/default.aspx Worth, M. J. (2011). Nonprofit Management: Principles and Practice. London: Sage Publications Inc. Read More