Business Management


Feature Writer: Mitch McCrimmon
Mitch McCrimmon

To succeed at work, you need to achieve with and through people. This means learning how to lead and manage others with skill and diplomacy. The Business Management Topic will help you manage yourself at work and succeed through others.

Coverage includes leadership, management, delegation, influencing skills, managing change, time management, team work, asserting yourself and maintaining confidence despite rapid change and complexity. Articles in this section will help you understand the difference between leadership and management. This topic is relevant for everyone at all levels because all employees can lead and manage even if no one reports to them.

Check out discussions for this topic. Please email me with any suggestions or comments.

Full Business Management blog

Under pressure
feature articles
Mitch McCrimmon

How to Communicate Clearly

In: Business Management (general)

Communication is hard enough without information overload and work pressure undermining concentration. Effective management requires extra effort in this area. more...

Celebrating Success at Work

In: Business Management (general)

Celebrating success is a good employee motivation tool, but only if it is used regularly and for all employees. more...

Leadership and Teamwork

In: Business Management (general)

Employees need to be competitive to get ahead, but future leaders are skilled at getting the balance right between teamwork and personal aspirations. more...

Succeeding in a New Job

In: Business Management (general)

Trying too hard to prove yourself in a new job can backfire if you don't first build relationships with key players. more...

What Is Succession Planning?

In: Business Management (general)

Succession planning is a way to manage. It's not just preparing for the future because it means more involvement, hence more shared ownership and motivation. more...

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feature blog
Mitch McCrimmon

Aug 12, 2007

How to be an effective manager

This blog describes the link between effective management, efficiency and organization.


The key to being effective as a manager is to achieve your targets as efficiently as possible. The first step is to set clear goals. Then you have to allocate all the resources necessary to achieve your goals. Of course, you need to set the right targets in the first place. Efficiency alone won’t make you effective if you achieve targets that are of no interest or value to anyone. But, let’s assume that you have set desirable targets. In this case, the objective is to maximize efficiency and this means making sure that you have the best price you can get for all the material you need to use, you get your budget right and you make the best use of the people required to do the job.

You can’t really be an effective manager unless you are reasonably well organized. If you are not, you might get the results you want but not make best use of all your resources. You might waste too much material, break your budget or not get the best performance out of the people working on your project.

Organizing complex projects so as to manage them well requires sophisticated information technology. You need to know what factors have the greatest impact on performance and how to measure them.

To manage people effectively, you need to get the balance right between performance measurement and empowerment. This means trusting people to do the right things independently and allowing them some freedom to measure their own performance.

Full Business Management blog

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