What is Business Management?

Blog: Flokzu

Business management is the discipline of overseeing and supervising business operations, processes, and resources to achieve organizational goals and objectives. It involves planning, organizing, directing, and controlling resources, including people, finances, materials, and technology, to efficiently and effectively achieve the desired outcomes.

The role of a business manager usually includes making strategic decisions, allocating resources, and creating policies that guide the company’s daily operations. Managing a business encompasses various aspects of business administration, including finance, accounting, human resources, marketing, operations, and logistics.

A successful business manager must have excellent leadership skills, communication skills, problem-solving skills, and the ability to make sound decisions. But it is not enough. They also need to have industry-specific knowledge, including technical, business, and commercial fundamentals (for example: understanding market trends and customer needs)

Main areas of business management.

There are several main areas when we talk about business management, which includes:

Strategic Management: involves setting the organization’s overall direction and making long-term plans to achieve the company’s goals and objectives. This involves analyzing the external environment, identifying the company’s strengths and weaknesses, and developing strategies to position the company for success.
Financial Management: involves managing the financial resources of the organization, such as budgeting, forecasting, financial analysis, and managing investments.
Marketing Management: involves identifying and understanding customer needs, developing and implementing marketing strategies, and managing the promotion and distribution of the company’s products or services.
Operations Management: involves managing the processes and systems that produce and deliver the company’s products or services. This includes supply chain management, production management, and logistics.
Human Resource Management: involves managing the company’s employees, including recruitment, hiring, training, development, performance evaluation, and compensation.
Information Technology Management: involves managing the company’s technology infrastructure, including hardware, software, and data management, to support the company’s business goals.
Risk Management: Risk management involves identifying and managing the risks that the company faces, such as financial risks, legal risks, and operational risks. This includes developing risk management plans and implementing strategies to mitigate risk.

In all these areas, of course, some processes drive the operation. Therefore, the discipline of business process management can help in all these areas and is not limited only to Technology. In fact, the Technology area takes a supporting role, helping to choose and operate the right BPM Suite for the other areas to be more efficient in the execution of their processes.

Most common business management tactics

Many different tactics can be used when managing a company, depending on the specific goals and challenges of the organization. Here are some of the most common tactics we have seen:

Setting clear goals and objectives. This helps to provide direction and focus for the organization and enables managers to track progress and measure success.
Develop a strategic plan that outlines the actions required to achieve goals. This helps ensure that resources are allocated effectively and everyone is working towards the same objectives.
Effective communication, including communicating goals and expectations, providing feedback and recognition, and building relationships with stakeholders and employees.
Monitoring and managing employee performance, setting performance standards, providing feedback and coaching, and addressing performance issues promptly and effectively..
Implementing processes and systems for continuous improvement. This involves regularly reviewing and refining processes and practices to optimize performance and ensure that the organization is operating at its best (Yes, this is precisely the spirit of the BPM Discipline, we will discuss it later)
Building strong teams is essential for success in a business management system. This involves creating a supportive and collaborative work environment, setting clear roles and responsibilities, and providing opportunities for team members to develop and grow.
Encouraging innovation and creativity involve creating a culture that supports new ideas and experimentation and providing resources and support for innovative projects and initiatives.
Identifying and managing risks is a crucial tactic that involves assessing potential threats, developing strategies to mitigate them, and having contingency plans to address unexpected events.

Great management critical principles

Many principles of excellent management have been identified and discussed over the years. Here are some fundamental principles:

Great management must develop a clear and effective communication channel with employees, stakeholders, and customers. Managers should be able to articulate their expectations, provide feedback, and encourage dialogue. Automated processes can ensure that communication is clear and consistent with employees and stakeholders, and automated notifications and alerts can ensure that messages are delivered promptly and consistently.
Having a clear vision for the company’s future and developing a strategic plan to achieve that vision is vital when leading a team. The Managers should be able to communicate the vision to employees and motivate them to work toward it. Business processes and their tasks must align with the company’s vision and strategy.
Empathy and Emotional Intelligence: Great managers understand and empathize with their employees’ perspectives and emotions.They can build relationships with their employees and communicate in a supportive and constructive way. Lack of time for the management of the company is usually an impediment to building these relationships. Naturally, eliminating paper, reducing endless email threads, and replacing repetitive tasks with automated processes help to regain the time needed to have meaningful conversations that build trust and relationships.
Taking responsibility for their actions and monitoring employees’ performance in detail are key aspects that enable accountability. This way, great managers generate credibility and trust, setting clear expectations and providing feedback on performance. Automated business processes can include KPIs to make tracking performance and holding employees accountable for their actions easier.
Great managers are committed to learning and growing. To stall is to go backward. Great leaders know this and continually seek to incorporate new knowledge and skills for themselves and, most importantly, their teams. Naturally, automating employee evaluation workflows and the processes for requesting, approving, and evaluating training investments makes it easier to implement a continuous education policy.
Innovation and creativity are irreplaceable ingredients when talking about the basics of business management, as it’s needed for solving complex problems or unexpected situations. Naturally, the best leaders take risks to achieve great goals. And along the way, they face challenging issues for which no obvious solution exists. In these cases, the team’s capacity for innovation and creativity are critical success factors. We have seen great results by automating processes to manage ideas (so that they are not lost), but above all, to track their evolution until they become a feasible and effective solution.
We all recognize the importance of teamwork and collaboration. Great leaders make it happen. They generate a work environment where trust exists, shared goals, team rewards (in addition to individual ones), and accurate and timely feedback to correct anything that needs improvement. Business processes are collaborative by definition, where tasks are assigned to different organization members to achieve one of the business objectives together. The KPIs of a process also serve as alerts to take timely action.
The last two characteristics to highlight are resilience and adaptability. Resilience allows great managers to face challenges and get up again and again in the face of failure until success is achieved. But for resilience to work, the leader must have great flexibility to adapt to unexpected situations and contexts. Leaders are usually forced to make decisions in uncertain and complex situations with very little information. But great leaders are flexible and agile to change their position if wrong and adapt quickly. No-code tools like Flokzu are examples of instruments leaders can use to adapt quickly. Modifying a process in minutes and deploying it to all users allows them to respond successfully to unforeseen changes in the market, team, regulations, etc.

Overall, great management requires a combination of skills, traits, and practices that enable managers to lead effectively, build strong relationships, and achieve their goals. A BPM Suite is a valuable tool to service business management. At the same time, automated processes can help managers to improve communication, align tasks with strategic objectives, increase accountability, and promote innovation and team building. Managers can focus more on strategic planning, coaching employees, and driving results by automating repetitive tasks and administrative processes.

Relationship between business management and BPM

Business Management and Business Process Management (BPM) are closely related concepts, as we previously discussed, but they have different focuses.

Business management is the overall practice of directing and coordinating business operations and resources to achieve organizational goals and objectives. It involves various functions, such as strategic planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling resources, as described before.

On the other hand, BPM identifies, automates, and improves business processes within an organization to optimize efficiency, reduce costs, and improve quality. It involves identifying business processes, modeling them (using a standard notation like BPMN), automating and executing them (using a Process Engine), analyzing their performance using indicators (KPI), and making necessary improvements to optimize them for better results.

In short, BPM is a subset of business management, focusing specifically on improving and managing the processes within a business. Effective BPM can help a company achieve its objectives more efficiently and effectively, which is a crucial component of successful business management.

Overall, business management and BPM work hand-in-hand, with business management providing a company’s strategic direction and helping to ensure that the company’s processes are optimized to achieve its goals.

Do you need automated business processes in every area of business management?

No, automated business processes are not necessarily required in every area of business management. The decision to automate a business process should be based on the organization’s specific needs, goals, and objectives and the availability of appropriate technology solutions.

Automation can be beneficial in areas such as financial management, operations management, and supply chain management, where repetitive, rule-based processes can be easily automated. For example, automating financial processes such as accounts payable and accounts receivable can improve efficiency and accuracy, reduce errors and delays, and provide greater visibility into financial performance.

Similarly, automation can be beneficial in areas such as human resource management, where automated tools can help to streamline processes such as recruitment, onboarding, and performance management.

However, in other areas such as strategic management and marketing management, the need for automation may be less critical, as these areas may require more flexibility and creativity in decision-making. While technology can be helpful in these areas, it may not be necessary to automate every aspect of the business.

Management styles

We previously talked about the management definition. Now is the time to talk about the different styles of business management. The appropriate management style for a given situation depends on various factors, including the organization’s culture, the nature of the work being performed, and the needs and preferences of individual employees. Here are some of the most common management styles:

Autocratic: the manager makes all the decisions and has complete control over the organization. This style can work well in situations where decisions must be made quickly. Still, it can also stifle creativity and innovation.
Democratic: the manager involves employees in decision-making and encourages open communication and feedback. This style helps build solid teams and fosters a sense of ownership among employees.
Laissez-faire (Allow-to-do): the manager provides minimal guidance and lets employees make their own decisions. This style is instrumental in situations where employees are highly skilled and motivated. Still, it can also lead to a need for more direction and accountability.
Transformational: the manager inspires and motivates employees to achieve their full potential. This style can be effective in fostering creativity and innovation, but it requires a high degree of emotional intelligence and communication skills.
Transactional: the manager sets clear expectations and provides rewards or punishments based on performance. This style can be effective in achieving short-term goals, but it may not be as effective in building strong teams and fostering long-term growth.
Servant: the manager focuses on serving the needs of employees and helping them to achieve their goals. This style can help to build strong teams and foster a sense of loyalty and commitment, but it requires a high degree of empathy and emotional intelligence.

Of course, the most effective management style depends on two key elements. Firstly, the specific needs and goals of the organization. And on the other hand, it depends on the strengths and weaknesses of individual managers and employees. Some very skilled managers can adapt their management style to fit the needs of the organization and its employees, but it is not the most common case.

Which of these styles is more useful to automate and formalize business processes?

Automation and formalization of business processes can be useful in any management style, depending on the nature of the work being performed and the specific needs of the organization. However, some management styles may be more conducive to automation and formalization than others.

For example, in a transactional management style, where performance is measured based on clear expectations and rewards or punishments, formalizing and automating business processes can help to ensure that performance is tracked accurately and consistently using objective KPIs that are automatically measured by the BPM Suite.

In a servant management style, where the focus is on serving the needs of employees and building strong teams, formalizing and automating business processes can help to ensure that employees have the tools necessary to be successful. Particularly in situations where employees are distributed across different locations or working on different projects.

The relevance of delegation in business management.

Delegation is a key aspect of effective management and is often cited as a key characteristics of great managers. Delegation allows managers to leverage the skills and knowledge of their team members, distribute the workload more effectively, and focus on higher-level tasks that require their attention. It also provides opportunities for employees to develop their skills, take on new challenges, and increase their engagement and job satisfaction.

Great managers understand the importance of delegation and are skilled at identifying tasks that can be delegated to others, selecting the right people to delegate to, and providing the necessary guidance and support to ensure that the task is completed successfully. They are also able to balance delegation with appropriate levels of oversight, accountability, and control to ensure that delegated tasks align with the organization’s goals and quality standards.

However, delegation is not always easy, and it requires a level of trust, communication, and collaboration between managers and their team members. Great managers are skilled at building relationships with their employees and creating a culture of trust and accountability that encourages delegation and empowers employees to take ownership of their work.

The cons of delegating and how you can overcome them.

Delegating can be an effective way to manage workloads, develop employees’ skills, and promote a culture of trust and accountability within an organization. However, there are also potential drawbacks to delegating, including:

Lack of control: When managers delegate tasks to others, they may feel like they are losing control over the work and may be hesitant to let go of tasks that they have traditionally been responsible for. A BPM Suite and automated processes can provide managers with a clear and centralized view of all delegated tasks, ensuring that they are still in control of the work. Managers can track the progress of the tasks and receive notifications when tasks are completed, which can help them manage their workload more effectively.
Misunderstandings and mistakes: Delegating requires clear communication and a shared understanding of expectations, timelines, and quality standards. If the manager and the employee do not have a shared understanding, it can lead to misunderstandings and mistakes. Automated processes can provide a standard, well-defined approach to completing tasks, managing due dates, and raising alerts, reducing the potential for misunderstandings and mistakes.
Employee development: While delegating can help to develop employees’ skills and confidence, it can also lead to employees feeling overwhelmed or unsupported if they are not given enough guidance or resources. Well-documented and automated processes can provide employees with the necessary framework and guidance to complete tasks successfully. The system can include best practices, examples, training materials, and step-by-step instructions, which can help employees build their skills and confidence.
Time investment: Delegating takes time and effort, as managers need to invest in training, communication, and follow-up to ensure that the work is done correctly. This can be a challenge for managers who are already stretched thin. By automating processes, managers can reduce the time required to delegate and manage tasks. Instead of spending time monitoring progress and providing guidance, managers can rely on the BPM Suite to ensure that tasks are correctly completed and on schedule.
Risk of delegation: Certain tasks cannot be delegated due to their importance and severity, therefore, there is always a risk involved in delegating the wrong task or delegating to the wrong person, which could lead to mistakes, quality issues, or even financial loss. By defining clear processes and roles in a BPM Suite, managers can ensure that tasks are assigned to the right people and are completed correctly.

FAQs keywords

What is management?

Management is the act of organizing, motivating, directing, and controlling an organization’s information, financial, physical, and human resources in order to efficiently and successfully accomplish its objectives.

What is the main goal of business managers?

Business managers’ primary goals are to boost profits and add value for the company’s shareholders. This entails establishing objectives, coming up with plans, and keeping track of progress. In order to get the necessary results, they also endeavor to build and enhance operations and procedures and manage staff and resources.

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