Dr. Uditha Liyanage Director PIM was the guest speaker recently at The Management Club in another of "The Way Forward" series of evening presentations held at the Galle Face Hotel on the 3rd of September. As always he held the audience spell bound with a brilliant presentation elaborating the fundamentals of management in a simple but forceful manner to make most of those who were present wonder whether the basic principles are really being followed by them.
He emphasised that top Companies make no mistakes in their core activities and take great pains in perfecting their basics, if not brilliant, irrespective of which industry they belong to. This leads to being positive even in tough times to take advantage of the good times when better times are around.
Dr Liyanage began by commending The Management Club on 3 aspects, work play and learn. He said reminding of work one thinks of factories, play tends to make you think of Clubs and learning sends our thoughts back to school. TMC as an entity combines all these 3 aspects of life in a very balanced manner.
Trying to match Expenses against the Turnover brings about a knee jerk reaction by companies when some times in the name of cutting costs, some companies cut the "arteries" in place of the "fat" thus leading to fatal errors.
Dr Uditha Liyanage went on to describe what he called Great Management Principals (GMP) and Key Managerial Roles (KMR) that one needs to perform to follow these great management principals.
He elaborated on the following GMP's:
1) You get what you see - If you change the way you see things, the way you focus on your objective you will be better equipped to change your course of action to achieve the desired result
2) You get what you focus" - As Managers many of us tend to focus on what is urgent and forget to exploit the opportunities available to us by doing what is important in the long term.
3) You get what you hire - Talent Vs Training - Hiring a person has to be for what he is, his natural ability, and then train him for the skills that he can acquire - Managers should be able to clearly differentiate between the two aspects of "won't do" and "can't do" in their team members. 'Won't do' is an attitude problem whereas 'can't do' is because the person does not have the skill to do the job.
4) You get what you believe - The difference between the ability in a person and the capability of performing a task is the extra element of inner challenge - the can do attitude that one must have.
5) You get what you measure - It is only those things that get measured that will get done.
6) You get what you reward - what gets rewarded will get done - It is those actions that are rewarded that will get repeatedly performed rather than those that are not rewarded. Rewarding the wrong behaviour in employees will never help and can be disastrous but any behaviour that brings good results must be rewarded to improve one's performance..
The Key Managerial Roles successful managers need to perform in following these great management principles according to what Dr Liyanage described would be:
1) Manager as "Assumptions buster"
2) Manager as "Time Allocator"
3) Manager as "Talent searcher"
4) Manager as "Capacity Builder"
5) Manager as "Principal Monitor"
6) Manger as "Reward Giver"
Dr Liyanage's presentation turned out to be one of the most educative sessions arranged by the Management Club. Every one who attended the session would have had a debate in their own minds thinking of whether they actually practiced the fundamentals of management correctly to reap maximum benefits in their own fields. |
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