The Personal Development Plan Management Essay

This report explores ideas about the leadership skills required by a manager to operate efficiency at strategic level. In this report we will describe strategy, its purpose and the strategic skills required of the leader to achieve the strategic ambitions.

Introduction:-

The personal development plan, in relation to the middle manager are very important, though these enable the managers to identify their training & developmental needs, and then it offers the opportunities for the development of the skills, competencies and capabilities of the middle managers, i.e. PDP (Personal Development Plan) facilitates and supports the development of the Personal Development Record of the individual or the middle manager. (Rucchell and Richard, 2002)

Strategy: – strategy is a term that refers to a complex web of thoughts, ideas, insights, experiences, goals, expertise, memories, perceptions, and expectations that provides general guidance for specific actions in pursuit of particular ends.

Far too many companies either have no goals at all, other than cost reduction or their boss hides them in his head. There’s no hope for companies in Britain unless more top managements accept the need for a widely communicated set of clear objectives. (Peter Beek, ex-Chairman, The Strategic Planning Society, 1987)

The organization is influenced by the strategic leader, and in the context of an ideally clear vision and direction, the organization draws its resources (employees, managers, plant, supplies, finance, etc.) from a competitive business environment. It has to compete with other firms for labour, supplies, loans etc. And its operates in a network which includes its suppliers and financial backers, with whom one would expect it to have strong and robust relationships.

There is one old saying:

“People learn to managers by managing under the guidance of a good manager.”

Good strategic leader also need to use knowledge about the skills and the aspects of managing people, activities and themselves that they need to understand. To become a better leader it is necessary to develop skills and knowledge .The leader will be better prepared to do this if they have a general understanding of the process of management.

The personal development plan:-

The personal development plan, in relation to the middle manager are very important, though these enable the managers to identify their training & developmental needs, and then it offers the opportunities for the development of the skills, competencies and capabilities of the middle managers, i.e. PDP (Personal Development Plan) facilitates and supports the development of the PDR (Personal Development Record) of the individual or the middle manager. (Rucchell and Richard, 2002)

Bush (2003) reflects that the “Personal Development Planning is the structured, systematic and planned process undertaken by the individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement to plan for their personal, educational and career development”. Thus it can be said that the main purpose of the Personal Development Plan for the middle manager is to help the middle manager to learn more effectively and efficiently, and to be able to (Mabey and Less, 2007):

To learn through a large variety of ways and in the large variety of the contexts

Recognize the own learning of the middle managers and then list evidences for the learning of the managers and the progress which they are making through the learning

Review, plan, and bear the responsibility by the middle managers for their own learning & development of the skills

Identify, define and recognize the training, learning & development needs of the middle managers

Draw upon and use the expanded pool of the personal knowledge by the middle managers in order to achieve the particular career or learning & development related goals

In the context of the organisation, the purpose and role of the Personal Development Plan is to enable the organisation to identify, plan and recognize the developmental and growth needs, and then adopting the effective strategies and initiatives in order to make the all people or the workforce having the level of learning & development up to the required standards. Thus, the personal development plan in order to the organisation is associated with the learning and development of the whole workforce of the organisation, so that it can contribute the maximum for the accomplishment of the strategic and operational objectives of the organisation. (Kellerman, 2010)

Leadership:

Leadership occurs whenever one persons attempts to influence the behavior of an individual or group, regardless of the reason. Leadership and management are fulltime responsibilities that must be practiced every hour of everyday. The most effective leaders will be people who use their energies to accomplish desired able to use the leadership style appropriate to that situation.

Peter f.drucker pointed out that leaders are the basic and scarcest resources of any business enterprise.

According to George R.Terry:-“leadership is the activity of influencing people to strive willingly for group objective.” Acc.to Harold Kountze and Cyrill O’Donnell state that-“leadership is influencing people to fallow in the achievement of a common good.” Leaders must know where they are going if they are to achieve their purpose. Jack Welch, chief executive officer of general electric, stated-“the effective leader leads through a vision, a shared set of values, and a shared objective.”

Role of leader:

Leaders need to think about how and to what they can manage the development of the capabilities of their organization. Good leader manage themselves as well as other people. They cannot delegate everything. They have get support, advice and assistance from their staff. Good management necessary for good and successful company. So if the staff members well trained and qualified there are lots of benefits to the company. The role of the well trained and qualified leader in any organization involves the acceptance of many responsibilities. The responsibilities and duties of leader:

Leader has the duty of rising an atmosphere that improves the effectiveness of the workers and employment force. This is complete by, cooperation and inspiration with the staff. For this Leaders conduct and work force. This is done by, cooperation and originality among the workers. For this Leaders arrange meetings with staff, listening and addressing the troubles of every section and most important the staff by example.

Leaders have the extra duty of chalking out the in service financial plan of a business or company. This refers to manipulative how much money was spend and how much money can be spend for given that the services or goods to consumers.

Leaders have even more duties when the entire position of work is not fine in the Company. Dealing with issues like client complaints, delivery delays and worker grievance are element and package of Leader’s job. Throughout these situations, Leader’s leadership skills are actually tested. Leaders have to make hard, quick and efficient decisions for serving to run the corporation easily and for solving troubles and preventing them from re-surfacing. Leader is a highly answerable and totally essential part, as well as a very commendable location in a company or organization.

Leader’s objectives are to find out ways by which the company can become more creative. Successful Leaders require having a well-built wisdom of leadership, along with fast and effective investigative abilities. Another significant feature that businesses seem for in Leader is vast communication skills.

The leadership skills:-

The leadership involves a lot of skills. These include thinking about what the business is setting out to achieve aims and objective. These also include organizing, taking decisions, monitoring and giving direction in order to lead an organization. Management leading the organization and giving direction to employees. It involves the control of all type of resources. Leader need to think about how to communicate with staff to get the best results. Business knowledge is also extremely important. If the leader has good knowledge about the business, they provide advice about what is best for its future. The skills involved can be divided into three areas:

Conceptual skills: – conceptual skills the is the cognitive capability to notice the business as a entire and the dealings along with its parts. Conceptual skills involve the leader’s idea, knowledge processing and development abilities. Conceptual skills are essential by all leaders but are particularly significant for leaders at the top. They must observe major fundamentals in circumstances and broad, intangible patterns. For example he Software Company of Microsoft reflects the conceptual skills of its founder. The company overall business goals clearly stated and effectively communicated. These also help to contributing to Microsoft’s leadership status and billion dollar revenues. But the advert capability will be narrow. A senior engineering leader who is held up in scientific matters slightly than ideas deliberately will not do well at the top of the company. Many of the duties of top leaders, such as decision making, resource allocation and innovation, need a broad view.

Human skills:-

Human skills are the leader’s capability to work with and throughout other individuals and to work efficiently as a team members. This skills is established in the way a leader relate to other workers, including the capability to motivate, make possible, organize, direct, communicate them without fear of ridicule and encourages contribution. The leader with human skills likes other individuals and is liked by them. EBay CEO Meg Whiteman believes her mainly significant involvement to the organization is creating a work values and culture to facilitate is ” fun, open, and trusting.” Human skills also important at all levels, and for that person who work with workers directly on a daily basis. Organizations commonly misplace good workers because of front-line bosses who fail to show respect and concern for workers. (Sue Shellenbe 2000)

Technical skills:-

Technical skills are accepting of and ability in the act of specific tasks. Technical skills include mastery of the methods, techniques and tools concerned in definite functions such as manufacturing, mechanized or finance. Technical skill also includes specialized information, logical capability and the knowledgeable use of tools and techniques to solve difficulties in that specific regulation.

Organization has to stay on their toes and use all their skills and competencies to benefits the organization and its stakeholder-employers, customers, investors, the community and so forth. According to Edward Elgar “There is music in the air, music all around us, said composer.”The tune heard most often by today’s leaders may be the constant ring of a cell phone tying them to the organization .leaders can become a leader who set the pace for an organization and lead people in a different kind of performance.

Leaders also find the off-key notes, bring people together and inspire them to act in ways that accomplish the organizations vision. Understanding people, communicating, building team work and inspiring others are the essentials of effective organizational leadership. By developing leadership skills in understanding human behaviour, communication, teamwork and motivation, leaders can boost an organization’s chance of hitting all the right notes.

The benefits of well trained and qualified leaders are:

Make clear objectives and plan

Organize work

Command the people under them by giving instructions

Co-ordinate the resources such as money,people,time for which they are responsible

Control activities and people by measuring and correcting them to enable performance to fit the plans.

The leadership strategy:-

The leadership strategy should concentrate on what line leaders have to do as leaders in order to play their vital and immediate part in increasing levels of engagement. This will include the implementation of learning programmers that help them to understand how they are expected to act and skills they need to use. The strategy should therefore include the steps required to make performance management more effective by increasing the commitment of leaders to it and developing the skills they require.

Opportunities for personal growth:-

A strategy for providing development and growth opportunities should be based on the creation of learning because it is recognized by top management, line leaders and employees generally as an essential organizational process to which they are committed and in which they engage continuously. (Reynolds, 2004: 21) the strategy defines the steps required to ensure that people have the opportunity and are given the encouragement to learn and grow in their roles.

Opportunities to contribute:-

Creating a work environment that gives people a voice by encouraging them to have their say, and emphasizes as a core value of the organization that management at all levels must be prepared to listen and respond any contributions their people make.

Organization development strategy:-

Organization development strategy is based on the aspiration to improve organizational capability, which is broadly the capacity of an organization to function effectively in order to achieve desired results. The process of integrated strategic changes as conceived by Worley et al (1996) can be used to formulate and implement organization development strategies.

Impact of encouraging the team welfare on achievement of the objectives:

The team welfare is associated with the welfare of the members of the team. The welfare of the team means the respect, mutual trust, co-operation & coordination, and congruence between the team members, which enables the team to accomplish the desired team objectives. The team members when having the effective transfer of the knowledge and communication in between each other practice their tasks with the level of cooperation and congruence, develops the environment for the team favourable, and hence, then the accomplishment of the strategic objectives of the business are well supported with the desired team performance results. (Thornton, 2003)

Employee effectiveness

Employees make a major contribution towards the achievements and goals of an organization. Involvement of employees in the decisions of an organization is not its goal but it is important to manage employees so as to make sure that they contribute in an expected manner. There are various ways that help in improvement of employee’s contribution in decision making like suggestion systems, continuous meetings, discussions and events and taking corrective action when required. The most significant method to do this is to recognize the efforts of the employees and reward them for those efforts, this motivates them to work hard as he is being praised and recognized for his work.

It is impossible that each and every employee of an organization takes part in all the decisions. A change is required in the organization to try and improve employee’s contribution. Change management is a key to increase employee’s involvement in decision making. This process involves a few steps –

Create such a plan which leads in involvement of maximum people.

In change management, only a small number of employees have access to important information about change. If only these people make plans of change management, the other employees won’t get the time to think about and adopt new ideas.

Although it is no possible to involve employees in the change decision of an organization, but they can be involved in the meaningful decisions regarding their work.

Measurement systems should be brought in the organization which helps the employees to know about their work. Employees should be recognized and rewarded for their extra ordinary work. Organisational Behaviour

Decision Making

Decision making in organisation behaviour is very vital and it is one of the most important function for any organisation. Decision making is a process of choosing alternative course of action from different alternatives available and it should be kept in mind that the decision made should be effective and efficient for the organisation. According to the Herbert A.simon decision making involve three steps which are mentioned below.

Identifying the problem- This step includes the identification of the problem that the organization is facing

Identify and examine the different alternatives available to solve the problem.

At last when the problem is identified and the various options are available then the organization decides which alternative to choose and that alternative should be effective for the organization.

Conclusion:-Being good strategic leaders has knowledge all those skills, they putting them together and gaining the best possible results. The skills are not just for use by leaders-they can be used by everyone to improve their chances of success, in whichever type of organization they work. Leaders spend about 80 per cent of their time working with and through other people, assisting their organizations to reach organizational goals effectively and efficiently. Developing interpersonal networks and believing in abilities of subordinates are all ways in which leaders can become more effective leaders.

Perhaps the simples and best advice is that:

“Good leaders sleep well at night-because they have clear consciences after the decisions of each working day.”