This week's post in our Manager Recipe Blog series is the Business Minded Manager.
The Business-minded Manager coordinates many activities in order to run a business efficiently and make a profit or achieve other challenging goals. He/she needs strong working knowledge in a number of key areas such as sales, marketing, operations, information technology, finance, support services and public/customer relations and be a specialist in one of these areas as well.
INGREDIENTS
The following ingredients should be added, blended well and left to mature over time:
Customer focus is tuning in to customer needs to guide decision-making and strategy (even if this is an internal as opposed to external customer team).
People and team development is the ability to organize the team in ways which achieve both departmental and business-wide goals. This means managing people both individually and collectively as circumstances shift or change.
Strategic ability is the ability to think about all the possible ways that business goals or targets
might be achieved and then set a course or overarching strategy that has the best chances of success.
Information management is capacity to both sift the plethora of data and information that is regularly received and present it to team members in intelligent and intelligible ways, so that it can be acted upon as necessary.
Operational coordination is about ensuring that the whole team has the skills/expertise and resources necessary to get work done in efficient and effective ways on a day-by-day and week by week basis.
Financial acumen is being able to set well-constructed budgets for projects and tasks and then making sure that finance is always appropriately controlled.
The Business-minded Manager has all of these ingredients; no substitutions or omissions can be made to the recipe.
