Understand of the functions of management can help you effectively manage the company or your team, it can help you understand at the minimum the purpose of some departments such as quality control, recruitment, or training… It can help you appreciate the activities and tasks you need to do. There are 5 functions of management: planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling.

1. Planning is charting the future, it is deciding in advance what to do when to do it, and how it's going to be done. It can be as big as deciding the invention, vision, and objectives of a company or a plan to improve certain business metric of your team. It is identifying what you want when you should achieve it, and how it will be.

2. Organizing is called the backbone of management, organizing is a grouping of activities together. All employees that hire under the recruitment department or those who advertise and sell the product served under marketing and sales, and those who actually make the product or services work under productions or operations. Organizing is also creating the organizational structure or hierarchy of the business, it's a delegation of authority and creation of responsibilities and tasks. Organizing also ensures that whatever necessary items the business or department needs are met such as the need for materials like machinery or computers, capital, and personnel.

3. Staffing is commonly associated with hiring and promoting employees as a function of management, it goes more than that as it involves training and development remuneration or compensation and performance appraisal.

4. Directing, on the other hand, makes the plans concrete, it involves supervision, motivation, leadership, and guidance of employees, all of these are done to ensure that organizational goals are met.

5. Controlling is measuring performance on a set of standards, and correcting any deviation. let's say your actual score or client satisfaction is lower than the target, the control would mean creating the necessary steps to correct and achieve the target.

Overall a frontline leader would normally do a smaller version of each function on a bigger level, each function can be represented by different departments or roles. Planning is normally done by middle managers and up such as department managers or district head. Organizing is done by HR or senior managers while staffing is handled by training recruitment and HR. Directing is handled by frontline leaders or operations and control is handled by quality control. These are just some general activities of each function and each industry or business will have more or less depending on their needs, and so these are the functions of management.

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