Most Vital Stage For Ikon's Management Process example essay topic

IKON Office Solutions is one of the world's leading providers of products and services that help businesses communicate. IKON provides customers with total business solutions for every office, production and outsourcing need, including copiers and printers, color solutions, distributed printing, facilities management, imaging and legal document solutions, as well as network design and consulting and e-business development. I am a Major Account Executive for IKON Office Solutions. With these credentials acquired in 22 years of existence, their management organization is obviously doing something correct.

A manager's role is to lead his / her organization to a clearly stated objective. In doing so he / she must muster all his resources in a concise and organized attempt at achieving those goals. To do this a manager must lead, plan, organize, and control the organization's employees. 20th Century French mine owner Henri Fayol first coined the term "Four Functions of Management" to define a functional organization design, focused on essential skill sets (Fayol, Five Functions of Management). Since then, they have been overlaid by concepts like processes, projects, programs, teams, and systems, and by emerging specialties like Marketing and Human Resources.

In addition, the amount of competitors and threats has also increased, and therefore these four functions have assumed even greater importance in the ongoing survival and success of any organization, including IKON Office Solutions. However, they are still at the core of much management thinking. Management is creative problem solving. This creative problem solving is accomplished through these four functions of management: planning, organizing, leading and controlling. The intended result is the use of an organization's resources in a way that accomplishes its mission and objectives Planning is "deciding in advance what to do, how to do this particular task, when to do it, and who is to do it". (Dixon 1993, ) At IKON Office Solutions, planning is a vital tool to all the managers since it allows them to help prepare for the future, rather than being commanded by it.

Comprehensive planning both helps coordinate the actions of all team members, while also serves as a basis for control and feedback. Using a systematic approach to planning, the manager can ascertain the capabilities of their employees and utilize resources to accomplish the most desired outcome, which at IKON is customer focused which in turn equals revenue. The managers at IKON evaluate the path ahead and make arrangements to sidestep any problems, which may arise. This new global business environment of today has made it imperative that a company plans out its path before walking down it. Due to the increase in technology that has enabled IKON to grow its product lines and partnerships the importance of planning has become even more crucial. Organizing, the principles discussed in the planning stage enables our managers to devise a framework by which job tasks are divided, grouped, and coordinated.

However, the function of organizing is concerned with assigning individuals with tasks or responsibilities, which combine together to form one goal. After IKON managers discover our strengths / weakness ' and define the overall plan, the managers must organize their resources to achieve those goals set out previously. This aspect of organizing to our organization and our managers is intertwined immensely with leading and planning since both are vital to the success of organizing the group. The manager then must be able to motivate the us, the members to apply ourselves to the tasks or responsibilities allocated to us during the planning stage. Leading is the fundamental part of management at IKON, whether by our Chief Operating Officer, our sales managers or our Sales Executives. This means influencing individuals to get tasks accomplished, maintaining moral, molding company culture, and managing conflict and communication.

Leading should be used as a motivating tactic to control individuals and emphasize the importance of achieving the goals set out in the planning stage. Although some managers are able to influence followers to work toward the achievement of organizational goals and personal professional goals, the authority of a manager does not necessarily make that individual a leader. Yes, that individual has authority, but whether or not they are able to influence their sales executives may depend on more than just that authority. Not all leaders are managers, and vice a verse, not all managers are leaders. Within a sales team environment, a leader is simply a role taken on by a member of the team.

Most sales teams require a manager to "manage", coordinate, schedule, contact, organize, and procure the affairs or numbers of the team. The functions of this role is quite different from that of the leader. Management roles need not presuppose any ability to influence. A leader, on the other hand, must have the ability to influence other team members. A leader must, by definition, have followers. Control is perhaps the most vital stage for IKON's management process because it relies heavily upon all other facets.

It allows the managers to see whereabouts in the process the company has gone wrong and for what reason. If the plan was not correct, or if it was not organized enough, or if the sales teams were not motivated enough to complete their tasks in the timeframe allocated of thirty days per cycle. All of these problems would arise in the controlling segment of management process. A manager's role in the development of an organization and achieving the goals set in its mission statement cannot be defined to four key functions.

Yet these four functions discussed; planning, leading, organizing and controlling are imperative to the success of any company. From the smallest family run company to the biggest multinational corporations such as IKON Office Solutions, plans must be made, people motivated and organized and given feedback on their progress, that is what makes these four functions crucial in the running of any organization. As we have seen, all four factors are inter-related in some manner. Planning allows the controlling stage to be performed while also allowing leaders to allocate tasks to team members, which are organized to form one cohesive effort. Organizing is the allocation of resources necessary to achieve these goals.

However how would a team be organized if there were no objective? How would a team operate if there were no motivation? And how would the team perform if they were not given feedback on their performance?

Bibliography

Dressler, G. (2001).
Management: Leading people and organizations in the 21st century (2nd ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Blair, Gerald. (2002).