Functions of Management

Management in today's workplace is truly no different from that of management of years ago. From the dawn of the first business, managers have constantly fought the battle of being successful. Over the years, education and understanding have led to the realism of how management is truly accomplished. Management can be broken down into four unique functions. These functions are planning, organizing, leading and controlling (Bateman & Snell, 2007, p.54). The application of these functions varies depending on the level of management, but all levels use all the functions. Allow me to explain the four functions of management while providing explanations of how each function applies to my organization, the U.S. Air Force.

First let's discuss the planning function. This function is used to specify organizational goals and determine what is necessary in order to achieve those goals. Planning normally includes determining what courses of action to take, types of resources and personnel that may be required, allocation of time, and anything else of strategic value. Within a military organization, planning is constantly occurring. My military organization is responsible for the training and qualification of crews that fly the Predator Unmanned Aerial Systems. My unit constantly plans different aspects in order to complete the Air Force goals of graduating 160 aircrews per year. Our planning efforts focus on things like establishing schedules, availability of resources, development of student materials, ensuring proper instructor qualifications, and timelines and goals to ensure completion. Once a plan has been developed for each of these things, it's time to move on to the next function, organizing.

Organizing is assembling and coordinating the human, financial, physical, informational, and other resources needed to achieve goals. (Bateman & Snell, 2007, p.57) Managers need to be able to organize in order to achieve maximum success and arrive at the organizational goals. Let's look at some of things that require organization using the scheduling function of my organization. As with that of any school, a military school needs to organize what it has and what the school is required to accomplish. Every day my unit's scheduling office must organize the quantity of instructors, students and aircraft that are available, the qualifications of each individual, the training required to be accomplished and the timeline in order to complete it. Due to the many personnel issues that arise on any given day, the function of organizing that this office deals with can be the make or break of our organization's goals.

After planning and organizing, the next function is leading. The whole point behind leading is to get the maximum performance from each employee. This is done by continual motivation and communication with employees. Leading is any form of guidance and inspiration to get employees to achieve organizational goals. In my organization, leading is constantly happening in the aspect of instructors leading and teaching new students how to accomplish their training. Due to the importance of the training our school conducts, my unit performs instruction on a one-on-one basis. This provides ample opportunity for each of the instructors to lead each student in the proper direction. With that middle managers of the unit get ample opportunity to provide guidance and feedback to each instructor to ensure the organization meets its goals.

The last function, controlling, is the one that ensures overall success. This is done by the monitoring