Managers – ManagersMag

April 21, 2023April 21, 2023

When Micromanagement Fails to deliver.

Think of it when your enterprise isn’t taking that much needed stride, supposed to toss you into the world of incomes even after investing in it heavily. While at times executives in promising companies assume supervision of some of it’s slightest tenets and departments, these presumptions significantly accumulate into big mistakes, creating loopholes critical for the firms downfall. Assumptions like these often provide a breeding hub for concealed errors to expand, eventually marking the onset of the firms relentless hardships. With micromanagement however, administrators are able to realize the full benefits of their sweat as the majority of the problems are handled at a firsthand perspective and solved in real time.

Micromanagement seemingly offers a firm a sort of a facelift which even upon the tempest of other big hurdles, greatly oversees the prosperity of a firm. Business failure which is certainly the diagnosis of a business that is registering minimal profits, often comes along due to a variety of reasons including this notorious assumption that the smallest tenets, the ficklest of issues, are not detrimental to your dilemma.

However micromanagement is a double-edged sword and despite this extremely appealing perspective, has a shortcoming with extremely lethal and far reaching impacts. In business management, micromanagement is a management style whereby a manager closely observes, controls, and or reminds the work of their subordinates or employees. Micromanagement is generally considered to have a negative connotation, mainly because it demonstrates a lack of freedom and trust in the workplace. Rather than giving general instructions on smaller tasks and then devoting time to supervising larger concerns, the micromanager monitors and assesses every stage of a business process and evades delegation of decisions. Micromanagers are usually annoyed when a subordinate makes decisions without consulting them, even if the decisions are within the subordinate’s level of authority.

Micromanagement also frequently involves requests for unnecessary and overly detailed reports. A micromanager tends to require constant and detailed performance feedback and to focus excessively on procedural trivia (often in detail greater than they can actually process) rather than on overall performance, quality and results. This focus on “low-level” trivia often delays decisions, blurs overall goals and objectives, impedes the cycle of information between employees, and guides the various aspects of a project in different and often opposed directions. Many micromanagers accept such inefficiencies as less important than their retention of control or of the appearance of control.

It is common for micromanagers, especially those who exhibit narcissistic tendencies and micromanage deliberately and for strategic reasons, to commission work to subordinates and then micromanage those subordinates’ performance, enabling the micromanagers in question to both take credit for positive results and shift the blame for negative results to their subordinates. These micromanagers thereby delegate accountability for failure but not the authority to take alternative actions that would have led to success or at least to the mitigation of that failure.

The most extreme cases of micromanagement comprise of a management pathology closely similar to workplace bullying and narcissistic behavior. Micromanagement resembles addiction in that although most micromanagers are behaviorally reliable on control over others, both as a lifestyle and as a means of retaining that lifestyle, many of them fail to concede their dependence even when everyone around them observes it.

Because a pattern of micromanagement suggests to employees that a manager does not trust their work or judgment, it is a major factor in stirring employee disengagement, often to the point of fostering a dysfunctional and hostile work environment. Disengaged employees invest time, but not effort or creativity, in the work in which they are assigned. The impacts of this phenomenon are worse in situations where work is passed from one specialized employee to another. In such a situation, disinterest among upstream employees implicates not only their own productivity but also that of their downstream colleagues.

April 21, 2023

How Managers can launch successful advertising campaigns

Advertising campaigns often use a series of advertising messages that share a single idea and theme which ultimately result in what is known as an IMC (Integrated marketing communication). While their sole purpose is to achieve a particular objective or set of objectives like establishing a brand or even raising a brands awareness, there is a dire reason why firms desperately need to come up with advertising campaigns. It being a strategy designed specifically to be carried out across all mediums it also serves the purpose of increasing sales, and even improving communication within a specific market. Therefore, these steps are paramount to the launching of a successful advertising campaign.

Set a campaign goal

These are advertising objectives to focus on. The most common goals include acquiring new client’s, promoting current products, and even launching of new products. You can also create an advertising campaign designed specifically to tackle on how brand awareness can be bolstered or even to help associate a certain brand with certain emotions. Whatever your goal might be, its twice as important to identify it before preceding to lay any modifications on it.

Define a target

Part of a campaigns success is directly tied to your target audiences if you have already defined target audience or market, it is much easier to accomplish and measure your goals. Defining points like age, sex, social class, marital status, education level, likes, habits and hobbies, by far, will help you understand who you are trying to reach through your advertising campaign strategy.

Segment your audiences

Once you have clearly defined your target audience, you should then segment the audience; dividing them into various groups based on the products or services you want to sell or according to their various demographics. Put yourself into the shoes of your potential customers and try to identify what it is that would spark their interests, if what you offer is useful for them? How will you grab their attention? Are they aware of the brand or the product and if they have the purchasing power to buy your products or services.

Define your advertising medium

There are many helpful tools at our disposal available to ensure your campaign message gets to your target audience as soon and as conveniently as you would expect. For example social media, allows you to create ads on social networks where your target audience is easily accessible. This means opening up a line of communication which allows you to easily reach your audience. The availability of platforms like these, offers personalized design strategies which yield a high success rate. Therefore, content cannot be exclusively personalized, you have to add value such as entertainment, new information, promotions etc.

Communication

The message of an advertising campaign is also fundamental even though strategies vary based on the type of company it is. However, the copy should always be natural sounding, well organized, clear, concise, fluid, and coherent. To communicate effectively, the message should always be brief.

Pay attention to your design

The design is just as important as the message, utilize responsible design and very friendly websites to win over your audience. Delight them first by sight and then through everything else you have to tell them.

Monitoring and evaluation

Measuring is important in many different fields, but in the world of advertising its absolutely crucial. If you don’t track your results, you won’t know what going on or what you could improve on. In an advertising campaign the metrics should make up for one integral part of the process. The only way to understand the campaign is to track and measure the metrics and data.

While Africa’s biggest constraint from an effective transition to the digital economy mainly emanated from the usage of outmoded data storage methods and facilities even on the internet, data centers will provide the reliability of storage by eliminating these glitches of using portable technology.

April 21, 2023

How managers transgress employee rights in bid to micromanage .

In a workplace governed by far, by authoritative managers who never allow their employees let out a word, leave alone transgressing rules crafted by these managers to gauge how people work, it might be easily to forget whether one has a right to anything particularly when the workplace is mired in some never ending tasks.

Although one is employed and often experiences fear that demanding for something might be seen as nagging or might easily bring back memories of probably when they underperformed creating a precarious situation for them

The pursuit for productivity often places workers at a precarious situation – beneath their managers, hence making it so hard for them to make demands or even take action when one of their rights are violated.

But truly, is there something like violation when one doesn’t understand what can be or is worth being violated? employees need to understand their rights very well and even have the much important knowhow on how to wield these rights in shaky situation like when 5their relationship [s with the manager is not so smooth.

March 6, 2023March 6, 2023

WHAT DOES A ‘GOOD MANAGER’S COMPANY’ LOOK LIKE?

A company’s culture is the foundation upon which its operations are run, hence should be friendly, open and nurturing – to motivate employees through hard times.

After working at an organization for a certain period of time, your tenure eventually comes to end ends, and you meet situations and people demanding you to give an account of your career’s affair at that firm. While this exiting might come either through a retrenchment, a transit to a greener pasture or through retirement, how comfortable you were as an employee at that firm greatly determines the kind of comment you give about it. This situation often gets one telling the truth as at that point you stand to lose nothing if you give a negative comment about the place, just as it is, if they give a good comment. Hence, as more former employees and clients continue to get accustomed to writing reviews about their former workplaces or products, their comments have in turn become a major constituent in what is popularly known as a company’s reputation.

Although clients are also fundamental in defining the quality of a firms reputation, employees who by far are seen as insiders – with more accurate details about the companies’ transactions, are seen as those with the ultimate clue. While these comments tackle areas like the company’s infrastructure, the employer’s relationship with the workers, quality of products and services and to allowances, a workplace can either be described as good or bad, nothing more – and this sets the difference between successful companies and those that are known to be to failures.

Following a popular tweet that saw some renowned companies faulted over their negligences, by people who during some particular time acted as employees in these firms, it is vivid that the even the countries most prestigious firms have at times missed some steps that greatly sabotaged their reputations. But how well they are able to gather their reputation back into a solid thing, is what says whether they remain at the top or not.

They tweet by this influencer demanded people to tweet back, openly, names of companies they had worked for, or were working for and which had exceeded the expectations in terms of employee satisfaction. For respondents who cited workplaces they were no longer working for, had their responses merited against the degree of their desirability to go back and further their careers as employees there, while those still at work against the level of their desperation if they were to be relocated to other workplaces. The responses were stupefying and the names that appeared there were nothing close to what most anticipated.

In just a few days, the post became very popular and amassed over three thousand likes and comments. The tweets came from diverse sources including from Kenyans who worked with international organizations like the Thompson Reuters and even from those living and working in diaspora. However, aside the much important accolades in form of positive testimonies, that respondents bestowed on their companies, the post became part of a broader debate about the status of the country’s employment scene and generally how well most of the organizations were prioritizing their employee welfare.

Screenshot of the twitter post by Bambi, one of the leading influencers.

A ‘good company’.

To decipher the lessons sent forth by this tweet we can possibly take one of the highly liked tweets which despite its exclusivity in context of it’s message, had much discourses to lend to both employees and their employers. The person who seemingly was from Mwea Tebere area in Kirinyaga, referred to some days when they used to harvest rice at a certain mzees farm, and his selfless nature saw him give them very sumptuous meals when ideally workers were supposed to bring their own food – for the employee to make a profit after paying them their daily wage. The meals which he said were not only sumptuous but in plenty costed him a lot that he would be left with no profits or just a sliver of it. In turn this saw employees flow in and out of his farms when there was scarcity of labor in the area and also came in handy to provide him with labor when he was facing financial hiccups. This influencer despite delving on a very far-fetched context, different from the ideal one of offices, gave an example that ultimately said it all. That it’s very important for to firms pursue a charming character first, then seek to prioritize on amassing profits. It came so easily for this farmer to convince the workers to work for him when he was out of cash, as they were more than sure that he will meet his promise, and even due to the outgoing nature he had showed, them felt very obliged to work for him, even if the guarantee to be paid was not there. Yet while profits remain the core motive upon which enterprises are brought up, they don’t always flow in if the company’s reputation is not withstanding and if employees are not satisfied or happy to be part of the firm’s team. To grasp a good reputation companies should seek to provide a quality experience, give priority to customer service, get involved with its community, respond to reviews, build its online presence, all the time as it focuses on treating its employees well. Employees are very important for reputation building and their extra-role behaviors, such as being positive spoken people for the firm, can improve organizational effectiveness and efficiency which increases the organizational reputation. An organizations reputation is basically its greatest intangible asset. When a company is viewed as reliable, transparent, and responsible it can set your business apart from competitors – offering a tangible advantage in your market.

Role of social media

Unlike the situation we had a few years ago where public foras or group discussions were the popular ways of debating about social problems, social media has come up very first to alter this ideal. Still, way past its motive of being just a social networking site it has redefined its role as a tool upon which organizations can greatly build themselves or dramatically drown to very low levels.

The fact that the tweet allowed people to publicly tag companies both for their goods and bad, it significantly became a changing point for companies that came beneath the ladder, to make an effort and scale up their priorities to enhance their public image. With a good reputation, companies can easily inch closer to their potential customers since there is evidence of trustworthiness and honesty hence reaching out to their goals as these customers are ever ready to even pay more. This defined the new role of social media as a great innovation, very fit for societal development including through acting as a watchdog against manipulative firms that don’t prioritize employee welfare. For example, when more than two negative comments from different individuals landed on a single company citing their unfriendly employee treatment, the rest would reply with besmirch emojis suggesting that they had already built a bad image about the firm and would not even like to do business with them leave alone working there. So far, the purpose of social media which has greatly improved is now very applicable in business to attract customers, get customer feedback and build customer loyalty, increase a firms market reach including international markets, do market research and reduce marketing costs and also to increase revenue by building customer networks and advertising.