Abstract
Amanda is the owner of a company that was founded as a small business, yet has recently started to expand. Because of the challenges that this growth presupposes, and the inconsistencies between the old strategy and the new environment with its new demands, Amanda will have to reconsider her leadership strategy. The alterations that her company will have to undergo will concern both the organizational issues and the principles of corporate ethics. Once a proper model for the staff to comply with is introduced, the employees will be capable of delivering better performance.
Introduction
I am writing on behalf of your adviser to provide you with suggestions regarding the improvement of your company’s current performance. Based on the four functions of management principle, which allows encompassing such aspects of company leadership as planning, organizing, leading, and controlling the performance of the employees (Barnat, 2014), I propose that the very foundation of your company and the leadership principles that you adopt should be revisited to address some of the current issues in your company by designing an adequate solution to the core problem.
Mission Statement Development
There is no need to stress that the company’s mission statement is one of the pillars for entrepreneurship to be based on. This does not mean, however, that you must follow your mission statement blindly and disregard the obvious problems that it causes. A mission statement makes the foundation of a firm, yet it needs to be shaped as a company evolves and alters; otherwise, it will wear out its welcome pretty soon. Therefore, your company’s mission statement must be updated as soon as possible, preferably with the introduction of a customer-focused strategy as its basis.
Resources Organization
The use of resources within your company also needs a thorough reconsideration; this concerns every single type of resource, including the human resources, the informational resources, the financial resources, and the physical ones. Applied to your case, the use of human and financial resources must be reconsidered thoroughly. For instance, the fact that the amount of work that you have to handle does not allow you to get a good sleep shows that you should either reinvent the entire principle of time management within your company, including the rescheduling of the staff’s working days and the redistribution of duties and responsibilities among the employees or to recruit more staff members.
Recruitment Significance
As it has been stressed above, the amount of work that the company members have to handle displays the necessity to recruit new members as soon as possible; otherwise, the organization will default on its deadlines and, thus, lose its customers. Still, you should be very careful in the choice of the HRM strategy, which you will utilize to identify the best candidates for taking positions in the company. The soft approach aimed at providing the staff with motivation for good performance should be combined with hard measures aimed at attaining good results; therefore, you should locate the golden mean between the contingency approach and the universal one (Newlands & Saee, 2012).
Motivation as a Phenomenon to be Reinforced
Analyzing the problems that you have faced in the course of managing the work of your staff, one must mention that the lack of motivation within the environment of the organization is quite obvious. Unless the staff is motivated properly, they will never be able to deliver their top performance; as a result, the performance of the company is doomed to be mediocre until the introduction of an efficient strategy for addressing the lack of enthusiasm.
As a rule, financial incentives are viewed as the first choice option for improving motivation rates. In your case, however, a combination of financial rewards and a public recognition of the staff’s achievements can be recommended. Once the staff realizes that the organization complies with the asset of ethical and professional principles, which guarantee the satisfaction of both clients and employees, the latter will most likely accept the responsibilities that the aforementioned changes entail.
The necessity for Setting Standards
Since the staff in your company displays an unwillingness to comply with the standard set of ethical principles (the fact that Lisa has been concealing the information concerning her communication with clients and provision of false data is a graphic example of a deviation from the existing ethical standards), a very specific and clear ethical code must be introduced into the company structure. Combined with a more cohesive and straightforward policy of the company aimed at the benefit of the staff and the clients, this approach will help your staff get their priorities straight and attain professional responsibility.
Among the key standards, which should be introduced into the set of ethical principles of the organization, professional responsibility must be listed. Once setting the staff an example of what kind of organizational behavior is expected from them, you will be able to control them more adequately and detect the possible issues at the earliest stages of the problem development. Finally, the introduction of the responsibility concept will help restrict the functions of the staff, thus, making their actions traceable and the effects of these actions more determinable. As soon as the specified principle is introduced into the organization, the issues that you have with Lisa will also resolve, as she will not be able to abuse her powers anymore.
Negative Information and Its Proper Analysis
Another obvious issue, which may hinder the development of a proper leadership strategy, turning a blind eye to the negative information deserves a mentioning. While your desire to focus on the assets of the company is quite understandable, it is still highly required that negative data should be incorporated into the analysis. Such upsetting data as your assistant’s abuse of power and the provision of the information that the company could not credit as verified may also lead to certain insights on how to improve the performance of the staff; therefore, it must not be ignored. To be more exact, it is recommended that the negative information should be used constructively and not be swept under the rug in hope that it will never be revealed (Carpenter, Bauer & Erdogan, 2010).
Timely Delivery of the Required Actions
The above-mentioned time management issue is, perhaps, among the most crucial concepts that you will have to review to make your organization more successful and its performance more efficient. According to the latest information concerning the company’s progress, the firm has been defaulting on the delivery of the end product to the customers, which was interpreted by the latter as a very frustrating experience. The effects of such delays are most likely to be drastic – not only will the organization lose its loyal clients, but also gain a rather undesirable reputation.
To introduce better time management into the organization, a change in the information sharing process can be suggested. As the case study shows, the lack of data available to the staff leads to the employees making consistent mistakes and, which is even worse, failing to either notice these mistakes or learn from them. For instance, the employees, who were unable to handle the customers’ requests and, therefore, forced to delay the payment procedures, should be instructed on the necessity to introduce a personal schedule into their working process.
It would also be a reasonable step to assign a professional, who will handle the tasks and responsibilities distribution, making sure that specific orders are assigned to the staff members by the professional skills of the latter; more to the point, the necessity to schedule the tasks management more care should be provided. By allowing the staff to learn the basics of time management and help them arrange their work properly, you will be able to improve their performance considerably, therefore, increasing their productivity.
Conclusion
Managing an organization is not an easy task, especially when one has to assume several roles at once, including the role of a leader, the one of a manager, and the one of an HRM specialist. However, handling corporate processes becomes possible even as the organization expands once the strategies adopted by the leader are reconsidered. With slight changes towards the introduction of social responsibility principles made to the corporate ethics code, as well as incentives for the staff, you will be able to motivate the employees for better performance and, thus, increase the net profit of the company. Moreover, the current deadline issues will no longer be an issue as soon as you get the company’s priorities straight.
I hope that the pieces of advice provided above will help you make your company more profitable and tackle the current issues efficiently.
Reference List
Barnat, R. (2014). Strategic management: Formulation and implementation. Introduction to management. Web.
Carpenter, M., Bauer, T. & Erdogan, B. (2010). Principles of management – version 1.1. New York, NY: Flat World Knowledge, Inc.
Newlands, D. & Saee, J. (2012). The global business handbook: The eight dimensions of international management. Burlington, VT: Gower Publishing, Ltd.