3.1. Read text ¹ 3. Complete the sentences, finding them in the text:

1. Behavioural simply means ..... .

2. Activity of any organization is ..... .

3. Any business concern does two things. First, it ..... . Second, it provides ..... .

4. Work has in fact two ..... . First, it can give ...... Without satisfaction, work can become ...... Second, work earns ...... .

5. Behavioural management is based on a study ..... .

6. The finding of ..... are used to see what things influence the way people behave ..... .

7. Managers have to know how ..... people to do things, how ..... them to behave in a certain way.

8. Behavioural management is management based on an ..... of an individual and the ..... of the knowledge.

3.2. Discuss:

A good manager is born rather than trained.

Give your pros and cons.

Text ¹ 4

Today I am going to talk briefly about our third way of looking at management, the systems management approach. And then I’m going to move on to a discussion of what skills a manager ought to have, without reference to any particular approach at all.

Let’s try a few examples. We have been talking for years about such things as transport systems, telephone systems and economic systems – all of which I once heard described as “a collection of things that don’t work!” These are all very simple examples, which have no particular difficulty or mystery. But the idea of systems has recently been built into a general systems theory, and it is an attempt to apply this theory to the problem of managing something that has given rise to the systems management approach. Perhaps we should leave it at that for the moment, but it will be interesting to see how it all develops.

I think it would be more useful if we now took a look at what skills you ought, as an aspiring manager, to develop. I am going to list nine of them, though I’m quite sure there are others one could think of. I’ll say just a few words about each of them as we go along.

First, there are communication skills.

Next, there are leadership skills.

Our third group of skills concerns team-working ability. It goes without saying – but I’m going to say it anyway – that a good manager has to be able to work as one of a team, and not just give other people orders. I don’t mean that he has to go to the other extreme and try always to be “one of the boys”. That usually makes one a bit ridiculous. But he certainly has to be able to work well with other people.

Then there are decision-making skills. A manager is called upon daily to make a number of decisions, and I need hardly stress that he can’t afford to get them wrong too often. So we are talking now about a willingness to make decisions, ability to make decisions, and skill in making the right ones!

We come now to what may seem simple enough but is in fact a skill that even the best managers are quite often not very good at. This is the ability to delegate – to entrust jobs to other people and to trust them to do them well. It is easy to get carried away by snappy little savings, such as “If you want the job done well, do it yourself”. But the fact is, that a busy man simply can’t do everything himself, and if he is a good manager, he will know this. Overwork, like many of the things that hurt most, is too often self-inflicted.

Our sixth skill, the ability to motivate other people, is probably clear enough. It is obviously related to the next skill, that of being able to improve personal relationships. Both of these can be helped by the concept of behavioural management that we talked about last time. And so is our eight skill, that of teaching and advising or consulting with other people, though they may also come from that instinctive quality that some people seem to be born with.

Our last skill also seems to depend sometimes on the sort of person you are. Some people never do anything on time: they seem unable to keep an appointment, finish a job, catch a train, an so on. They lack what we may call time-management skills, the ability to plan and use time sensibly.