In the turbulent business environment in which farm and agribusinesses operate, the manager's role is highly demanding. A manager often has many roles: planner, organizer, leader, controller, change facilitator, delegator, etc. While the competitive environment of specific industries may differ, a business' success depends greatly on a manager's ability to fulfill all these roles at the same time and with equal effectiveness.
Developing your management ability is a gradual process. It includes both formal training and practical experience. Formal management education, by itself, is not enough to learn how to be a manager. Similarly, management experience without formal training can also hamper success. This guide will help you consider each of your roles and start the process of determining your strengths and weaknesses.
As a planner, your role (whether you're hired as an outside employee or are a family member) is to make decisions. In the long-run, the manager works closely with the owners of the farm in developing business plans. In the short-run, the manager is often responsible for day-to-day planning and decision making, with little input from investor-owners. As a planner, you'll need to make decisions about marketing, production and operations, finance, staffing and organization. You'll need to consider the following as you plan: (1) the business environment, ( 2) the farm's comparative strengths, and (3) alternative strategies to meet the objectives of the farm business.
Once you've made business plans, you need to implement them. As the manager, you need to address issues related to people, tasks and resources. As an organizer, managers must consider incorporation, partnership or sole proprietorship, the specification of job responsibilities and the management of inputs. Sometimes, managers focus on the design and upkeep of buildings and production at the expense of organizing. If your business is unorganized, this could result in poor performance because staff doesn't know what to do, or whom to report to, or it may be that people, tasks and resources are not coordinated.
A main role of the manager is to direct performance. In this capacity, the manager provides motivation and leadership. A manager also has to manage groups of people. Motivation is defined as energizing high levels of employee effort and performance. If you understand what motivates employees, you can help improve their performance. Leadership is defined as the process of influencing group activities toward the setting and achievement of goals. The effective manager understands the principles of leadership and is able to apply them in a business context. Effective management of groups is also vital to business performance. Many managers agree that people-related issues are the most critical to the success of a farm business.
Once your business plan is in place, management control becomes important. Control helps you examine how well the other managerial functions are working. Control allows you to compare actual business performance to planned performance. Another benefit of the control process is that it can help you identify changes that can get you back on track before mistakes are irreversible.
The control process consists of the following steps:While the concept of a control system for monitoring performance is fairly simple to grasp, developing and putting one into place can be hard to do. The key to having a control system is setting good performance standards. If you set standards too low, you may not do as well as you could. If standards are set too high, you may have a hard time ever succeeding. Further, if you set standards in noncritical areas, you may be wasting time. You will also need to adjust standards to keep up with the times.
The environment in which firms operate is constantly changing. Effective managers are able to quickly perceive changes, anticipate future changes and adapt business plans accordingly. Forces for change are either external or internal to the farm business. External forces include changes in the domestic and international political/economic climate, changes in demographics, changes in consumer tastes and preferences, and changes in technology. Internal forces for change include the availability of a trained work force, the quality of the working environment, family communications and available resources.
The first step is to identify forces for change that impact your operation. The next step is to assess the current situation of the farm, and identify specific problem areas that need attention. Then you need to recognize constraints and choose a change strategy. The last steps in the process are to implement your plans, evaluate the results and identify needs for further changes.
Farming is a very demanding occupation in many ways. One of the hardest parts is to be able to do so many things at the same time. Delegating duties is the best way to deal with this problem.
Delegation needs to take place at various levels in the farm operation, depending on the nature and complexity of tasks. Tasks must be assigned to the right people to keep labor costs down and make the best use of available skills. It's important to give direction but still allow workers to make decisions based on the accomplishment of farm goals. If you have only a few employees, or none at all, then delegation takes the form of picking those tasks for you to do that have the greatest payoff.
Delegation takes place along lines of authority. Usually, these lines are described in an organizational chart and through "job descriptions." There are two fundamental principles that apply to an organizational chart:
1. No employee can have more than one boss.
2. Authority must be equal to responsibility.
The first principle relates to issues of communication and accountability. If a farm employee is expected to take orders from more than one person, what happens when orders conflict? Which boss checks to see that work was done well? A one-to-one relationship between supervisor and employee is essential to avoid confusion.
The second principle, that authority must be equal to responsibility, is often overlooked. When an employee is assigned to do something, he or she must be able to do what is reasonable to see it gets done. Without this authority, the employee is handicapped; efficiency is lost because the staff has to "check with the boss." This uses up the boss' time, which could be used for big-picture planning.
A supervisor is one who makes sure a job gets done, not always the one who does the job. On many farms, the supervisor has to be a doer as well as a manager. This makes it very hard to understand the role of a supervisor or to separate it from being an employee. You are so busy getting the task done; you don't see yourself as a supervisor.
Employees know who is a good supervisor. Farm employees asked to list the qualities of a good supervisor would likely list the following:
Leave-them-alone method: Letting them do their jobs with little communication until something goes wrong.
or the
Treat-them-like-the-rest-of-the-employees method: The owner is still the supervisor in this case. Most commonly, the owner barges in on the work tasks and tells the crew what to do. "After all, I am the owner."
Somewhere there is a happy medium. It takes an effort to make your manager really effective, but the time spent is well worth it. Some positive suggestions that do help are: