Being a manager

If we go back in time we remember that the “manager position” was not a job in fact. It was just a “fragile” position controlled by those who were ruling the country destiny.

Today we can discuss about the “manager job” as a well defined profession, based on a fundamental imposed training connected with the ruling act itself and the field particularities.

As already mentioned in the editorial of the previous number, the future and destiny of any company depends a great deal on the manager quality and value, as he is the one who imposes through the applied management his/her own personality to the company, to the employees, to the social issues and geographical areas and regions.

Once having shifted to “strategic management”, the manager has been given the importance he/she deserves, being in fact „the fight ruler” on the battle field of the company. The battles the manager has to win comprise a large range of actions which must be developed both in the company and on the market, where the competition can rapidly change plans, imposing fast adaptation to various situations with various complexity and influences hard to predict and control.

The manager value is given exactly through his/her anticipation capability and a selective, strategic mind oriented towards the optimization of the situations in order to assure an effective and not only calculated efficiency of his/her activity.

Not anyone can be a manager! This fact is well known, verified and accepted by the human society on the Earth.

The question is: Who can be a manager and what special skills must he/she have in order to be of performance? Of course, the human being is very complex, having a lot of good features and bad ones, different from a person to another and differently applied from a situation to another. Still, there are certain specific skills which are compulsory:

• a high level of training and all-round education;
• to be a fighter;
• to accept competition and to have as a permanent target „to be on the dais”;
• to be healthy in body and mind;
• to know how to build a team, how to make it work and how to reward it;
• to know to listen (both the employees and the superiors) and to handle the art of dialogue;
• to know how to negotiate (to know when and where he/her must loose or to give up in order to win);
• to have a „social behaviour” and to know how to adapt to various situations;
• to be open to discussions, honest and to have a correct;
• to keep his/her promises.

How is the „manager life”? Maybe it is the most complex alternative of living, but it is also the most exciting and full of satisfaction – excepting failure situations.

The manager effort, compared with that of a sportsman, leads usually to a short life, but which is worth to be tried and lived like this.

Prof.univ.dr.eng. Ivan Cismaru
President of Managerial Board of PRO LIGNO Foundation