Blended Management Style
Business management in theory as opposed to practice often craves certainty. Managers demand certainty in the data they analyze, certainty in how the standard operating procedures are obeyed by their work colleagues, to make an organization fair and effective. Managers often seek certain ways of doing business, namely the most effective ways of doing business. But often this craving for certainty causes some managers to single-mindedly adopt a particular theory of managerial governance regarding their personal style of communication with their fellow associates. In the name of fairness, they treat everyone the same, without a regard for individual needs and differences. This is the mistake a blended management style seeks to avoid.
One might call this blindness to emotional and personal differences a traditionally male or authoritarian schema of approaching one’s subordinates and colleagues. But to deal with human beings is to deal with uncertain quantities, as one can never be certain of how an employee will react to one’s commands or overtures as a manger. One deals not with a number or job description, but with a whole constellation of personal preferences, past history, and personal needs. Also, to succeed in today’s world, one must be responsive to all situations and types of people, a fact that a standardized or less human approach does not always embrace. Today’s workplace is continually changing in the faces that it wears and the languages that it speaks, and the needs of today’s global economy are also continually changing. Managers must change with it, and it is not enough to exchange one popular theory for another — one must change immediately, and now as a person as well as demand change of one’s employees.
This is why I believe my blended management style is ideal for my organization and the approach of businesses in the future, as well as for myself. It is only fitting that one speaks of today’s greater workplace diversity in regards to the expansiveness, newness flexibility of the blended management style. Blended management was born of diversity, namely the increase of women in managerial position. It takes a blend of gender styles in terms of managerial interation to manage everyone in one’s workplace equally and fairly yet forcefully and directly. Sharpening one’s personal talents in a blended style means honing in on once-neglected talent such as traditionally ‘feminine attributes’ of strong communication skills, the ability to be empathetic to the multifaceted concerns of one’s employees, taking a grass-roots rather than a top-down approach that solicits opinions of others rather than management (including subordinates and the organization’s customers) when necessary, a willingness to reinvent the rules of the organization when the rules of the marketplace change, and a willingness to combine all of these assets with an obsession with customer preferences. (Griffin, 2001)
These female or supposedly softer skilled attributes may be combined with more traditionally masculine and self-serving traits on the part of the manager in the interests of career advancement, such as focusing on one’s personal achiements, the to turn challenges into opportunities, and the ability to stick to one’s objective in a way that demands decisivenes under pressure. This assertiveness is also necessary to suceed in today’s marketplace.
Key to my blended management style and the blended management style in general is the idea that when one deals with many different people during the average workday one must respond to these differences. The blended management style reconizes not simply just the differences between male and female workers, although a blended management style can indeed be more effective in dealing with gender differences in the workplace. Rather, a blended management style also acknowleges that different individuals have different learning styles, and thus different abilities to contribute to the worklace.
Works Cited
Griffin, Cynthia E. (2001) “Be a Man! Helpful Management Attitudes.” Entrepreneur. Retrived from Find Articles on 23 Sept 2005 at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DTI/is_5_29/ai_74699932
