Management Career Paths

A management career path is not a straight line. Nor is it the same for everyone. Yet all management career paths have a starting point. All have milestones along the way. This page is the starting point for several management paths. Each path leads managers to what they need to know based on where you are in your career and where your interests lie. On each visit you can go further along the path, retrace steps along the same path, or start down a new path. Five paths are listed below.

Considering Management

This person wonders whether a management career is for them. Maybe someone has suggested it. Maybe they just feel they can do it better than their current boss. Take this path to learn more about what management does and whether management might be for you.

Going For It
This person has decided to try the management career path. They have no management experience yet, but are interested and motivated. This path leads to the knowledge and skill needed to land that first management job.

Risk Management

Risk management is attempting to identify and then manage threats that could severely impact or bring down the organization. Generally, this involves reviewing operations of the organization, identifying potential threats to the organization and the likelihood of their occurrence, and then taking appropriate actions to address the most likely threats.

Traditionally, risk management was thought of as mostly a matter of getting the right insurance. Insurance coverage usually came in rather standard packages, so people tended to not take risk management seriously. However, this impression of risk management has changed dramatically. With the recent increase in rules and regulations, employee-related lawsuits and reliance on key resources, risk management is becoming a management practice that is every bit as important as financial or facilities management.

There are several basic activities which a nonprofit organization can conduct to dramatically reduce its chances of experiencing a catastrophic event that ruins or severely impairs the organization.

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Be A Better Manager

Here are some key skills and abilities that help anyone be a better manager.

Need For Good Managers Increasing
The need for good managers is not going away. It is intensifying. With ‘flatter’ organizations and self-directed teams becoming common; with personal computers and networks making information available to more people more quickly; the raw number of managers needed is decreasing. However, the need for good managers, people who can manage themselves and others in a high stress environment, is increasing.

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Crisis Management

Crisis management is the nature of activities to respond to a major threat to a person, group or organization. Crisis management is a relatively new field of management. Typically, proactive crisis management activities include forecasting potential crises and planning how to deal with them, for example, how to recover if your computer system completely fails. Many people would refer to this, instead, as risk management and not crisis management.

Hopefully, organizations have time and resources to complete a crisis management plan before they experience a crisis. Crisis management in the face of a current, real crisis includes identifying the real nature of a current crisis, intervening to minimize damage and recovering from the crisis. Crisis management often includes strong focus on public relations to recover any damage to public image and assure stakeholders that recovery is underway.

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Management Development

Management development is an effort (hopefully, planned in nature) that enhances the learner's capacity to manage organizations (or oneself). Very simply put, managing includes activities of planning, organizing, leading and coordinating resources. 

A critical skill for anyone is the ability to manage their own learning. The highly motivated, self-directed reader can gain a great deal of learning and other results from using the guidelines and materials in this library topic.

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Meeting management

Planning Effective Meetings

Meeting management tends to be a set of skills often overlooked by leaders and managers. The following information is a rather "Cadillac" version of meeting management suggestions. The reader might pick which suggestions best fits the particular culture of their own organization. Keep in mind that meetings are very expensive activities when one considers the cost of labor for the meeting and how much can or cannot get done in them. So take meeting management very seriously.

The process used in a meeting depends on the kind of meeting you plan to have, e.g., staff meeting, planning meeting, problem solving meeting, etc. However, there are certain basics that are common to various types of meetings. These basics are described below.

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Operations Management

Major, overall activities often include product creation, development, production and distribution. (These activities are also associated with Product and Service Management.) Related activities include managing purchases, inventory control, quality control, storage, logistics and evaluations of processes. 

A great deal of focus is on efficiency and effectiveness of processes. Operations management focuses on carefully managing the processes to produce and distribute products and services.

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