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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Stress Management and Time Management

Consequently, there are many resources with guidelines and tips to manage time more effectively. Time management and stress management often are closely related and discussed together.

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Program Management

Program management or programme management is the process of managing several related projects, often with the intention of improving an organization's performance. In practice and in its aims it is often closely related to systems engineering and industrial engineering.

The Program Manager has oversight of the purpose and status of all projects in a Program and can use this oversight to support project-level activity to ensure the overall program goals are likely to be met, possibly by providing a decision-making capacity that cannot be achieved at project level or by providing the Project Manager with a program perspective when required, or as a sounding board for ideas and approaches to solving project issues that have program impacts. Typically in a program there is a need to identify and manage cross-project dependencies and often the PMO (Program or Project Management Office) may not have sufficient insight of the risk, issues, requirements, design or solution to be able to usefully manage these. 

The Program manager may be well placed to provide this insight by actively seeking out such information from the Project Managers although in large and/or complex projects, a specific role may be required. However this insight arises, the Program Manager needs this in order to be comfortable that the overall program goals are achievable.

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Project Management

Project management includes developing a project plan, which includes defining and confirming the project goals and objectives, identifying tasks and how goals will be achieved, quantifying the resources needed, and determining budgets and timelines for completion. 

It also includes managing the implementation of the project plan, along with operating regular 'controls' to ensure that there is accurate and objective information on 'performance' relative to the plan, and the mechanisms to implement recovery actions where necessary.

Path-goal Theory

Develop by Robert House, path-goal theory is a contingency model of leadership that extracts key element from the ohio state leadership reaserch on initiating structure and consideration and the expectancy theori of motivation.

The essence of the theory is that it’s the leader’s job to assist his or her follower.

Managing Work Force Diversity

Work force diversity means that organizations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity. But the term encompasses anyone who varies from the so-called norm (Robbins: 1996).

The challenge for organizations, therefore, is to make themselves more accommodating to diverse groups of people by addressing their different lifestyles, family needs, and work styles. The melting pot assumption is being replaced by one that recognizes and values differences.

Managers will need to shift their philosophy from treating everyone alike recognizing differences and responding to those differences in ways that will ensure employee retention and greater productivity—while, at the same time, not discriminating (Robbins: 1996).

Strategic Managemen Process

Strategic managemen process is the process of identifying and pursuing the organization's mision by aligning the organization's internal capabilities with the external demands of its environment (Gary, 1995).

Manager's Job

As david kwok found out when he became a manager at the Princeton review, regardless of wether it's called 'the leading function', 'interpersonal roles', 'human skills', or 'human resorce management and networking activities', it's clear that managers need to develop their people skills if they're going to be effective and successful in their job.

Management Skills

Manager need skills or competencies to successfully achieve their goals. Robert katz (1974) has identified three essential management skills. There are technical skills, human skills, conseptual skills.

Technical skills the ability to apply specialized knowledge or expertise. When you think of the skill held by profesionals such as civil enginers, tax accountants, or oral surgeons, you typically focus on their technical skills. 

Human skills the ability to work whit , understand, and motivate other people, both individually in groups. Since managers get things done through other people, they must have good human skill to comunicate, motivate, and delegate.

Management Roles

Mintzberg (1973) concluded that managers perform ten diferent highly interealted roles, or sets of behaviors, attributable to their jobs. These ten roles can be grouped as being primarily concerned with interpersonal relationship, the transfer of information, and decision making.

Interpersonal roles;  consists of three things first, figurehead is reqiured to perform a number of routine duties of a legal or social nature. Second, leader responsible for the motibation and direction of subordinates. Third, Liaison maintains a network of outside contactswho provide favors and informations.


Informational roles; consists of three things first, monitor receives wide variety of information; serves as nerve center of internal and axternal informatioan of the orgnization.Second, disseminator transmit information recieved from outsiders or from other subordinates to members of organization. Third, spokesperson transmits infomration to outsiders on organization's plans, policies, actions, and results; serves as expert on organization's industry.


Decisional roles; consists of four things first, entrpereneur, . Second, disturbance handler, . Third, resource allocator, . fourth negotiator.


Manager Reference.................

Manager Reference

H. Mintzberg, The Nature of Managerial Work (New york: harper & row, 1973)

R.L. Kats, ''Skills of an Efective Administrator," Harvard Business Review (September-October, 1974), pp. 90-102

S.P. Robbins, Organizational Behavior, (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc, 1996)

G. Dessler, Managing Organizations, (Florida: The Dryden Press, 1995)