By Arial Starks
Ranga Ramanujam
Key components to navigating organizations across any industry are: managing yourself, continuously learning and updating information, and building and maintaining relationships. Once you can do those 3 things effectively, navigating different organizations will come more seamlessly to you, and you will have the confidence to take your management skills anywhere. Rangaraj Ramanujam, Vanderbilt Professor of Management and Richard M. and Betty Ruth Miller Chair, shares how his upcoming Executive Education program, Navigating Organizations: The Manager’s Roadmap, helps professionals better manage people, information, and responsibilities.
What is a Manager?
By definition, a manager is someone who holds a leadership role in an organization and manages a team of people. Ramanujam defines a manager as anyone of any position working in an organization. He says while management includes leadership, it is not a skill that is exclusive to organizational leaders, because at the end of the day, everyone is managing something, someone, or a combination of the 2.
“Through this course, I hope people realize that management is difficult,” Ramanujam said. “Nobody is a natural-born manager. You will constantly get better, but that also means you will constantly make mistakes. I want people to learn to cultivate a mindset so that they are okay with making the small mistakes to get better and better over time. “
What do Managers Manage While Navigating Organizations?
Managing Self
The first and perhaps the most important thing professionals need to learn to manage is themselves. Ramanujam says you cannot begin to manage others and their tasks without first learning to manage your own responsibilities.
“You need to be, for example, physically fit, you need to be emotionally intelligent, and you need to manage your time,” Ramanujam said. There are so many things about yourself that you need to manage, which most people forget because they think about management as managing others and the outside, but you need to start internally.
Managing Information
An important leadership quality all managers should possess is the ability to manage information. This includes learning and retaining company policies, procedures, and team structures, but it can also include harnessing good relationships with your peers and the people you are leading so that you have a sense of awareness about what is going on with your team at all times.
Ramanujam says your effectiveness as a manager largely depends on the quality of information people are willing to share with you.
“You receive information from people very often and a lot of that information is voluntarily shared,” Ramanujam explained. “For example, if I am on a team where I don’t manage people effectively, and they withdraw from me and stop sharing information with me, then I am suddenly out of the loop and now I don’t have the information I need to be effective.”
Managing people
As a manager you will undoubtedly manage other people, and depending on your level of leadership, you may manage several teams of people or even other managers. Ramanujam says those are the obvious components of management; the not so obvious responsibilities of managing others also includes building and maintaining informal relationships with others.
“You have to manage your boss, you have to manage your peers and colleagues across your organization, and you also have to manage key relationships outside of your organization which is what we call networking,” he said. “When we put all of these components together, we start to realize being a manager is a lot of work.”
Ramanujam says your impact as a leader is dependent on others’ willingness to work with you towards collective goals. “If you don’t manage people effectively, they are not going to work with you and in turn they are not going to work towards the goal. So, both informationally and motivationally, you depend on people.”
Balancing Management While Navigating Organizations
There are so many moving parts to management that it can seem overwhelming when you start to think about it all. There are 2 main factors that can make or break a manager: time and attention. Ramanujam says having the discernment to know when and where to focus your time and attention is vital.
“Part of why time management is so critical is because if you are not careful, for example, you could spend all of your time focusing on managing information and you may neglect managing people. Or, you may focus exclusively on people within your team, but you forget to manage your networks outside the team. By knowing that there are so many moving parts to your job, your attention needs to be appropriately allocated.”
Ramanujam points to dynamic balance, a concept he teaches in his Navigating Organizations course. Dynamic balance is defined as the ability to remain standing and stable while performing movements or actions that require displacing or moving oneself. In a business setting this translates to mastering the art of multitasking by prioritizing tasks and responsibilities in a way that allows you to still get everything done.
Intentionality is also foundational in navigating organizations and management. Ramanujam says setting your intentions is a guaranteed way to stay on track.
“With so many different moving parts to your job, you can get in a space where you are reacting to only the most urgent task on your agenda or what other people tell you is important,” said Ramanujam. “If you are not intentional about what you are doing, then you are always going to be reactive to whatever is coming your way.”
To learn more about how to navigate organizations as a manager, register for Ramanujam’s open enrollment program offered November 6-7, 2023.
