Henri Fayol - Five Functions of Management Process

Henri Fayol, the father of the school of Systematic Management, was motivated to create a theoretical foundation for a managerial educational program based on his experience as a successful managing director of a mining company. In his day, managers had no formal training and he observed that the increasing complexity of organisations would require more professional management. Fayol's legacy is his generic Principles of Management. Of Fayol's six generic activities for industrial undertakings (technical, commercial, financial, security, accounting, managerial), the most important were The Five Functions of Management that focused on the key relationships between personnel and its management. The Five Functions are: 1. PLANNING drawing up plans of actions that combine unity, continuity, flexibility and precision given the organisation's resources, type and significance of work and future trends. Creating a plan of action is the most difficult of the five tasks and requires the active participation of the entire organisation. Planning must be coordinated on different levels and with different time horizons; 2. ORGANISING providing capital, personnel and raw materials for the day-to-day running of the business, and building a structure to match the work. Organisational structure depends entirely on the number of employees. An increase in the number of functions expands the organisation horizontally and promotes additional layers of supervision; 3. COMMANDING optimising return from all employees in the interest of the entire enterprise. Successful managers have personal integrity, communicate clearly and base their judgments on regular audits. Their thorough knowledge of personnel creates unity, energy, initiative and loyalty and eliminates incompetence; 4. COORDINATING unifying and harmonizing activities and efforts to maintain the balance between the activities of the organisation as in sales to production and procurement to production. Fayol