51 Examples of Management Strategy

Management strategies are techniques that are used to direct and control an organization to achieve a set of goals. These include strategies for leadership, administration and business execution. The following are examples of management strategies.

Action Items

Assigning tasks to people that are tracked with a lightweight process such as meeting minutes or a team task list.

Alignment

Alignment of goals and strategy at the organization, department, team and individual contributor levels. Avoids wasting resources on personal projects that distract from core priorities.

Assumptions

Documenting the assumptions behind decisions, strategies and plans to manage stakeholder expectations.

Automation

Improving speed, accuracy, quality and reducing cost by automating work.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the comparison of your team's capabilities, processes, metrics or targets to standard industry results or a top competitor in your industry.

Best Practice

Best practices are approaches, processes or techniques that are generally accepted as the best known solution to a common business problem. They are sometimes criticized as the hallmark of complacency, mediocrity and resistance to change. In other words, best practices represent the way that things have been done in the past but not necessarily an optimal solution. At any rate, best practices can be used as a benchmark with which to compare new and innovative techniques.

Budget Control

Administering a budget, managing budget risk and reporting variances.

Capability Management

Capability Management is viewing your business as a set of capabilities. Capabilities are identified, benchmarked and optimized. They can also be mapped to products, processes, programs, projects and organizational units. In many cases, capabilities are represented as a hierarchy of two or three levels. It is also common for capabilities to be documented for both the current and target state of your business.

Change Control

Managing a process for change requests that allows changes to be submitted, evaluated, prioritized, budgeted, scheduled, implemented, launched and accepted.

Change Management

Change management is a leadership discipline that manages resistance to change. It consists of a series of strategies to engage employees to build support for initiatives.

Constraints

Communicating constraints such as budget, time, regulations and technology limitations to manage stakeholder expectations.

Contingency Planning

Planning for high impact risks.

Cost Management

Cost improvement strategies such as automation, productivity and eliminating waste.

Delegation

A basic management technique that assigns responsibilities to subordinates. Responsibilities are accompanied with the appropriate level of authority to complete tasks.

Facilitation

Facilitation is the practice of running an efficient meeting to plan strategy, make decisions or solve problems. Common facilitation techniques include setting a clear set of ground rules and agenda for a meeting.

Fail Well

Designing initiatives so that if they should fail they fail quickly, safely and cheaply.

Financial Analysis

Analysis of financial measures that are relevant to management decisions such as return on investment and payback period.

Goal Setting

Goal setting is a basic management function that creates an action plan for teams and individuals that documents targets. In many cases, goal setting follows a methodology across an organization such as the requirement that goals be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, or SMART.

Human Error Reduction

Designing processes, practices and interfaces to reduce the probability and impact of errors.

Innovation

The creation of valuable new techniques, products and services. Innovation typically requires specialized management approaches such as fail often that involve aggressive levels of experimentation.

Integration

The integration of processes, systems, data and user interfaces to achieve goals such as process efficiency and risk reduction.

Job Rotation

Job Rotation is the planned placement of an individual in a variety of different roles over a period of time. It is designed to train the individual and is considered to have business benefits. For example, people who are new to a position are likely to challenge the old ways of doing things.

Knowledge Management

The acquisition, preservation, representation, sharing and use of knowledge.

Leadership Development

Developing the abilities of your team. Associated with abundance mentality, a technique that builds influence by serving others.

Lessons Learned

Continuously learning from successes and failures with open and candid lessons learned exercises.

Management Accounting

A branch of business mathematics designed to support management decision making and optimization activities. Not to be confused with financial accounting.

Management By Exception

Creating processes, practices and procedures to handle regular business conditions so that management can focus on strategy, improvement and handling exceptions that make no sense to automate.

Management By Walking Around

Avoiding the pattern of only interacting with your teams through static scheduled meetings by walking around and engaging employees. Considered a executive management technique for motivating employees and staying grounded with day-to-day business realities.

Methodologies

Implementing management methodologies in areas such as quality and project management that improve productivity, reduce risks and improve stakeholder satisfaction with your results.

Metrics

Selling the value of your work with meaningful metrics that show your improvement over time and contributions to your firm's core goals.

Performance Management

Performance management includes critical activities such as goal setting and performance reviews that give each member of your team well defined direction and feedback.

Principles

Principles are foundational statements that an organization, department or team adopt to guide future decisions, methods and processes. They are intended to provide a consistent direction to improve the efficiency of decision making.

Prioritization

It is normal for a team to work with a large backlog of ideas meaning that prioritization is a critical activity that decides what gets done. A strict ranking of priorities tends to be more useful than a rating system.

Problem Management

The practice of investigating and fixing the root cause of incidents as opposed to only addressing symptoms.

Process Improvement

Optimizing and reinventing processes to achieve efficiencies such as productivity or quality gains.

Quality

Quality is the value of work outputs. It has a great number of dimensions that can each be used to improve customer and stakeholder satisfaction with your team's deliverables.

Relationship Management

Growing productive relationships with customers, internal clients and partners. May include practices such as regularly asking for feedback.

Reuse

Collaborating with other teams to reuse existing knowledge, resources, technology, data and product platforms.

Risk Management

Risk management is the identification and treatment of potential future outcomes that threaten the goals of an organization, department, team or individual.

Roles & Responsibilities

Setting detailed and unambiguous roles and responsibilities for processes and projects is known to improve results.

Scenario Planning

The practice of pre-planning tactical actions for potential opportunities and threats.

Standards

Adopting accepted standards such as a set of service management practices may improve customer and stakeholder perceptions of value. It may also avoid an extensive process of defining and gaining acceptance for internal standards.

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is the process of planning and executing a business strategy.

Structured Decision Making

Using structured decision making processes and practices to improve the quality of your decisions, gain acceptance from stakeholders and improve team engagement.

Systems Thinking

Strategies that consider full end-to-end impacts as opposed to focusing on a narrow set of goals.

Tactics

Tactics are quick actions that respond to opportunities and threats as they arise.

Target Operating Model

A target operating model is a view of how your business will look in the future. It is usually documented as a set of capabilities or processes and is used to communicate and prepare for programs that change your operating model.

Team Building

Activities that break teams out of their regular routines and habits to develop team relationships.

Team Culture

The values, norms, habits, expectations, language and symbols of your team. Team culture is perhaps the single greatest factor that contributes to engagement, productivity and innovation.

Transparency

The practice of being candid, open and visible. It is associated with aggressively communicating your team's successes and feeling no need to hide challenges or failures.

Workarounds

Using practical, lightweight and often temporary solutions to quickly clear issues and solve problems.

Next read: More Management Strategies