Management as a business term refers to the act of using people to meet specific goals and achieve company objectives. A manager uses technical, interpersonal, and conceptual skills—as well as their natural talents and knowledge learned from experiences—to engage employees to perform at their best.
Since I don’t have the students’ permission to use their responses, here are some examples of what I would have written.
Being a manager is like being a symphony orchestra conductor making the best use of the individual talents of violinists, drummers, and other performers to collectively interpret works from centuries ago or recent compositions then present the resulting production to an audience of listeners.
Being a manager is like being a painter looking at a palette of watercolors and wondering what picture will result after applying an assortment of hues to a canvas and how it will be received once it goes on display in a gallery.
Being a manager is like being a teacher who has the privilege to educate a class with the profile of a meeting of delegates to the United Nations, to push students out of them comfort zones to find and occupy new comfort zones, to challenge their written skills by assigning five papers in five weeks on topics relevant to their careers, to give them time to interact and exchange divergent points of view, to let what once were strangers become colleagues who experience and understand the art of management.
It was my privilege to be the instructor for a wonderful group of students who are now better prepared to fulfill their individual potential as effective managers and strong leaders.
