5 Management Models That Can Help You Succeed in Your Career

Management models – This is a new way to look at your career. Have you ever thought that what if you can use strategic management models to improve your career? If you haven’t given any thought about it, don’t worry, we’re here to your aid. In this article we will bring top 5 management models which will help you see your career in different perspectives.

Management models are not only applicable for business or writing academic papers. If you sincerely understand what the proponents of those models wanted to teach, you will be able to tweak few parts here and there and will be able to design a beautiful, customized model for your career and professional growth.

Here’s the thing. We didn’t just pick any management models from any professors. We carefully picked these 5 so that you can see a significant similarity in your own career as well. First of all, we will talk about the model, how it is applicable to your career and tweak some parts of the models (if needed) to make it appropriate.

After going through this article, you can choose one of the management models from this and start working. Or else, you can also pick something else from a huge list of management models and customize it according to your need.

Let’s get started. We will learn a lot about how you can improve your career via using the management models. Now, there is no excuse.

#1. Kurt Lewin’s Change Management Model

Change is an important part of a career graph. If you want to improve your career, all you need to do is to understand this model by Kurt Lewin. To understand this model, you need to know 3 steps. But before going into the detailing of the change management model of Kurt Lewin, you need to identify one thing that you want to change your career. This thing can be for your individual need or for your team’s need.

Let’s say, you want to change the level of productivity for the team or for yourself in a given week. Here’s what you should do.

• Unfreeze

In this stage you need to communicate to yourself or to your team members that why the old method of doing work is not improving the productivity. May be it’s because there’s no feedback loop in the system. Creating awareness and communicating is the first step to start the process of change. There would be resistance, but you need to make sure that the team members understand why the change is necessary. If it’s for you, you need to make yourself understand why the change would give you more benefits.

• Change

Change is the toughest step to go through. Most people struggle here. If you are doing it for yourself, you will struggle with the new system as it’s still not properly wired in your brain. The new behaviours and new method of doing will take some time to adjust so that you can do it long enough to create better results. Once you or your team go through this stage, things start to become easier.

• Freeze/Refreeze

Once you or your team is habituated with the new system to improve productivity, it’s time to set it as a norm. But how to do that? To use a reward system. If you do it right for a month and produce this much quantity you would be given a certain amount of money or kind. If this can be implemented, your career and the productivity of you and your team will sky-rocket.

You can use this management model for any area of your career or life. All you need to understand the model and tweak it according to your need. Isn’t this a great management model?

#2. Management Models- Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Most of you have already heard about it. But if you don’t you can see the image below to understand it. Maslow said that we all start from the bottom and once the need at the bottom gets fulfilled, we can go ahead to gradually fulfil our all other needs.

• Physiological: You need to fulfil these basic needs first before you think about other needs. Air, water, food, shelter, sex, sleep and warmth are the basic needs as Maslow pointed out. They are also called your biological needs.
• Safety: Once you can fulfil the physical needs, you will go ahead and think about your safety, maintaining law and order, ensuring security and getting free from fear.
• Love & Belongingness: Later you need to have family, friends and love and affection and a place where you feel that you’re included.
• Esteem: After physiological, safety and love & belongingness needs, you can think about achievement, mastery, self-respect, autonomy.
• Self-actualization: This is the top most need you have and that is to achieve your full potential, extracting the best out of you and leaving a legacy which Steve Jobs called “making a dent in the universe.”

Addition

Now these are the needs of any human beings no matter whatever country or place s/he belongs to. But there is another need which is mostly ignored and which is also ignored by Maslow. Author Jonathan Fields says – There is the first basic need, even before the need to eat, quench thirst and find a shelter. And that basic need is the need of not changing. It sounds a little strange, but if you look closely at us, you will understand that statement to be true.

Now how this management model is relevant to your career and business. Here are three key points –

• You would be able to prioritize your career according to these needs. Yes, self-actualization is important. But a hungry belly cannot create master-pieces (yes, sometimes, but mostly not).
• By following Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs management model, you will be able to create an excellent balance between your career and personal life which now careerists call work-life balance.
• You can constantly review where you are in your career by looking at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs management model and start from there.

#3. Five Disciplines

Peter Senge has developed a beautiful model called “Five Discipline” and he is also the author of Fifth Discipline.

Now before we discuss about the five disciplines, here’s what you need to realize. Learning is an essential part of your growth, especially then when we talk about your career. If you take this model seriously, and apply these disciplines in your life, they will not only help you grow multi-fold, they will also catapult your team to a new height.

Let’s look at them one by one.

1. Systems thinking: This should come last but this discipline weave the other four disciplines together so that you can practice them in proper manner.
2. Personal mastery: According to Senge, you should not view your work as a means of earning money and making a living. Rather he wants you to see your work as an artist would look at a piece of art and you need to constantly strive to make it better and beautiful.
3. Mental models: We view the world as per our ingrained mental models. To improve our way of thinking, we need to improve our view of the worlds and better understanding of old and new mental models.
4. Building shared vision: An organization cannot go alone. To run an organization well and to achieve success, we need to depend on each other. It’s really all about interdependence. So, your vision should at least be shared by your team to make it effective and to be able to help each other in the pursuit of achieving success.
5. Team learning: When team members are closing all their assumptions and rather getting engaged in true dialogue, then they will learn faster.

If you use this model in any of your project, all your projects would be successful. Don’t forget to use the fifth discipline which cohorts all the other disciplines in implementable ways.

#4. Deming Cycle

This is a very useful management model if you want to improve your productivity or anything you do in your career. This management model is simple to understand and easy to implement.

There are four parts of Deming Cycle. Business Guru W. Edwards Deming is the proponent of this management model. This management model is also called PDCA Cycle.

• Plan: At this stage you need to plan for what you will implement. It’s easy to articulate a plan before taking action.
• Do: Once you plan, you should go ahead and implement your plan of action.
• Check: A control measure should be there so that you can understand how successful you’re in your effort to implement your plan of action. The best way to check your action is to have a set of standards structured beforehand.
• Act: Once you check and do course-corrections, now you can improve the process which Deming called as to “act”. After improving the process you will go back to planning again.

You may wonder how this management model would help you in your career. Think about a project you want to complete within a time limit. To make matter simple you have decided to chunk down your big projects in manageable sub-projects and set sub-deadlines for each of them. Now, you can use PDCA Cycle in case of your sub-projects. If you use this management model to your sub-projects, you don’t need to worry about the entire project and the quality of deliverables. Once you’re done with the project you can use the same management model and check whether everything has happened according to plan or not. If not, you can improve the deliverable by following Deming Cycle once again.

#5. Smart

This incredible concept is being proposed by the father of modern management Peter Drucker. He said that if you want to create great results, you need to measure it. He said – “There’s nothing as useless as doing something efficiently which should not be done at all.” And he also said – “What gets measured gets done.” Later organizations realized the value of his word and implemented the SMART method to their all goal-setting activities.

Let’s look at what SMART is and how this management model can help you succeed in your career. This management model is simple but don’t go by its simplicity. It’s incredibly powerful and useful.

• Specific: The first part of this management model is being specific about what you should be doing. It should not be vague or ambiguous. You need to be really crystal clear about what exactly you want to achieve for the organization or for your career.
• Measurable: If your goal is not measurable, how would you know when you achieved it? You won’t. You will simply circle around all the places and realize that all your effort is being wasted. So create a structure even for intangible goals which will help you measure the outcome.
• Achievable: The thing you set for yourself should be doable. It should not be pie in the sky stuff. You plan to build a castle in the cloud and you say that how can I do it? That’s not doable. Set yourself a target that you know you can achieve.
• Realistic: It should be realistic. If you want to earn a million dollar within a month if you’re just starting out, it’s not only beyond your wildest dreams, it is also extremely unrealistic. Making a US $10,000 profit in a month (if you are big firm and starting out) is a great goal to aim at. But it really depends on the individual and the circumstances around the person.
• Timely: The goal should have a deadline. Suppose you’re writing a report and there’s no deadline, do you think you will be able to finish it in the shortest possible time? We bet you won’t! Set a deadline after completing the first four steps and you’re done.

You can use this management model in any area of your life and career. Simply take a sheet and write down the elements of this management model. On the top of the paper, write your goal down and then make it specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. If you do this, you would be able to achieve any goal.

Use these management models and you will see that you will be able to create a structure for your career success. Try one at a time and see what works for you.