2.4 Management Functions To understand management, it is imperative that we break it down into five managerial functions, namely planning, organizing, staffing, leading, controlling and coordinating. 2.4.1 Planning Planning involves selecting missions and objectives and the actions to achieve them. Planning is setting organizational goals and deciding on the course of action for achieving them. Here, selecting a course of action to achieve the goals is referred to as decision- making. Planning is futuristic in the sense that the company has to identify the opportunities and threats that lie in the future and to decide on a course of action presently to exploit the opportunities and prepare to face the threats. Planning involves forecasting and predicting the future. This requires the ability to understand the needs of the customer and to device the means to satisfy them. Plans range from overall purposes and objectives to the most detailed actions to betaken. No real plan exists until a decision – a commitment of human and material resources – has been made. 2.4.2 Organizing Organizing is defined as the management function of grouping tasks and assigning resources, required to carryout a specific job. Organizing is that part of management that involves establishing an internal structure of roles for people to fill in an organization. Internal in that all tasks necessary to accomplish goals are assigned to people who can do them best. Organizing involves grouping of the required activities into manageable departments or work units, establishing authority and reporting relationships with the established hierarchy. It decides who will carryout particular tasks, where they will be done and when they will be done. Thus, the organizing function deals with designing the organizational structure needed to accomplish goals. This process is called Organizational design and structure 2.4.3 Staffing Staffing is a continuous and vital function of management. After the objectives have been determined and activities for the implementation of strategies, policies, programmes, have been identified and grouped into jobs, the next logical step in the management process is to procure suitable personnel for manning the jobs. Staffing involves filling, and keeping filled, the positions in the organization structure. The staffing process can be viewed as consisting of a series of steps that managers perform to provide the organization with the right people in the right positions. This is done by identifying workforce requirements inventorying the people available and recruiting, selecting, placing, promoting, appraising, planning the careers of, compensating, and training or otherwise developing both candidates and current jobholders to accomplish their tasks effectively and efficiently. It is also involved in employee disengagement.