Interview with manager

Throughout the essay, the managers will be referred to as Mr X and Mr Y and their company’s will be referred to as Company X and Company Y respectively due to confidential reasons. The first manager that was interviewed in order to fulfil this task was Mr X. He works for Company X, which is, a large service based organisation at the position of ‘Head of Corporate Credit Administration.’ His key responsibility at this bank is to provide credit administration support to Corporate, Investment banking and SME business. Within Company X’s hierarchy Mr X appears to be a middle level manager at he is expected to report to the CEO of the company while he also supervises. The second interview that was conducted for this task was with Mr Y. He is a Creative Marketing Director at Company Y which is a marketing consultancy and IT development enterprise located in Malaysia. His organisation is also service based; however, it is a medium sized one. As a top level manager, Mr Y’s task is to direct and oversee the overall projects and ensure that they are carried out as planned and are successful. Management is the process of coordinating and overseeing the work activities of others so that their activities are completed efficiently and effectively (Robbins, Bergman, Stagg & Coulter, 2012). In the subsequent essay, the universality of management will be discussed in light of Fayol’s four functions and Katz’s three skills and how relevant these theories appear while analysing the information gathered from the interviews. Henri Fayol proposed that that all managers perform five functions: planning, organising, commanding, coordinating and controlling (Robbins, Bergman, Stagg & Coulter, 2012). During the course of the essay, however, the emphasis will remain on the four functions: planning, organising, leading and controlling. A skill is the ability either to perform some specific behavioral task or the ability to perform some specific cognitive process that is