Text 8: control as a management process

Like their McDonald's counterparts, managers in other organiza­tions also face important issues related to the function of controlling. Controlling is the process of regulating organization all activities so that actual performance conforms to expected organizational standards and goals. As the definition suggests, controlling means that managers develop appropriate standards, compare ongoing performance against those standards, and take steps to ensure that corrective actions are taken when necessary. Since most aspects of organizations ultimately depend on human behavior, controlling is largely geared toward en­suring that organization members behave in ways that facilitate the reaching of organizational goals. Thus controls both highlight needed behaviors and discourage unwanted behaviors. For instance, during their 2-year training program, management trainees preparing to be­come McDonald's franchisees work their way through a thick guide that spells out various aspects of what to do and not do in properly running a McDonald's outlet.

Significance of Control Process

As you night expect, the controlling function is closely allied to the other three major functions of management: planning, organizing, and leading. It builds most directly on the planning function by pro­viding the means for monitoring and making adjustments in perform­ance so that plans can be realized. Still, controlling also supports the organizing and leading functions by helping ensure that resources are channeled toward organizational objectives. For example, feedback from the control process might signal the need to reorganize, provide more training to workers, clarify communications, increase leadership influence, or take other actions associated with the respective organiz­ing and leading functions. For instance, after detecting a shortage of workers who could assume some supervisory responsibilities, six McDonald's restaurants in Fairfax Virginia, have been experimenting with a training program to teach English to workers who have man­agement potential but speak little English.

As part of the control process, managers set up control systems. A control system is a set of mechanisms that are designed to increase the probability of meeting organizational standards and goals. Control systems can be developed to regulate any area that a manager consid­ers important, such as quantity produced, resources expended, profit margins, quality of products or services, client satisfaction, timeliness of deliveries, or specific activities that are performed in producing a product or service.

For example, McDonald's has a 19-step procedure that workers have rigidly to follow when they are cooking and bagging french fries. Local managers are expected to ensure that employees prepare and bag french fries in accordance with these steps to that the french fries will conform to McDonald's standards. This procedure also is one of the operations that corporate evaluation teams check during their un­announced inspections of outlets. Thus the local managers, the corpo­rate evaluation teams, and the standards embodied in the procedure from part of a control system aimed at achieving consistently good french fries at all McDonald's outlets.