Management and Business Skills in the Built Environment

Geoff Crook, Mike Waterhouse

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138414259
• eBook ISBN: 9781136740244
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The third book in this series is written by a team of interdisciplinary teachers and professionals, led by Mike Waterhouse and Geoff Crook, is aimed at students and professionals in the built environment who wish to develop their management and business skills. In a rapidly changing world where techniques and custom and practice can date soon after discovery, where organisations are constantly changing shape and style to cope with rapid technological, economic, political and social change, there is a need for managers and built environment professionals who know how to learn, who are self-aware enough to know when they don't know, and who have the confidence and personal substance to be able to initiate the required learning activites when necessary.

Part One

Learning how to Manage Yourself

Chapter One

Managers and Professionals

Geoff Crook and Mike Waterhouse

Theme

Professionals in the built environment perform a wide range of management roles. Does this mean that professionals are managers? This chapter explores the meanings of ‘manager’ and ‘professional’, drawing on examples from built environment practice.

Objectives

After reading this chapter you should be able to:

• describe what is meant by professions and professionals in the built environment;
• describe what is meant by management activities, including task and process;
• describe the roles of a manager;
• discuss management functions in an organization;
• discuss the relationships between professionals and managers;
• explore why professionals might need to develop management and business skills.

Introduction

A traditional view of a professional would be one of a specialist with technical expertise. Someone who acts professionally, or exhibits professionalism, is perceived as having a body of technical knowledge with skills and expertise in a particular area. This view of a professional is also likely to include the idea of membership of a professional body to which entry is determined by achieving approved qualifications and is maintained by adhering to certain standards.

Workpiece 1.1

Specialist Knowledge and Expertise

Take a profession in which you have a particular interest and investigate its areas of specialist knowledge and expertise.

Try to identify those areas of technical knowledge and skills which a professional in this field would need to have competence.

(Hint: One of the easiest ways of doing this is to look at the syllabus of a course programme which has been approved by a professional body.)

Professional Values, Standards and Codes of Conduct

Professionals spend many years in both studying for qualifications and gaining experience before being accepted as competent by a professional body. Sociologists have argued that as most professionals will spend much of their working lives with others who have had similar training and experiences, there is a tendency for them to adopt similar values, attitudes and norms.¹ Furthermore there may be an element of self reinforcement in the way individuals choose to follow a particular profession, influenced perhaps by their perception of the values that it holds. For example, it may be that the planning and housing professions have a particular attraction to those who put a high value on such principles as equality and equity.

Professional bodies define standards and set down codes of practice to guide and control the conduct of their members. Professionals can face difficult dilemmas where the wishes of a client, or of an employer, appear to be in conflict with their role as a professional – for example, a manager of a construction project may have to cope with a reduction in the budget for a scheme. The professionals in a project team may find great difficulty in reconciling their professional principles and standards with a request to modify the overall quality of a scheme. Codes of practice and the syllabus of approved educational programmes provide useful insights into the way each profession sees its role in society and its role in relation to that of other built environment professions.

Built Environment Professions

A central feature of current practice in the built environment is the multiplicity of professional bodies and the often complex relationships between them. Four professions which are involved in a wide range of built environment activity are:

• architects
• engineers
• surveyors
• town planners.

These can be broken down into more specialist areas and other professional groups added:

• landscape architects
• urban designers
• building surveyors
• quantity surveyors
• estate managers
• housing managers
• project managers
• highway engineers
• structural engineers
• civil engineers.

Muir and Rance² argue for the improvement of collaborative working between these professional groups. They see the dangers of duplication and demarcation in the proliferation of built environment professions, with their own culture, standards and codes of practice and defining for themselves legitimate fields of activity.

Learning about Management

Many professionals who have recently qualified in built environment disciplines may consider that they have little management knowledge and experience and identify this as a barrier to their future career development. Some perhaps do not yet see themselves as managers because they either do not have the title of ‘manager’, or do not manage other people, or do not have control over budgets. It often comes as a pleasant surprise for such professionals to discover that managers play much wider roles than they had first imagined and that they themselves already have a wide range of management skills, qualities and experience. Having this wider perspective is useful because it provides a basis for assessing strengths and weaknesses in management terms and for thinking through potential steps to personal development. It is also helpful in circumstances where it is necessary to articulate and sell those management skills and experiences, such as in tendering for work or preparing a job application.

What Do We Mean by Management and Managers? Workpiece 1.2

When we think about management, what images come to mind? Who are the managers and what do they do? Why are some people given the title of manager and others not? Don’t read on any further until you have done Workpiece 1.2.

Workpiece 1.2

You as a Manager

Think of circumstances in the past where you have acted as a manager.

Your examples might have included:

• selecting a course of study;
• deciding whether it would be cheaper to maintain your old car or to replace it with another;
• organizing and preparing for a holiday.

If you have been a captain of a sports team you may have been able to find examples fairly quickly. As a captain you might have been involved not only in deciding who will play in the team and what role they are to play, perhaps, but also in planning the strategy and encouraging members to play together as a team.

Look back at your list and see if you could improve it further. This workpiece should serve to illustrate that most people ‘manage’ for some of the time whether this be in the environment of their work, home or social lives. The idea of a manager sitting in an office spending most of the day taking key decisions on who does what and on how resources are to be allocated is a limited view. Much of the management activity comprises the more mundane clearing up of messes and simply getting things done. Management in one sense means coping – coping with the inadequacies of:

• resources
• information
• time
• preparation
• colleagues
• self.

What Do Managers Do?

Managers get things done; they complete tasks themselves or create and maintain an environment where others can work effectively on tasks. In doing so they spend much of their time planning and organizing how things are to be done, setting up ways of working and ensuring that they are effective. This planning, organizing and controlling of the ways things can be done, or of the processes for completing tasks, is one of the hallmarks of management activity.

Within management literature there have been many descriptions of these activities. The main management activities are listed below.³

PLANNING The development of long and short range plans which may require the formulation of goals, objectives, strategies, policies, procedures and standards. It may also involve the perception and analysis of opportunities, problems and alternative courses of action and the design of programmes to achieve selected objectives.

ORGANIZING The development of structures within which individuals and groups can work; assigning and coordinating activities by delegating authority, offering responsibility and requiring accountability.

STAFFING The selection, training and assignment of personnel to specific organizational activities.

DIRECTING The leadership of the organization through communication and motivation of organizational activities.

CONTROLLING Observing and measuring organizational performance and environmental activities and, where necessary, modifying the plans and activities of the organization.

Within an organization, managers may be involved to differing extents in these activities. Figure 1.1 shows an organi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One Learning How to Manage Yourself
• Part Two Learning How to Build and Work in Teams
• Part Three Learning about the Principal Areas of Business Management
• Index