Supervisor's Survival Kit: Your First Step into Management, Ninth Edition

MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES

All supervisory planning should start with top management objectives (MO or TQM). They are the broad goals of the company that you sometimes find stated in employee handbooks or in annual reports to stockholders. Management objectives, or goals, can be expressed in terms of service standards, sales volume, profit pictures, or similar criteria and will change from time to time. Sometimes the supervisor may have a small voice in forming these broad objectives, but most of the time the supervisor must take responsibility for goals handed down from higher management and must then relate the operation of the department to the company goals. In so doing, the supervisor should ask these questions:

1. What are the current objectives ...