Stages of the management process - what is worth knowing about them?

The classic management process consists of four stages: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. This model was formulated by Henri Fayol at the beginning of the 20th century, and it remains the starting point for most detailed management methods to this day – from BPM to project and risk management.

The four basic stages of the management process

Regardless of the industry and the size of the company, the management process is based on four recurring stages. These do not have rigid timeframes – in a small company they can last days, in a large corporation months – but each of them must find its place in the company’s operations.

1. Planning – setting goals and how to achieve them. It answers the question: where are we going and what path are we following.
2. Organization – the distribution of resources, tasks, and responsibilities among people and teams so that the plan can be implemented.
3. Conduction – motivating the team, communication and making ongoing decisions that keep the work on the right track.
4. Control – checking whether the actual results correspond to the intended goals, and drawing conclusions from this.

If the results of the control disappoint, the natural step is to return to the earlier stages – to check whether the problem lay in the planning itself, in the organization of work, or in the way the team is led. This is the most common mistake made by managers: looking for the guilty parties instead of checking at which stage of the process something actually failed. The timeframes for the individual stages cannot be imposed in advance – in a small project team planning can take one meeting, in a large organization it takes several weeks of analysis and consultations between departments.

The steps of BPM are: 

Design -> Modeling -> Implementation -> Monitoring -> Optimization -> Design ... 

As you can see, this is not a complete set of steps, because after going to the last stage, you can immediately start designing solutions that came to your mind during the optimization of your previous project. 

The stages of the management process in the BPM approach

Business process management (BPM) is a popular method for organizing a company’s work, often presented as a circular diagram – because a manager’s work rarely ends with one single step through all the stages. The BPM model breaks down management into four steps:

• Design – the choice of method, approach and idea for managing a given area of the company’s activities.
• Drafting – adapting the concept to the realities of the company: checking whether the team has the resources and competencies to implement the given solution.
• Implementation – implementation of the chosen solution in practice.
• Monitoring – observing the effects and collecting data that will be used for optimization.

After the monitoring phase, the manager has two paths to choose from that lead back to design: changing the assumptions or modifying the action. Modifying the action means correcting the chosen direction – for example, changing the type of bonus if the current bonus system does not motivate the team as expected. Changing the assumptions is more radical: abandoning the current approach in favor of a new model, e.g., switching from a merit-based bonus system to a commission-based system, in which the employee decides on the amount of their remuneration based on their performance.

Management stages according to the time horizon

Planning in a company takes place across three different time horizons, and the stages of the management process—although on paper they appear identical—have a different level of detail in each of them.

Mixing time horizons is one of the most common mistakes in management – strategic planning blurred by operational details loses its function, and operational planning overloaded with distant strategic goals becomes impractical in practice. An essential element for building a strategic plan is analyzing the needs of the company and the market environment – without it, the goal five or ten years ahead is just a wish, not a plan.

Work management stages and risk management stages

This same four-step framework – planning, implementation, control, and conclusions – repeats itself in narrower areas of company management as well, although the names of the stages are different:

• Stages of work management: setting goals and performance standards, preparing tools to improve efficiency, measuring the effectiveness of work, reviewing the results.
• Stages of risk management: risk identification, risk measurement, selection of remedial methods, implementation of risk-reducing strategies.
• Stages of change management: diagnosing the need for change, planning its implementation, communicating about it, and implementing it, and establishing a new way of working.

B. Lovato he also makes one more interesting observation. He notices that the management process itself also ... has to be managed. He notes that individual management processes should form a pyramid. It is based on the strategic management process with all its individual stages. It includes, for example, the process of managing the marketing of a product, and it in turn consists of managing the sales process. This knowledge makes it easier to improve your competences in specific areas and modify specific parts of the plan, all the time being related to the overall management project of the company. 

Example: the four stages of management in the implementation of a new service

To ensure that the scheme does not remain a theory, it is worth examining it using a specific example – a service company is introducing a new customer support package.

If after a month the response time has dropped to only 40 hours instead of the 24 expected, a well-managed process does not end in disappointment; it returns to earlier stages: the team may need more training (the leadership stage), it may lack tools (the organizing stage), or the goal was simply too ambitious for the first month (the planning stage). Without breaking the process down into stages, it is difficult to even diagnose where to look for improvement.

Tools supporting the individual stages of management

Each of the four stages can be supported by a different type of tool, although in practice many companies today use a single system that covers the entire process:

• Planning – strategy maps, SWOT analysis, Porter’s five forces analysis, project schedules.
• Organization – organizational schematics, lines of responsibility (who is responsible for what), systems for managing tasks.
• Conduction – regular team meetings, internal communication systems, motivational programs.
• Control – KPI indicators, dashboards with real-time data, periodic reports.

Separating these tools into four separate systems is in itself a problem – the manager loses time switching between applications instead of seeing the entire process in one place. Therefore, more and more companies are moving planning, task organization, and performance control to a single common management cockpit.

The most common mistakes in the management process

• Missing the organization phase. A good plan without a clear division of tasks and responsibilities remains on paper – no one knows who exactly is supposed to implement it.
• Inspection without any previous standards. It is impossible to assess whether the result is good if the success is not defined at the planning stage.
• Treating control as the final stage, rather than the starting point for the next cycle. In BPM and similar models, control always leads back to design – if the company ends up on it, it loses the most valuable part of the process, which is the conclusions.
• Confusing operational planning with strategic planning. Setting a five-year goal using methods appropriate for a weekly plan leads to unrealistic or overly general plans.
• No response to the monitoring signals. Collecting data on the effects does nothing if the company does not implement modifications to its operations or changes to its assumptions based on them.
• Too rare a repetition of the cycle. The management process is not a one-time transition from planning to control – in a well-run company, the cycle repeats regularly, not just once a year during budget planning.

Who in the company is responsible for the individual stages?

In a small company, one person is usually responsible for all four stages – the owner or the team leader. In a larger organization, the roles naturally become divided: the management and directors are primarily responsible for strategic planning, middle-level managers for organizing work and leading teams, and the control or analytical department for the control stage. The problem arises when these roles are blurred: no one is formally responsible for monitoring results, so data are collected, but no one draws conclusions from them, or vice versa – someone monitors the results but has no influence on the earlier stages of planning and organization, so their comments do not lead to any change.

Good practice is assigning each stage to a specific person or role, even if in practice the same people are involved in several stages at the same time. Clarity about who plans, who organizes, who leads the team, and who controls the results reduces the time needed to react when something goes wrong – there is no need to look for the guilty party; it is enough to check who is responsible for the given stage.

Management stages in the various areas of a company's operations

The universal framework for planning, organizing, leading, and controlling repeats itself in all areas of corporate management, but takes on a different form in each of them. Human resources management focuses on the recruitment, implementation, evaluation, and development of employees. Competency management involves identifying gaps in team skills and planning training to fill them. Innovation management requires an additional step—testing ideas on a small scale before they are fully implemented, because the cost of error at the testing stage is much lower than the cost of error after launching the product on the entire market.

In marketing management, the same stages are evident in the development of a marketing strategy: market and competitive analysis corresponds to the planning stage, channel selection and budget – the organizing and conducting of campaigns stage – the leading role stage, and the measurement of results – the control stage. Those who understand this scheme in one area of the company will also find it easier to apply it in other areas – because the logic of the management process is the same everywhere, only its subject changes.

It is similar in sales management: the sales plan is the planning stage, the division of territories and customers among salespeople is the organizing stage, the daily work of the sales team and the support of the manager are the leading stage, and the analysis of results against the goal is the control stage. The differences between the areas concern rather the terminology and tools used than the structure of the process itself, which for a person managing several departments at the same time is practical information: it is not necessary to learn a new way of thinking for each department separately; it is enough to adapt the same scheme to a different context.

How Commplace helps to streamline management processes

At Commplace, we build every strategy – marketing, communication, or sales – according to the same framework: first analysis and goals, then division of tasks and resources, implementation, and continuous measurement of results. If your company needs a structured strategy that forms the foundation for well-planned management, see, how we build a marketing strategy for companies. Tasks, deadlines and control indicators are visible continuously in the cockpit. Commwork®AI – thanks to this, the control phase does not involve guessing, but rather reading the current data.

It is also worth reading: elements of strategic management, strategic management in a company and Strategic areas of management of a modern company.

Sources: the editorial team of the Commplace blog based on Henri Fayol's classic management functions and the commonly used BPM (Business Process Management) model.

See also: Plan your sales process steps step by step