When I had first started the grade 12 business management course, I thought it was simply going to be about how to manage a business: to make sure you are always making profit and never losing, to understand certain factors that impact the economy, and it would include understanding how money is made. With the first unit being about factors that affect the economy and supply & demand laws, it only confirmed my feelings of the course.
The second section we were introduced to was about the levels of management and corporate social responsibility. We learned about top, middle, and first levels of management as well as frontline works through the Bureaucratic Pyramid. Additionally, we analyzed certain businesses, their processes, and manufactured products from an ethical perspective. This unit allowed me to be critical of certain practices widely done in the business world but are harmful environmentally and/or socially.
Time passed and the class was into the planning unit. I found this to be remarkably interesting with the unique types of planning business must be prepared with at all levels of management. With operational, tactical, and strategic planning, I got a thorough understanding of how these plans work and their role in the success of a business. I also learned about the tools available to assist planning such as forecasting, benchmarking, and using SMART as a format for goal setting.
Soon, the class was learning about human resources (HR) management. We touched upon the hiring process and the role of HR managers in the business. All the way till this moment, everything I was learning in this class could somewhat be connected to my initial perception of business management at the start of the course.
Our last unit of business was surrounding basic elements of life such as mental, emotional, and physical processes and its role in business management, specifically business leadership. Concepts such as emotional intelligence, personality through the Big 5 and Myers-Briggs model, and even very fundamental concepts such as motivation and stress. In this unit, our class was told to make a gratitude log in which we record 3 things we feel grateful for and one positive event every day for 2 weeks; it wasn’t until this one assignment that made me significantly change my outlook on business management. Aside from the fact that doing this log opened my eyes to everything I was taking for granted, it truly taught me that as much as leadership in business management may sound technical and all about making money, it is more about managing and training one’s inner self that will bring true success; this includes building on emotional stability, understanding the component of stress in the workplace, always being optimistic, and giving others the benefit of the doubt.
It made me conclude that business leadership starts from oneself. If the self is grateful, understands the impact of his/her actions, firm in values, lives a healthy lifestyle, emotionally intelligent, etc., the team this person leads will gain the same characteristics, resulting in the business having high corporate social responsibility, strong connections between different departments of the business, higher levels of productivity, creativity, and most importantly, higher profit margins.
