FPT Báo cáo môn Quản lý (Introduction to Management)

INTRODUCTION TO MANAGEMENT
MGT101
Student:
Roll number:
Class:

INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT
Interview a manager (with at least 3 staff) to analyze 17 roles of a manager.

INTRODUCTION
I.

The company
Name: Oriflame
Type: Multi level marketing
Field of business: Cosmetics, personal care products
Address: Offices in many cities: Ho Chi Minh, Ha Noi, Can Tho,…
Branches in Ha Noi:
Main office: 85 Hong Ha, Hoan Kiem, Ha Noi
Others: Lang, Nguyen Chi Thanh, Minh Khai…
Brief history of company:
Oriflame is a cosmetics group, founded in 1967 in Sweden by the brothers
Jonas af Jochnick and Robert af Jochnick. The company sells skin care, cosmetics
products and other related products through an independent sales force of over 3
million people. Nowadays, Oriflame has 4600 staff, 650 branches of products and
works in over 60 countries.
Oriflame appears in Vietnam for the first time in 2003 in Ho Chi Minh City.
Now, oriflame has 4 main branches: Ho Chi Minh, Ha Noi, Can Tho and Da
Nang. After 7 years working in Vietnam, ORIFLAME now has more than 45000
staff.

II.

The interviewee
Name:
Address:
Position: Manager (First level manager)
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Number of staff: About 40
Areas of activity:
Brief biography:
He entered ORIFLAME on June 30 th, 2011. Now he earns about nearly 1
million VND per month, however, this number is not permanent. Managing a
group with more than 40 members makes him more confident, active and this
work also gives him experience in communication, business and more friends.
One small thing he feels uncomfortable is this work takes him much time to
travelling. That brings him some small problems to his study.

THE SEVENTEEN MANAGERIAL ROLES
I.

PLANNING
I must confirm that he’s NOT a strategic planner, but he’s an operational planner.
He only receives plans from higher level manager such a Senior manager
monthly. And after that, he gives out operational plans for his own system weekly.
Although his group has more than 40 members, he only works directly with about
5 people – small group leaders in his system (he calls them F1 or downline). And
then, these leaders will notice weekly operation to all members. We can see that
he is a manager in FIRST LEVEL. It means that he’s a manager, and he also

directly work himself.

II.

ORGANIZING & STAFFING
The clearest roles he presents are organizer and staffing coordinator. With
position as a group’s leader, he’s responsible for giving direction, training
members in groups. In detail, his work is training members to know from
products of company to the way of selling and recruiting. Besides, he often takes
downlines to workshops, introduces them to higher manager and spreads out new
rules or policies of company. And then, more important, he always explains
exactly rules to all members, and assigns and instructs small groups what to do for
each month as well as sets goals for them. The goals may be simple such as
becoming manager, getting promotion or higher income. In his work, he doesn’t
need to be liaison or resource allocator. He rarely has to delegate task to
individuals – when that person doesn’t understand exactly how to work.

III.

LEADING
For leading roles, the first thing I see is his roles as a motivator and coach. As I
mentioned in part II, his jobs include training members about product and skills in
marketing as well as recruiting. Moreover, he’s good at motivating others. He
always finds good performance of down line to have awards or recommends them
to up line (higher manager). When being asked about communication and
relationship among members of his groups, he told me about birthday party that
his group held for members, or small meeting for group, some small gifts such as
books to excellent members. So we can find he also does well the roles as team

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builder. In addition, he’s also directs team’s work, shows loyalty to higher
manager and his company, being passionate with his work in ORIFLAME.
Secondly, he’s exactly an excellent spokenperson and negotiator. He always
represents report of group’s work to up line monthly. Futhermore, in the multi
level company, asking up line about supporting or sharing experience is an
essential part of his work. I know some of his down line and all of them are
satisfied with his performance in supporting, encouraging and helping them
connect to their senior.
IV.

CONTROLING
Not a very important part but he is a monitor who oversees how the members
work or amount of goods they sell month by month. In the multi level company,
this role seems unnecessary because all member can do business independently.
However, like any other system, there always have conflicts. In his group, the
conflict is usually about what kinds of goods or how much to store goods before
selling, and sometime personal conflict among members. In these situations the
role of a disturbance handler is showed well when giving direction and solving
conflicts in group. A meeting is where he often lets every member talk, discuss
and solve personal conflict.

V.

CONCLUSION
That are some things he shared about his management job. Each manager has
different ways to practice the seventeen roles that are suitable for context in their
jobs. For Mr.Thanh, I can see he has good skills of organizer, staffing
coordinator, motivator, team builder & player. Negotiator and disturbance

handler are other roles he’s good, too. However, resource allocator or figure
head, spoken person, task delegator, monitor, liaison are not really important
when any member works independenlly. He also shares that training new
member and solve technical problem are much difficult to him. And, of course,
in his position, he is NOT the entrepreneur, needn’t to give out strategic plans,
just has to carry out operational plans.

SUMMARY
Management is a difficult job. It requires many skills in management and
leadership. To do this work well, any manager should have good understanding of
the seventeen roles, each manager applies them in other suitable way to get best
performance.

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