Functional Management Skills: 5 Functional Manager Tasks

Functional management is a business management system reliant on individual managers overseeing specific departments within a company. A functional organization breaks down each area of its business into departments more adequately run by specific types of managers.

This sort of specialization allows functional managers to more distinctly cater to the needs of their team, potentially delegating authority to other line managers while also reporting to senior managers with a greater scope of influence over the entire organization. In short, functional managers oversee the more specific functions of a unique area within a business.

Functional managers oversee and assist their departments in meeting the broader goals of their umbrella organizations. As such, you’ll need these three qualities to succeed to the best of your ability in functional management:

• Effective communication skills: The functional management process relies on managers being able to communicate as effectively with their own supervisors as with each individual member of their own departments. Similarly, they might need to also communicate needs or ask questions about deliverables for other teams. Functional managers need to communicate well to set the rest of their own team, as well as their parent organization, up for success.
• Organizational capability: Functional managers need to excel in strategic planning to keep their functional area of the company moving along optimally. They need to implement solid time management and scheduling practices for themselves and the rest of their team when it comes to delivering on all their tasks. Functional managers often work alongside dedicated project managers whose specialty is this sort of organization.
• Leadership ability: Although they might report as employees to the organizational structure’s top management, functional managers still need to act as leaders to their own teams. This means both empowering their employees for decision-making and problem-solving of their own, as well as stepping in to give the final say when necessary, too.

Functional managers oversee entire departments, leaving them with plenty of tasks to accomplish. Here are five of the most essential:

1. 1. Coordinating team performance: Functional managers often work alongside dedicated project management teams to ensure their team is able to hand over all necessary deliverables in a given timeframe. As their name suggests, they primarily work to ensure their employees serve their dedicated function in the overall organizational structure. This means both assisting their own team members and serving as the main liaison between them and other departments.
2. 2. Providing resources to team members: With management authority comes responsibility for your own team’s success. Functional managers must remain cognizant of needs within their own silo or sphere of influence. This means utilizing effective resource management techniques to ensure team members have everything they need for their own success. When managers empower their own team to succeed, they help the overall organization do so as well.
3. 3. Reducing inefficiencies: Functional managers look at business objectives and compare them against their own team’s performance, looking for ways to reduce all inefficiencies and maximize productivity. For example, suppose someone is the functional manager of a company’s IT department. In this scenario, they would constantly be on the lookout for ways to improve both the information systems the company uses as well as the performance of the team maintaining and running those systems.
4. 4. Reporting to senior managers: Each organization’s chain of command is different, but functional managers often reside at the middle of a company’s hierarchy. For example, a functional manager for a company’s creative department might oversee line managers for the copy and design teams specifically, while also reporting themselves to the company’s overall strategic manager for input on business goals or the human resources manager for staffing concerns. As they meet with senior management, they advocate for their own team while also finding out what the organization requires of them, too.
5. 5. Spearheading initiatives: Functional managers take input from the project team when it comes to deadlines and then do their best to help implement these scheduling priorities in real time with their own stakeholders. These managers know how to take initiatives and bring them from ideation to completion. Along the way, they might help fill in the gaps for their team members, ask for more information from higher-ups, and consider ways to make internal processes more efficient for next time.

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