Management involves the challenges of achieving an organization's strategic goals through the activities of planning, organizing, controlling, and leading. A manager's responsibility is to see that the organization successfully achieves all these activities resulting in reaching the organization's goals effectively and efficiently.

The activity of planning is like creating the blueprint for the organization and involves deciding on what strategic niche the organization will fill in the global marketplace. Organizing involves deciding on the organization's decision-making authority levels, allocation of human capital, financial, and asset resources, and the organizational processes to achieve the goals. Controlling involves monitoring outcomes to planned strategies and making necessary adjustments to fit the organizational goals. Leading is an ongoing activity that involves motivating, mentoring, empowering, rewarding and learning from employees.

Management is differentiated by the general, functional, and frontline levels within the organization. The top level, general management, leads the overall organization or multiple divisions (sub-units) of an organization. Functional management specifically leads and oversees one division (such as accounting or research and development unit) of the organization. The lowest-level management, frontline management, leads the daily, specific activities of non-management employees—management that is critical to organizational success.

The journey into management evolves from success at technical skill and task level, thus promotion into management. The addition of success at the people-skills level becomes paramount as the manager now needs to succeed at leading and motivating.

Effective managers require the ability to successfully play necessary roles: Interpersonal roles (figurehead, leader, and liaison), Informational roles (monitor, disseminator, and spokesperson), and Decisional roles (negotiator, resource allocator, disturbance handler, and entrepreneur).

A manager must also have conceptual, technical, and human skill competencies. Successful and effective management must possess some of all of these competencies.

Organizations can succeed through compelling and inspiring organizational beliefs and shared values driven by employees and lead by managers. Managers' roles are diverse and challenging requiring motivation, creativity, intelligence, and insight.