The Manager

Market Research; something we should all be familiar with since it was a topic under our Marketing module last term. Kevin Lee, 28, Research Manager of Taylor Nelson Sofres (Singapore), a global market research firm, kindly saved some time from his busy schedule to have this interview with me.

He shared his responsibilities with me which I thought could be organized into POLMC: Planning, Organising, Leading, Monitoring, Controlling and Correcting.

Planning, Organising, Leading
- Managing and serving a range of Qualitative market research projects for key clients like Nokia, Samsung, Mcdonalds and Unilever.
- Providing quality services to clients including all aspects of Qualitative research process entailing client briefings, writing proposals and reports, study design and implementation, accompanied interviewing, creative and ideation workshops, analysis, report writing and presenting finding or recommendations to the client

Monitoring, Controlling and Correcting
- Coordinating with other Research teams, Project Services Division to ensure key milestones of projects are always on the right track
- Manage researchers and facilitate their learning and development

Kevin's management style is non-bureaucratic, interactive, flexible and one-to-one. He believes that workers should be more directly-involved in the decision-making process and refuses workers to be closely supervised by many layers of management.

Some of the difficulties that he faces are:
(1) Managing interpersonal relationships (having to balance the role of boss and friend)

(2) Meeting deadlines (having to mobilise everyone to stay on the ball)
"It is hard to have your colleagues meet certain deadlines as some just do not know when they are crossing the line. They persuade and come out with the strangest excuses just to extend a particular deadline. Little do they know that it is because I am not only their manager but their friend as well, which is exactly why I know they would come up with a lie like that."

(3) Answering to higher authorities (taking responsibilities and even the blame)

Kevin then shares that he overcomes these difficulties by:

(1) Demarcating from day one. Lead by example to earn respect; interact with subordinates and be firm with them when you need to. "Successs is acheived when you are able to use your healthy relationships with your subordinates to further organisation goals instead of hinder work."

(2) Closely monitoring and tracking of individuals' work.

(3) Having clear channels of communication and staying accountable always by giving them reviews and updates. Also, taking the blame on behalf of your workers.

In my opinion, a good manager would be someone who motivates, delegates (which would be quite a big step for me as I tend to worry the person whom I'm passing the job to, won't do a good job), learns from his/her own mistakes and at the same time let people make mistakes. Last but not the least, a good manager should be someone who is fair and treats everyone equally.