Fictional Character in management

Answer

Fictional Character in Management

Introduction

Whether in movies or real-life, organizations have an end goal of success, productivity, growth, and expansion. Successful organizations and business firms hold their positions at the top as they owe their success to a well-structured leadership in the organization with department heads to reach the organization's objectives. These department heads in most business organizations are managers. For organizations to obtain organizational success, managers take up responsibilities in the planning, organization, leadership, and control of the organization (American Intercontinental University, 2016). Developing a fictional character in a managerial position helps understand the character’s life journey, trials, and opportunities that spearheaded into learning, developing, and honing managerial skills related to real-life management while aiming to better incorporate the managerial skills in organizational planning.

Fictional Character Personality

As the renowned " Wall Street Financial Whisperer," Ramie Kofi Johnson is acknowledged as a shrewd, sharp-witted, ambitious, goal-driven, and competitive chief financial officer at his financial management firm, Everest Financial. Ramie’s story of rising in the ranks of a financial mogul is known all over, with Wall Street as the Wall Street Journal dubbing him “Ramie! Just another kid from Harlem with a billionaire mindset.” Ramie rose to the ranks of owning his financial advisory company in Wall Street through his ambition, resourceful nature, persistence, ferocity, and loyalty to Harlem's business partners and community.

Ramie, an African American, was born in Harlem, New York City, on 10^th August 1981 to parents Nanjwa Lachel and Kendrick Johnson. Nanjwa, Ramie's mother, worked in the FDNY Ladder 30 Engine 59 fire station located 111W 133^rd St in Harlem, while Kendrick, Ramie’s father, worked as a construction worker. Growing up, Ramie witnessed his father succumb to alcoholism and domestic violence, where every night that Kendrick came home, he would start a fight because Nanjwa would bring into the home a steady salary that was more than what he earned. He would refuse to eat, and at one instant, where Ramie was at the dinner table, Ramie, at the age of 10, witnessed his father pick up the plate and throw it towards his mother, cutting up her face the physical scar. Kendrick later proceeded to start kicking Nanjwa, and when Ramie intervened, the father kicked him and his internally bleeding mother to the streets and never let them back into the house. Ramie and the mother lived in a shelter for six months before Nanjwa consolidated her funds and found a decent one-bedroom apartment just close by to her work.

While living in the apartment, Ramie changed schools and attended Grace Church School, a church-funded school with sponsorship programs. Ramie was one of the students at the school learning on the Grace Church's scholarship program, where he and his mother attended Sunday service. The scholarship program was intended for children from underprivileged families who had potential in their studies. While in school, Ramie helped devise simple plans to help the school have budget cuts on unnecessary school programs and divert that capital into more student-focused programs that included building a state-of-the-art computer lab. While at Grace Church School, Ramie was bullied by students in the football team when he joined because of his stunted growth and horn-rimmed glasses. The students would ridicule him, saying he was too short and mal-nutrition to have the energy to stop him from playing such an intense sport, but this did not stop him from enrolling into the team as a wide receiver. Since his mother would always be late from work, Ramie made it a habit to stay back in school after classes and continually practice his runs. He would free up time in the weekend and attend charity events where he would talk with disadvantaged kids in the Harlem community while getting to understand what they were going through. At the end of his high school education, Ramie got a 3.6 GPA  that qualified him for Wharton School, where he majored in Business Analytics for his undergraduate university program.  Soon after graduating from his class, he got a sponsorship to go back for his master's program in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. 

Dell Technologies, who scooped him up for their internship program, flagged Ramie during his undergraduate graduation as a revolutionary asset to their company. In between his transition between the internship and his master's program, Ramie successfully implemented programs that saw Dell Technologies at the time grow its stock by a 30% market share every six months for two straight years. Soon after his maters' program, Ramie joined the workforce again under Dell, but now in a different capacity, as the head of the company's financial department. His ranks rose in the three years of his tenure to the chief financial officer, recording profit margins that kept Dell as the leader in digital transformation. Soon after his three-year employment tenure, Ramie left Dell Technologies and pursued his career as a financial consultant, opening up his own company, Everest Financial. However, this did not come easily to him establishing the company.

Management Trait Development

During his transition into the private sector, Ramie had to develop a team of financial advisors that would help propel his company into the vision that he saw for his company. Ramie has a vision of creating a company that offered financial advice on money management and developed communities and people in society in how they would develop their communities. This came with a deficiency of such people in the workforce. Therefore, Ramie developed a program that taught financial management to all his employees when he started the company.

 As a start-up, Ramie found it difficult to have the time to train and run the company as little as it was at the time. However, Ramie soon started using the education he had gotten from Wharton School and developed training and task delegation programs. Soon the employee turnout started increasing with his company expanding from an office block in Downtown Harlem, close to the home he grew up in, of 30, to an office space in Manhattan, New York, with an employee size of 300 by three years of business. Ramie's clientele increased exponentially from just helping people in his neighborhood develop better financial plans to secure their futures to manage other companies that were starting up to make better financial decisions in their investments towards becoming successful. Ramie’s ambition, vision, philanthropy propelled the company into having offices in a building on Wall Street. 

Growing up in Harlem, a predominantly African American neighborhood, employed people from all races. Ramie designed this as a way to make the company culturally diverse. By making the company culturally diverse, its clientele increased and propelled kit towards the success of being in a building on Wall Street. Everest Financial went on to incorporate diverse companies from all countries to help them with their growth. Ramie's vision for Everest Financial came into view as a community-centered financial company that offered investment advice and invested back into the community for overall social benefit. True to his vision, Ramie invested in his Harlem neighborhood by buying all six apartment buildings on his block and refurbishing them back to the people who lived there rent-free. Ramie also gave back to his church and school by building a state-of-the-art recreational facility with an indoor swimming pool, a community gym, an all-purpose field, and two creative arts studios in barren land that Everest Financial bought off from the government and placed under the ownership of the church.

Management Traits

As a chief financial officer and leader in his company, Ramie possesses leadership qualities and management skills necessary for any manager to manage subordinates better and understand top-level management in any organization. These management skills are time management skills, communication skills, and delegation skills.

Ramie’s time management skills started when he was still in high school. Ramie would dedicate his time through football practice and still hand in his homework assignments. Ramie would take his time to spread his day to factor in football practice, study time, and still time on the weekends to volunteer in church and community programs. Ramie developed time management that he went on to use when he opened up Everest Financial (CCU, 2017). Ramie was able to factor in time to train his employees when the inception of Everest Financial. He dedicated time to help his employees understand the company's objectives and align the employees to the company's goals.

Secondly, Ramie developed communication skills. Ramie’s communication skills are seen from when he sits down with other community members and listens to them attentively to help address issues in the community when he was still a student at Grace Church School (CCU, 2017). Ramie develops his communication skills when he confidently talks to his employees when assigning work and bringing them to the company. While at Dell Technologies, Ramie effectively described tasks to his subordinates at the financial department when issued new responsibilities and tasks. Ramie also actively listened to his subordinates at Dell Technologies and his Everest Financial employees when articulating solutions to complaints raised. By actively listening to each employee's grievance, Ramie understood them and provided solutions in light of the companies' goals and objectives towards success, expansion, and growth.

Lastly, Ramie developed delegation skills as a management trait that propelled his success in expanding Everest Financial. Through delegation, Ramie soon employed workers in the company equipped and knowledgeable with specific tasks towards the growth, expansion, specific customer service. Each employee on Everest Financial's was equipped to the department assigned, and work was allocated in line with the company's main goal (CCU, 2017). As Ramie's company was successful, Ramie, like any other manager, has more time to focus on other new projects that guaranteed the expansion, growth, and success of Everest Financial. Therefore, through delegation, subordinates felt valued and trusted by the manager to affect decisions that would expand Everest Financial properly. Employees who are valued by assigning them to work help the company gain more profit margins and market share.

Personal Management Skill Development

First, time management can be developed individually by establishing skills favorable to promote time management. These skills should be healthy towards creating time for specific tasks; therefore, it is important to find healthy ways of spending time individually. There should be set goals that are both achievable and attainable. These skills should be scheduled routinely. The tasks should have time limits sets to help with better time management (Heinrich, 2017). Also, as tasks may overwhelm someone while attending to them, there should be breaks between tasks to help re-energize oneself after a task. The breaks act as ways to give someone time better to relax before attentively getting onto another. Lastly, through time management skills, one should have a timetable and how to schedule them. Through organizing oneself through a timetable, one can plan, factoring in emergencies and delays between tasks.

Secondly, communication skills are developed through training to develop emotional intelligence and active listening. Baller (2017) states that emotional intelligence is important in the workplace as it helps with employees being able to perceive the emotions of fellow workers, understanding them, and acting accordingly. Learning emotional intelligence would help me be more self-aware to understand others' emotions, have an internal drive to do better, and regulate my emotions to refrain from insulting others while ensuring that one understands other’s emotions. By developing a respectful tone, one can develop better communication on how to address subordinates and top-level management by understanding the hierarchy of the workplace (Heinrich, 2017). Attending training, workshops, and work conferences will foster more knowledge on communication skills and terms appropriate in the workplace while also understanding what terms to avoid that may be offensive.

Lastly, delegation skills, through training and experience, will develop better managerial skills that offer companies and employees better success. Learning from superiors, managers, and top-level managers on strategies to assign and delegate work effectively will allow a smooth running of the business into propagated success(Heinrich, 2017). Therefore, learning to identify which employee is skilled in what field and leaning into their strengths will help ease work and workplace responsibilities towards attaining organizational goals. In the meantime, learning employee weaknesses strengthens managerial skills by training employees to overcome their weaknesses through training or redirecting their weaknesses into strengths.

Disadvantages of Managerial Traits

As much as time management is essential, as a manager, it can be consuming. People are prone to error and lateness as they are human. Therefore, managing people and scheduling them without leeway for lateness may make a manager seem robotic and impartial. Therefore, some managers who stick to specific times for employees to complete tasks or arrive at work fail to be empathetic and considerate https://focusme.com/. Interruptions and distractions are also fundamental issues that may affect time management. Therefore, time management strategies should encompass these issues as disadvantages of time management skills as managerial skills to be developed.

 Delegation may have its disadvantages as well. First, some managers may opt to do the tasks themselves instead of delegating. This breeds distrust amongst employees leading to less motivated employees towards achieving organizational goals (Tanuja, 2016). Also, a lack of confidence in lower-ranked employees will lead managers to do tasks themselves, increasing distrust and decreasing work productivity.

Communication also has its challenges as a managerial skill. Lockely (2016) suggests that inadequate feedback leads to less communication in the workplace. Although there may be complaints raised in the workplace, employees need to develop proper feedback to address each towards organizational success. Also, managers may lack to communicate properly; therefore, instructions may lack, leading to a breakdown in communication and goals are not met (Lockely, 2016). Lastly, new employees may find it hard to understand communication channels leading to improper communication channels that affect the organization's progress towards achieving its goals.

Personal Reflection on Managerial Traits

I have seen these traits utilized effectively in my schooling. For example, while attending lectures, the professor in charge handles our assignments by assigning students to different groups for group work. Each group has a leader who assigns questions for each member to tackle. These questions are assigned a specific time for which each student will hand in the questions completed. There is then a discussion amongst group members on how to present the questions. The discussion encompasses each student in the group to understand the questions and answer them to help each other understand the course material. The group leader hands in the completed assignment on behalf of the group members, delegating one of the members to present the assignment to the class in case of a presentation. The assigned presenter usually is on the merit of good, confident, and articulate communication. Through each group work, students rotate on who is t present the next group project. This allows each student to hone communication skills, learn to talk to others, and answer questions objectively.

Bulleted Resume Traits

• Dedicated, collaborative, team working, Wharton School certified financial manager with appropriate communication and interpersonal skills.
• Passionate, goal-oriented, and keen on assisting and supporting junior financial managers by coaching them on business activities.
• Assist in developing business strategies through organized plans of action with set times to accomplish tasks.
• Capabilities to perceive, retain, and communicate instructions effectively and persuasively.

Relatable Aspect of Fictional Character

I find Ramie relatable as a financial manager. His managerial skills are impressive and speak to all levels of management in ensuring that organizational goals are achieved. Compared to most managers, Ramie stands out to think beyond the organization and incorporate the community in his actions towards expansion. By considering society, Ramie earns respect from the community while ensuring that their investment is protected. Giving back to the community helps others emulate him as a mentor.

Regarding Ramie's endorsement as my manager, I would like it very much to be under his management. His resourcefulness and innovative ideas help grow the community and grow the company into diversification. His communication skills and relatable experiences put him at a humbling point, even though he has accomplished far more than his status. Therefore, working under a manager like Ramie assures my growth, extensive knowledge, and the ability to learn more from him.

Conclusion

Learning management skills is important in understanding employees, their needs and sharpening these same skills towards the growth of an organization. Therefore, picking out role models in the managerial qualities of managers will assure one will have a reference towards what they intend to achieve while underemployment in a workplace.