Skill Management
Understanding and displaying good management skills
We often discuss management skills in the abstract, but what are they, really? In the broadest sense, management skills are nearly anything that enables you to manage others effectively. This could include communication skills, interpersonal skills, general leadership skills and more. While some abilities will vary based on your industry, there are several key skills that will help you become a successful manager in nearly any work environment. Let’s explore some of them.
- Building good working relationships with people at all levels.
- Prioritizing tasks effectively for yourself and your team.
- Considering many factors in decision-making.
- Knowing the key principles of good communication.
- Understanding the needs of different stakeholders and communicating with them appropriately.
- Bringing people together to solve problems.
- Developing new ideas to solve customers' problems.
- Cultivating relationships with customers.
- Building trust within your team.
- Using emotional intelligence.
- Using emotional intelligence.
Making skill management succeed
Success in skill management cannot just be top down. It requires real conversations between people. You have to make space for people to talk about their jobs, roles and skills and those conversations have to have consequences. They need to lead to changes in job and role descriptions and the provision of learning resources.
Individuals need to be motivated to re-skill and upskill. They need to understand what opportunities open up by maintaining a skill profile and investing in their own learning and development. We believe hope is the best motivation for upgrading skills. This manifests differently across Individuals with different career or personal aspirations. What skills people have, how to develop target skills and how to put skills to work for each other should all become part of day-to-day conversations.
Teams are an important part of how we work. The roles we play on teams are as important to our career as our formal job titles. Understanding the skills on teams and how they connect people is an important part of skill management. Think of your career as a braid of all of the different roles you play, many of which are on teams.
The driver for an organization is aligns to the business model. Sometimes this means driving more existing business (larger accounts, more projects), other times this means navigating a shifting business model and making sure staff reskill and upskill in alignment to that. And often, this is related to the competition for talent.
