Management Skills and How it Influences Your Career
Contemporary employment outlook requires increasingly soft skills or hard skills. These are necessary to aspire to managerial or directive positions and usually cover leadership, team management, initiative, and a global perspective. But that is not enough to be the ideal candidate for a managerial position; other tools are necessary.
What are the managerial skills?
They are all those skills necessary to manage with affinity, direct with precision, and lead an organization successfully. Every administrator, manager, or executive requires these skills to lead their work team to success. For many people, acquiring these skills is the linchpin in their career growth toward better positions.
Why is it important to have managerial skills?
In the 21st century, we face a new economic and social paradigm. This globalized environment demands closeness, with large doses of uncertainty, with an increasingly informed consumer, who wants to interact with the company, with great environmental and social challenges and with contexts as changing as, often, turbulent. A situation in which to achieve a competitive advantage in the market, we have to know how to manufacture the product and know and meet the client (internal or external), shareholders, society, the environment, etc. And these are challenges that require a lot of managerial, social, and personal intelligence in companies.
Techniques to improve managerial skills
In short, we are talking about improving the following list of skills. It is not a closed or exhaustive list, but it does include the main current managerial skills:
- Leadership and communication skills: Without fluent communication, it is impossible to maintain positive work climates; it is more difficult to influence customer decisions, negotiate with interlocutors, or convey timely information at the right time. A fluid communication, verbal and non-verbal, lubricates the structures of organizations and allows efficient operation. Active listening, empathizing with the interlocutor, being assertive, and showing expressiveness and interest in a sincere and balanced way are basic tips for this skill.
Leadership is the ability to influence people in their behavior and direct them towards the common goal. While it is true that many people are born with almost innate leadership skills, this much-needed skill can also be practiced in workgroups. Working on aspects such as working as a team, delegating, giving feedback, knowing how to motivate, determining objectives, goals, and priorities, being flexible, or transmitting confidence to our collaborators, are key points to improve our leadership. Leadership skills are also worked on with a good dose of self-confidence and self-knowledge. The manager must know their qualities, enhance the good ones, and work on those less positive aspects.
- The ability to make decisions and solve problems: Linked to the ability to collect relevant information, a critical and analytical spirit, and speed and agility to relate data to solutions.
- Flexibility: understood not only as of the ability to adapt to different situations – not always positive – but also related to an orientation towards change and negotiation. Also, linking with this ability, we would talk about creativity and the capacity for innovation. That social skill enables us to generate new ideas that add value and do things differently to do them better. Creativity and innovation can be worked with a multitude of techniques and dynamics (mind maps, brainstorming, etc.), but some basic tips to promote this skill have more to do with: clearing our mind of limiting beliefs, learning to question what, the how and why of our activities, reading, knowing and exchanging experiences and, among others, having fun and relaxing. Stress is a great creativity killer!
- Resilience: This term tells us about the human capacity to face adversities and not only overcome them but also come out stronger. A resilient organization faces uncertainty, crises, critical situations, and not only overcomes them but also manages to become positive as a result of these events. Resilience as a managerial ability that we must have in organizations is linked to tenacity, effort, optimism, and improvement.
- The ability to work with enthusiasm and passion: The magic ingredients of management skills. The illusion would be the hope of achieving a desired and attractive goal—something closely linked to motivation and commitment to transposing the concept to the business world. Passion is an intense feeling that guides our will towards someone or something. Again, an attitude is linked to motivation. Passion is the engine of perseverance and results in orientation. How to work on these items is complex, but that we can associate with optimism.
Six managerial skills that a good business leader must possess
1. Work capacity and organization
It is useless to transmit corporate values to the work team if we, as managers, do not lead by example. For this reason, and given that our tasks and responsibilities are usually above that of any other employee of the company, it is necessary that we, as leaders, have a certain capacity for work and organization.
To do this, the leader has to establish communication channels and promote productivity tools among employees. Until recently, the possibilities were very limited, but the appearance of new mobile applications has made the range of options ever greater.
2. Communicative ability and knowing how to listen
There are many types of bosses in companies, but a good leader has to be eloquent and make himself understood since good communication skills develop other skills. Most charismatic leaders differ from the rest by their excellent public speaking.
But as important or more than knowing how to speak is knowing how to listen and attend to employees’ needs. Also, paying attention, being concise, or having good control over non-verbal language are some of the keys to improving our communication skills.
3. Empathy
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes from a psychological point of view. And a good leader has to have this important skill. Thanks to this, you will be able to adapt your speech according to the person with whom you are speaking at all times, without hurting sensibilities and trying to motivate as much as possible.
If we can put ourselves in the other’s place, it will be easier to understand the situation of all people and develop good communication oriented to each employee.
4. Be engaged
A good leader must be committed to his team, through thick and thin. But he is also committed to the company, which he does not abandon at any time, to suppliers and customers, to offer a better product or service and, of course, to himself always to continue improving.
This important skill is amplified when the work team itself is committed to achieving better results every day.
5. Resilience
Although all leaders have to be able to solve problems, not all tasks can be completed successfully. For example, if we are late for a delivery of a part of a project and cannot speed up the process, we must at least manage the consequences that may entail.
This is precisely what resilience means: the ability to know how to recover from adverse situations and recover quickly from them. The classic falling and getting back up, but applied to the business environment.
6. Encourage motivation
A motivated team is a guarantee of success, since performance and work productivity increases. For this reason, emotional salary is becoming more and more fashionable, a concept associated with employee compensation that includes non-financial issues, which help to retain and attract talent within the company.
A leader who does not promote work motivation can never be a good leader. It is an element important enough so that the rest of the work team members follow our example.