Essential Management Skills
What skills managers need to be effective
The skills of managers are similar to those of investors but with important differences.
To understand what skills are essential for success in management, it helps to compare it to investment. Firstly, managers and investors have the same goal: to achieve the best return on the investment of certain resources. The investor focuses on money while the manager has a wide range of resources to invest. A more important difference between the two is that most investors are passive while management is an active force. To be effective, managers need to drive things along, not to the point of intimidating people but certainly enough to energize them into putting forth extra effort when required.
Another key difference between investment and management is that the former is typically something one person does while management is normally a group function. Of course, you can manage yourself and your own personal affairs on your own, but management is a group activity in organizations.
Skill sets common to managers and investors
One of the skills or attitudes shared by investors and managers is a proactive searching for opportunities and risks so that resources can be shifted promptly to take better advantage of opportunities and avoid risks. A second shared skill set is being sufficiently organized and disciplined to be constantly reviewing how resources are invested. For example, good managers will be continuously questioning whether the tasks facing them should be done by someone other than them and what person is best placed to do them. They regularly adjust their priorities, asking themselves what is the best use of their time and talent at the moment. They ask how they can add most value right now to decide how to invest their time. Similarly, they regularly help their team members adjust their priorities.
Skill sets not shared by managers and investors
Clearly, investors only need good knowledge of money and other business related topics while managers also need strong people skills. But what’s not so obvious flows from the fact that management is a group activity. There has been a lot of writing in recent years about self-managing teams, suggesting that such teams don’t need anyone to manage them at all. Regardless of whether we draw this extreme conclusion, the interesting point is that certainly the function of management can be shared across a team. This means that people in management roles don’t necessarily need to have all the critical management skills themselves. The manager might have the organizational skills and be good at motivating people to work harder, for example, but others may have better commercial skills and be better at fostering team work. So, when deciding what management skills to develop, managers need to think again like investors and ask themselves whether someone else in the team already has these skills.
