For any business or organisation to be successful, there has to be people with the necessary skills to be able to motivate others to help their organisation meet their goals. While some people are natural leaders, leadership skills can be obtained by taking business management courses. Here are some of the essential skills that every management candidate should learn to advance their career and help their organisation be successful.
Becoming an Effective Manager
While the title may identify a manager in a business organisation, that doesn’t always indicate their ability to actually manage people. A good manager possesses the skills necessary to plan, organise and coordinate personnel to get a job done. A leader is someone who can inspire and motivate personnel to help a company achieve its goals. The best managers in an organisation will not only assume the responsibilities of their position, but they will be effective leaders as well.
Essential Management Skills
The skills an effective manager needs to possess can be broken down into two categories: hard skills and soft skills.
What are Hard Skills?
Most employers want their management personnel to have both hard skills and soft skills so they are well-rounded. Hard skills consist of specific abilities to get a job done effectively. For a business manager, the hard skills they should have include:
- Accounting;
- Business Development;
- Business Planning;
- Scheduling;
- Sales Management;
- Operations Management; and
These are some of the hard skills that employers want their management personnel to possess to be effective in their jobs. These are skills that can easily be learned in business classes or business management courses.
What Are Soft Skills?
Many of the soft skills that people possess are intuitive because they have to do with interacting with people. These soft skills, which are often referred to as people skills, can be taught, but it also takes a certain amount of natural ability to successfully motivate or inspire people that you are leading in a company. Still, by taking business courses or reading motivational books, these skills can be acquired by anyone wanting to learn them. Some of the soft skills an effective business manager should have include:
- Team Building;
- Goal Setting;
- Time Management;
- Communication;
- Flexibility; and
- Work Ethic.
These are essential skills that managers should possess to help their employers succeed.
Team Building
An effective leader will have the ability to select personnel either from the pool of employees they already have or by hiring people who can work together successfully to build a strong team. The manager has to identify the strengths of each member of his or her team and be able to have them apply those strengths to help make the team better, instead of using them for their own individual needs.
Along with inspiring a group of individuals to work as a team, an effective manager will also listen to their team’s ideas and suggestions for changing work processes for the better or to resolve problems. They will then take the best ideas and find a way to apply them to make their team, and their company, more efficient and stronger.
Goal Setting
In order to know where you are going on a trip, you usually need a map to get to your destination. In the same way, goals can help a business, or a team within a business, know where they are headed. An effective manager can demonstrate where their department or team needs to be by setting goals for them to achieve. Effective goals need to be observable and measurable so personnel can see how they are doing as they help their company achieve its vision.
Time Management
It seems there is never enough time in a day to get everything done. However, an effective manager knows how to prioritise and delegate tasks so that everything that needs to be done gets finished on time. Using their time effectively will help managers get more done each day and by delegating tasks, they will help others to develop new skills to advance their own careers.
Communication
Effective communication skills are probably the most important soft skills that a manager can possess. While there is a hard skill element to being effective at written communications, which can be learned in a classroom, in order to effectively speak to others to inspire and motivate them requires soft skills that are usually honed by experience.
Managers need to be able to communicate with a wide variety of people from every walk of life. This requires the ability to cross cultural boundaries to communicate with personnel on their team or with colleagues in another country. Managers also have to communicate with their superiors, as well as their peers, to help find solutions to business problems.
Flexibility
The old saying goes that the only constant thing in life is change. Businesses face changes all the time in regulations, by introducing new products and bringing new clients on board. Effective managers need to know how to cope with change by expecting it and planning for changes. Being flexible in the light of change will allow them to react quickly and help minimise any disruptions that changes can sometimes bring about.
Work Ethic
To be an effective leader, a manager must be able to work as hard as their employees. By demonstrating the ability and willingness to take on any task that they delegate to others, they can inspire and motivate their team to work just as diligently to help their company succeed. In doing so, they will also help themselves succeed.
While technical skills may be important for being a managerial candidate, it is the soft skills that help companies succeed. People skills are used to inspire and motivate others to work hard and help their companies be more successful. These people skills are teachable and many institutions have them in the curriculum of their business management training courses. If you want to become an effective leader, as well as a manager, seek out the courses that will teach you soft skills.
