Editor’s note: James Manktelow is founder and CEO of MindTools.com. Julian Birkinshaw is professor of strategy and entrepreneurship, deputy dean for programs and academic director of the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School. They are coauthors of Mind Tools for Managers: 100 Ways to Be a Better Boss.
Being a manager is an incredibly tough job. Just consider the vast array of knowledge and skills it takes to deal with a variety of people, tasks and the needs of your particular company. In fact, ideally, managers should have between 90 and 120 individual skills. That’s a lot. But thankfully you don’t have to tackle them all at once.
You develop these skills over the course of your career. With each new skill you master, you’ll notice your confidence and ability levels rising. But it’s a good idea to start with the ones that give you a good, solid foundation to build on.
We surveyed 15,242 managers and professionals worldwide and wrote our book Mind Tools for Managers around our research. (See the details of this research here. Registration required.) The book offers tips and strategies to help you master each of the 100 skills it features and also directs the reader to helpful outside resources.
Stumped on where to begin? We suggest working on the most crucial skills first – the ones managers around the world value and recommend. To get you started, here are the highest ranked skills from the survey, presented in descending order.
10. Developing emotional intelligence.
Recommended by 72.1 percent of managers surveyed.
All managers need emotional intelligence to be effective. This means having the self-awareness, self-control, motivation, empathy and social skills needed to behave in a mature, wise and empathetic way with the people around you. Emotionally intelligent managers are a joy to work with, which is why they attract and retain the best people.
9. Building trust within your team.
Recommended by 73.3 percent of managers surveyed.
When people don’t trust one another in a team, they waste a huge amount of time politicking and covering their own backs. By contrast, people in trusting teams work efficiently and they can deliver wonderful results. To build trust, you need to lead by example, communicate honestly and openly, get to know individuals as people, avoid blame and discourage behaviors that breach trust.
8. Understanding and developing customer relationships.
Recommended by 73.6 percent of managers surveyed.
The way you do this depends on whether you serve consumer or business markets. When you’re dealing with consumers, you’ll get great insight into customer groups by segmenting your market and by developing customer personas representing these different segments. You can then use approaches like customer experience mapping to give them an exceptional experience of using your organization.
This is where sales skills are important. And while selling is a profession in its own right, non-salespeople can also master these skills and use them to improve customer relationships.
7. Developing new ideas through an empathetic understanding of customers’ problems.
Recommended by 74.4 percent of managers surveyed.
A vast number of products and services now sell based on customer ratings and reviews. To get top reviews, it’s not enough to provide something that does the job adequately. You need to provide something that meets the needs of customers exceptionally well. Approaches like design thinking and ethnographic research can help you develop highly satisfying products, and customer experience mapping can help you develop a great customer journey.
6. Bringing people together to solve problems.
Recommended by 75 percent of managers surveyed.
It’s often tempting to try to solve problems on your own. But there are many reasons why it pays to bring together a team of experienced people. Brainstorming is popular for this but it also pays to understand structured problem-solving processes, know how to facilitate meetings well and manage the sometimes weird group dynamics that can undermine a good team process.
5. Understanding the needs of different stakeholders and communicating with them appropriately.
Recommended by 75.8 percent of managers surveyed.
As you run bigger projects, it becomes increasingly important to manage the many different groups of people who can support or undermine the work you do. This is where it’s important to develop good stakeholder analysis and stakeholder management skills. These really matter.
4. Understanding the key principles of good communication.
Recommended by 77.7 percent of managers surveyed.
Management is about getting things done by working with people. You can do this only if you communicate effectively. This is where the seven Cs of communication – clear, concise, concrete, correct, coherent, complete and courteous – can help you get your message through more clearly.
3. Considering factors such as opportunities, risks, reactions and ethics in decision-making.
Recommended by 77.8 percent of managers surveyed.
We’ve all seen how bad decisions can be when they’re rushed, or when financial criteria are the only ones that are used. This is why it pays to use a formal, structured process to think a problem through thoroughly, including analyzing risk and exploring ethical considerations. The ORAPAPA framework – opportunities, risks, alternatives and improvements, past experience, analysis, people and alignment and ethics – is a good example.
2. Prioritizing tasks effectively for yourself and your team.
Recommended by 79.5 percent of managers surveyed.
All of us have a huge number of things that we want to do or have to do. The demands can often seem overwhelming, to us and the members of our team. This is why prioritization is the second most important management skill, as ranked by the participants in our survey. There’s a particularly useful approach to this called the action priority matrix, and every manager needs to know about it!
1. Building good working relationships with people at all levels.
Recommended by 79.9 percent of managers surveyed.
The most important management skill, as ranked by our 15,242 managers worldwide, is the ability to build good relationships with people at all levels. For example, there’s a particularly elegant approach to relationship-building, which focuses on creating high-quality connections, made up of respectful engagement, task enablement and trust-building.
Always more to learn
Even if you already feel like you have some of these skills, know that there is always more to learn, and the results will show in your improved leadership. Practice them until they become effortless, and, in time, not only will you perform better, you’ll get better results from your team and stand out as a talented leader within your organization.