2.1 Essential Skills for Today's Manager

Welcome back to the Career Readiness Series hosted by UCI. This is the Fundamentals of Management module number 2. I really do mean welcome back. I hope that you listened to module number 1. I am Dave Nagy. In this module, I would like to explore three new themes, you know, that are part of this body of knowledge. First, I’d like to look at what are the essential success skills for a new manager, a new supervisor to be successful in frontline, first level type of manager. Secondly, I would like to explore what are the five functions of management. We briefly talked about them in module one. And lastly, I would like to explore with you the changing business operating philosophy. What was it like before and where are we now? So first off, I would like to share with you a survey that was, that was published in a book called The 21st Century Supervisor by Brad Humphrey and Jeff Stokes. It was published a while ago, back in 2000, in fact. But I think you will see that the skills are still relevant today. So, in this book, Humphrey and Stokes published a survey, the survey results, of 500 hiring managers. People that professionally and full-time hire people, trying to get it right the first time, and having those people stick right hires. So these ni, 500 hiring managers were asked to list and rank, what are the most essential skills for a new manager to be successful. So I’m going to share with you the list. Not in the, the the sequence order as to how they rank them. But the nine skills that were the top nine as 500 hiring managers responded. Business as, analysis skills. The ability to analysis your business as compared to competition. Writing skills, emails, reports, projects presentations. Continuous improvement skills, the ability to analyze your department and to, you know, and to figure out how can we make improvements. Computer skills, not just how to turn one on and off. But how to use the variety of different applications. Of course, they’re significantly different today than they were back in 2000. Team skills, the ability to build and motivate, and develop a team. Communication skills, being able to talk to people, communicate, get your message across. Coaching skills, the ability to develop people for the future. Resource management, figuring out what do you need in your department, additional tools, additional people, additional budget, in order to make your department better. And project management skills, the ability to keep track of what your department is responsible for and to deliver it. So I would invite you to pause this recording and I would like for you to rank those nine skills in order of priority. Which one of those do you think was the highest ranked skill as those 500 hiring managers responded? So rank them one through nine. Nine being the lowest priority of the top nine. So I hope that you did, in fact, pause the video and rank them. So, let’s see how your ranking compared. So, the hiring managers, these 500 hiring managers says the most essential required success skill is communication skills. 83% of those 500 hiring managers says this is number one. Coaching skills, the ability to grow people, develop them for future assignments. Team skills, as we move into a different work environment, the ability to build and coach, and to develop and to take teams to championship. Project management skills, the ability to keep track of what your work, what your is, deliver it, and on, get it there on time. Computer skills, all kinds of different applications, presentation skills, database management skills. Continuous improvement skills being the sixth highest ranked. 73% of those 500 managers said computer continuous improvement skills being very important. Seven, writing skills. You have to be able to communicate, not only verbally, but with written expertise. Eight, business analysis skills, and number nine, resource management skills. In my years of experience, business analysis and resource management generally are not part of a first level manager’s responsibilities. These are generally reserved to a higher level. Most new managers don’t have the, they aren’t involved in competition analysis or market analysis generally at a higher level. And most new managers just don’t have the ability to just hire new people or say I need another, you know, $100,000 to make things work or to buy a new machine that generally is reserved for a hire manager. So how did you compare? If you were in sync with these nine essential skills, then you would see that people skills, interpersonal skills, are one, two, and three. People skills, not technical skills. Those were number two. But computer skills and continuous improvement skills, they bring business analysis skills in there. And then administrative skills, project management, writing skills, and resource management skills. People skills, the most essential success skill for a new manager to be successful.