Management Skills

MANAGERIAL SKILLS:
Managerial skill is to be understood as the ability to perform managerial tasks effectively with readiness and dexterity. Skills require knowledge and ability to apply that knowledge competently and efficiently has to be acquired by practice. A skilled person is one who has done the job effectively number of times and in the process of doing so, improved his efficiency at the job.
Various authors identified certain tasks of management discipline. Some authors have identified a list of managerial skills many of them being the tasks of management..
Research by Robert L. Katz ,found that managers needed three essential skills. These are technical skills, human skills and conceptual skills.
Technical skills
For a manager managing any activity, the actual work involved in the activity is technical skill. It includes knowledge of and proficiency in a certain specialized field, such as engineering, computers, financial and managerial accounting, or manufacturing. These skills are more important at lower levels of management since these managers are dealing directly with employees doing the organization's work. .
Contributing to corporate mission/departmental objectives, customer focus, multitasking; working at multiple tasks at parallel, negotiating skills, project management, reviewing operations and implementing improvements, setting and maintaining performance standards internally and externally, setting priorities for attention and activity, time management.
Human skills
Ability to transform ideas into words and actions, credibility among colleagues, peers, and subordinates, listening and asking questions, presentation skills and spoken format, presentation skills; written and graphic formats
To communicate with other persons in the department or organizations and the ability to understand their desires and persuade them to ones point of view are human skills.
It involves the ability to work well with other people both individually and in a group. Because managers deal directly with people, this skill is crucial! Managers with good human skills are able to get the best out of their people. They know how to communicate, motivate, lead, and inspire enthusiasm and trust. These skills are equally important at all levels of management.
Conceptual skills
Ability to use information to solve business problems, identification of opportunities for innovation, recognizing problem areas and implementing solutions, selecting critical information from masses of data, understanding the business uses of technology, understanding the organization's business model.
Conceptual skills are understanding of how customers of the department or organization react as a group to various activities. Similarly a manager has to understand how suppliers to his department react as a group. Here economic consequences, political consequences, and social consequences come into play and a manager must be able to visualize all these likely outcomes in coming out with his objectives, strategies and tactics.
Managers must have to think and conceptualize about abstract and complex situations. Using these skills managers must be able to see the organization as a whole, understand the relationship among various subunits, and visualize how the organization fits into its broader environment. These skills are most important at top level management.
In words of KatzAbility, the administrator needs:
a) sufficient technical skill to accomplish the mechanics of the particular job for which he is responsible.
b) sufficient human skill in working with others to be an effective group member and to be able to build cooperative effort within the team he leads.
c) sufficient conceptual skill to recognize the interrelationships of the various factors involved in his situation, which will lead him to take that action which achieves the maximum good for the total organization.
In today's demanding and dynamic workplace, employees who are invaluable to an organization must be willing to constantly upgrade their skills and take on extra work outside their own specific job areas. There is no doubt that skills will continue to be an important way of describing what a manager does.