Functions of Managers

Planning: This step involves mapping out exactly how to achieve a particular goal. Say, for example, that the organization's goal is to improve company sales. The manager first needs to decide which steps are necessary to accomplish that goal. These steps may include increasing advertising, inventory, and sales staff. These necessary steps are developed into a plan. When the plan is in place, the manager can follow it to accomplish the goal of improving company sales.

Organizing: After a plan is in place, a manager needs to organize her team and materials according to her plan. Assigning work and granting authority are two important elements of organizing.

Staffing: After a manager discerns his area's needs, he may decide to beef up his staffing by recruiting, selecting, training, and developing employees. A manager in a large organization often works with the company's human resources department to accomplish this goal.

Leading: A manager needs to do more than just plan, organize, and staff her team to achieve a goal. She must also lead. Leading involves motivating, communicating, guiding, and encouraging. It requires the manager to coach, assist, and problem solve with employees.

Controlling: After the other elements are in place, a manager's job is not finished. He needs to continuously check results against goals and take any corrective actions necessary to make sure that his area's plans remain on track.

All managers at all levels of every organization perform these functions, but the amount of time a manager spends on each one depends on both the level of management and the specific organization.

Roles performed by managers

A manager wears many hats. Not only is a manager a team leader, but he or she is also a planner, organizer, cheerleader, coach, problem solver, and decision maker — all rolled into one. And these are just a few of a manager's roles.

In addition, managers' schedules are usually jam‐packed. Whether they're busy with employee meetings, unexpected problems, or strategy sessions, managers often find little spare time on their calendars. (And that doesn't even include responding to e‐mail!)

In his classic book, The Nature of Managerial Work, Henry Mintzberg describes a set of ten roles that a manager fills. These roles fall into three categories:

Interpersonal: This role involves human interaction.

Informational: This role involves the sharing and analyzing of information.

Decisional: This role involves decision making.

Table 1 contains a more in‐depth look at each category of roles that help managers carry out all five functions described in the preceding “Functions of Managers” section.

Not everyone can be a manager. Certain skills, or abilities to translate knowledge into action that results in desired performance, are required to help other employees become more productive. These skills fall under the following categories:

Technical: This skill requires the ability to use a special proficiency or expertise to perform particular tasks. Accountants, engineers, market researchers, and computer scientists, as examples, possess technical skills. Managers acquire these skills initially through formal education and then further develop them through training and job experience. Technical skills are most important at lower levels of management.

Human: This skill demonstrates the ability to work well in cooperation with others. Human skills emerge in the workplace as a spirit of trust, enthusiasm, and genuine involvement in interpersonal relationships. A manager with good human skills has a high degree of self‐awareness and a capacity to understand or empathize with the feelings of others. Some managers are naturally born with great human skills, while others improve their skills through classes or experience. No matter how human skills are acquired, they're critical for all managers because of the highly interpersonal nature of managerial work.

Conceptual: This skill calls for the ability to think analytically. Analytical skills enable managers to break down problems into smaller parts, to see the relations among the parts, and to recognize the implications of any one problem for others. As managers assume ever‐higher responsibilities in organizations, they must deal with more ambiguous problems that have long‐term consequences. Again, managers may acquire these skills initially through formal education and then further develop them by training and job experience. The higher the management level, the more important conceptual skills become.

Although all three categories contain skills essential for managers, their relative importance tends to vary by level of managerial responsibility.

Business and management educators are increasingly interested in helping people acquire technical, human, and conceptual skills, and develop specific competencies, or specialized skills, that contribute to high performance in a management job. Following are some of the skills and personal characteristics that the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) is urging business schools to help their students develop.

Leadership — ability to influence others to perform tasks

Self‐objectivity — ability to evaluate yourself realistically

Analytic thinking — ability to interpret and explain patterns in information

Behavioral flexibility — ability to modify personal behavior to react objectively rather than subjectively to accomplish organizational goals

Oral communication — ability to express ideas clearly in words

Written communication — ability to express ideas clearly in writing

Personal impact — ability to create a good impression and instill confidence

Resistance to stress — ability to perform under stressful conditions

Harvard Business Publishing

We often hear that human skills (or soft skills) are important to create thriving and high-performing teams. But the changing nature of work—with fully remote to hybrid arrangements—makes these skills even more crucial to develop now.

What exactly are human skills?

Sometimes known as “soft skills,” they constitute our ability to relate to one another and refer to aspects such as empathy, compassion, and authenticity. People with strong human skills can form deeper connections with colleagues and customers. This ultimately serves as a strong foundation for positive workplace performance in terms of innovation, adaptive thinking, collaboration, and more.

This surfaced as one of the key themes during the 2021 Partners’ Meeting—Learn, Lead, Illuminate. As we sat down virtually with organizational development leaders, the idea that human skills are crucial for a more adaptive, inclusive, and digital future resonated.

For many, this became more apparent than ever during the pandemic. Quickly evolving work arrangements amplified relational issues, as everyone tried adapting to the dramatic changes.

Struggles faced by their teams included:

New hires feel disconnected from their teams during on-boarding

Team members have become disengaged with less face-to-face time

Employees over-connecting online to compensate for the lack of face-to-face time

Increased burnout as some find it hard to “switch off” online while working from home

Even with most employees returning to the office to some degree, work norms have forever changed. With these challenges likely to remain to some extent in future work arrangements, our participants identified the development of “human skills” as key to navigating these challenges.

5 Human Skills That Will Help Leaders Thrive In The New Age of Work

#1 Empathy

Having empathy and compassion involves genuinely caring for others and being able to understand another person’s situation and perspective. These are qualities that may not immediately come to mind as essential workplace skills. But many are realizing that this is an essential part of cultivating long-term relational harmony and resilience at work.

Especially during these uncertain times, we’re all forced to move out of our comfort zones. During intense change, there is an increased likelihood of conflict and friction. Being able to put yourself in the shoes of another person and feel for others is more important than ever to overcome these challenges and stay connected and united as a team.

What does this look like exactly? Some participants suggested that they’ve been taking extra time and care to communicate with new hires who are looking for a stronger sense of office culture to meet their relational needs. Others are focused on supporting burned-out team members by working with them to develop better boundaries and self-care habits like mindfulness practices.

Participants also highlighted that demonstrating empathy requires effective interpersonal communication, which leads to the next set of skills.

#2 Communication

Strong communication skills have always been important in the workplace. But what makes a good communicator has shifted now that we’re so often talking and collaborating online through video calls and group chats.

Maintaining effective core communication skills whether online or offline is still essential:

Practice active listening

Reframe what’s been said to clarify meaning

Be mindful of body language

Be clear about the point you’re trying to make

Online working environments warrant paying extra attention to specific skills. For example, some try to be even more conscious of active listening and reframing what’s been said during Zoom calls to prevent miscommunication. There’s also a need to take extra care that everyone’s voices are heard.

#3 Adaptability

The pandemic has served as a good reminder to always expect the unexpected—especially when movement restrictions can be implemented at any time.

Flexibility and adaptability are skills that are essential for staying optimistic about overcoming unexpected challenges, and also help us to be more resourceful and innovative in the way we solve problems as we learn to make do with what we have.

One participant highlighted that emotional and social adaptability is particularly important for leaders managing different personalities and situations frequently. This requires honing emotional intelligence to discern and adapt to what is needed for each circumstance to make navigating work relationships as smooth as possible.

#4 Coaching

Several participants identified that coaching teams is a key skill for drawing out the best in others. Managers recognize that the old-school directive style of management creates stifling environments that do not help develop talent—and this ultimately translates to poor business outcomes.

Participants suggested that managers need to develop coaching abilities like knowing how to ask the right questions (instead of giving answers), listening well, empowering others, and guiding action plans. Creating a widespread coaching culture will help to foster an environment where employees feel supported in their growth. This can lead to long-term benefits to the organization like greater innovation and talent retention.

#5 Trust Building

This was a skill that resonated with many of our participants as an essential part of any team’s success. As one mentioned, “Trust is foundational, and you need to build that first before doing anything else.”

When people are in a team environment where they feel safe and are able to trust others, they’re able to do their best work. It’s no easy task for leaders to create such an environment. But participants suggested leaders can start off by being authentic, honest, transparent, and compassionate.

Leaders can do a lot to set the overall tone of the work environment simply in the way they’re behaving and “being” in a group. And when team members see leaders owning mistakes, looking out for others, and being upfront about challenges, it signals to the rest that it’s safe for them to do the same.

It ultimately shows that work is a place for mutual learning, and where people can feel safe to be who they are.

Human Skills for Creating “A New Better”

We’re all entering a new frontier in the way we work, and human skills will become even more important for people and organizations to thrive in this digital age. The more individuals are supported in developing these skills, the more likely they’ll be able to build a better future for themselves and their organizations.

As a leader, how are you working to develop human skills across your team?

Abbey Lewis is senior product manager at Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning. Email her at [email protected].

The 7 Transferable Skills To Help You Change Careers

By Martin Yate, Next Avenue Contributor

(The following is excerpted from Knock 'em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide Copyright © 2017 by Martin John Yate, CPC, and published by Adams Media, a division of Simon and Schuster. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. The Kindle version is available for 99 cents until Feb. 11.)

There are certain keywords in almost every job posting that relate to skills: communication, multitasking, teamwork, creativity, critical thinking and leadership. These words represent a secret language that few job hunters understand. The ones who do “get it” are also the ones who get the job offers. That’s because these keywords and phrases represent the skills that enable you to do your job well, whatever that job may be. They are known as transferable skills because no matter what the job or profession is, they make the difference between success and failure.

Transferable skills are ones that apply in all professions. They are the foundation of all the professional success you will experience in this and other careers you may pursue over the years.

Also on Forbes:

A Review of Transferable Skills

As you read through the following breakdown of each transferable skill, consider your own varying strengths and weaknesses. You may, for example, read about communication, and think, “Yes, I can see how communication skills are important in all jobs and at all levels of the promotional ladder, and, hallelujah, I have good communication skills.” Take time to recall examples of your communication skills and the role they play in the success of your work.

You might also read about multitasking skills and realize that you need to improve in that area. Whenever you identify a transferable skill that needs work, you have found a professional development project: improving that skill. Your attention to those areas will repay you for the rest of your working life, no matter how you make a living.

The 7 Transferable Skills

Here are the seven transferable skills that will speed the conclusion of this job search and your long-term professional success. You’ll find that you already have some of them to a greater or lesser degree, and if you are committed to making a success of your life, you’ll commit to further development of all of them.

Technical

Communication

Critical Thinking

Multitasking

Teamwork

Creativity

Leadership

All the transferable skills are interconnected — for example, good verbal skills require both listening and critical thinking skills to accurately process incoming information; these enable you to present your outgoing verbal messaging persuasively in light of the interests and sophistication of your audience so that it is understood and accepted.

Effectively develop the following seven transferable skills and you’ll gain enormous control over what you can achieve, how you are perceived and what happens in your life.

Technical Skills

One of the technical skills essential to every job is technological competence. Even when you are not working in a technology field, strong technology skills will enhance your stability and help you leverage professional growth. Staying current with the essential technical and technology skills of your chosen career path is the keystone of your professional stability and growth.

Technology constantly changes the nature of our jobs and the ways in which they are executed. As a result, if you want to stay employable, you need to stay current with the skills most prized in your professional world.

Communication Skills

Every professional job today requires communication skills; promotions and professional success are impossible without them. But communication embraces much more than listening and speaking. When the professional world talks about communication skills, it is referring to four primary skills and four supportive skills.

The primary communication skills are:

Verbal skills — what you say and how you say it

Listening skills — listening to understand, rather than just waiting your turn to talk

Writing skills — clear written communication, essential for success in any professional career. It creates a lasting impression of who you are

Technological communication skills — your ability to evaluate the protocols, strengths and weaknesses of alternative communication media and then choose the medium appropriate to your audience and message

You can check out resources for developing each of these skills at

Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking skills are the professional-world application of all those problem-solving skills you’ve been developing since grade school: a systematic approach to uncovering all the issues related to a particular challenge that will lead to its solution.

Critical thinking, analytical or problem-solving skills allow the successful professional to logically think through and clearly define a challenge and its desired solutions and then evaluate and implement the best solution for that challenge from all available options. You examine the problem, ask the critical questions, look through the factors affecting each possible solution and decide which solutions to keep and which to disregard.

Once you have decided on a course of action, you plan out the steps, the timing and the resources to make it happen.

Multitasking (Time Management and Organization) Skills

This is one of the most desirable skills of the new era. According to numerous studies, however, the multitasking demands of modern professional life are causing massive frustration and meltdowns for professionals everywhere.

Few people understand what multitasking abilities are built on: sound time management and organizational skills.

Multitasking is based on three things: being organized; establishing priorities and managing your time. Then, at the end of every day, review what you’ve accomplished by executing the Plan, Do, Review Cycle. This keeps you informed about what you have achieved and lets you know that you have invested your time in the most important activities today and will tomorrow, so you feel better, sleep better and come in tomorrow focused and ready to rock.

Teamwork Skills

The professional world revolves around the complex challenges of making money, and such challenges require teams of people to provide ongoing solutions. This, in turn, demands that you work efficiently and respectfully with others who have totally different responsibilities, backgrounds, objectives, and areas of expertise.

Teamwork asks that a commitment to the team and its success come first. This means you take on a task because it needs to be done, not because it makes you look good.

Teamwork skills are especially important if you intend to be a leader, because all successful leaders need to understand the critical dynamics of teamwork. So if you intend to be a leader, learn to be a team player.

Creativity Skills

Creativity and the seventh transferable skill — leadership — are called complex transferable skills. That’s because they can only come into being when a fully integrated combination of each of the other transferable skills is brought into play.

Your creativity comes from the frame of reference you have for your work, profession and industry. It lets you see the patterns that lie behind challenges, connect the dots and come up with solutions.

There’s a big difference between creativity and just having ideas. Ideas are like headaches: We all get them once in a while, and like headaches, they disappear as mysteriously as they arrived. Creativity is the ability to develop those ideas with the strategic and tactical know-how that brings them to life. Someone is seen as creative when his ideas produce tangible results. Creativity also demands that you harness other transferable skills to bring those ideas to life.

Creativity springs from your critical thinking, multitasking, communication, teamwork and leadership skills.

Leadership Skills

When others believe in your competence and believe you have everyone’s success as your goal, they will follow you; you accept responsibility, but “we” get the credit. When your actions inspire others to think more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are on your way to becoming a leader. This will ultimately be recognized and rewarded with promotion into and up the ranks of management.

Leadership is the most complex of all the transferable skills that you will develop to make a success of your professional work life. It is a combination and outgrowth of all the other transferable skills: Your job as a leader is to make your team function, so your teamwork skills give you the smarts to pull your team together as a cohesive unit. Your technical expertise, critical thinking, and creativity skills help you correctly define the challenges your team faces and give you the wisdom to guide them toward solutions. Your communication skills enable your team to buy into your directives and goals. Your creativity comes from the wide frame of reference you have for your work and the profession and industry in which you work, enabling you to come up with solutions that others might not have seen. Your multitasking skills enable you to create a practical blueprint for success, and help your team take ownership of the task and deliver the expected results on time.

Leadership is a combination and outgrowth of all the transferable skills plus the clear presence of all the professional values. Leaders aren’t born; they are self-made. And just like anything else, it takes hard work.

How Transferable Skills Impact Your Job Search

Development of transferable skills will be repaid with job offers, better job security and improved professional horizons. When you are seen to embody them in your work and in the ways that you interact with the people of your professional world, you will become known and respected as a consummate professional, and this can dramatically differentiate your candidacy.

So, remember to:

Develop these skills

Make them a living dimension of your professional brand

Understand how each enables you to do every aspect of your job just that little bit better

Reference them subtly in your resumé and other written communications

Reference them appropriately in your meetings with employers as the underlying skills that enable you to do your work well

Examples of your application of these skills can be used in your resumé, cover letters and as illustrative answers to questions in interviews.

But most important, when these skills become a part of you, they will bring greater success to everything you do.