The Top 10 Management Skills You Need

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Being a manager is a tough job, but being a great one is even tougher. Just consider the array of knowledge and skills it takes to deal with a variety of people, tasks and business needs. Authors James Manktelow and Julian Birkinshaw say that, ideally, managers should know between 90 and 120 individual skills. Manktelow, founder and CEO of and Birkinshaw, deputy dean for programs at London Business School, surveyed 15,242 managers worldwide to identify the most critical competencies, which are highlighted in their book Mind Tools for Managers: 100 Ways to Be a Better Boss (Wiley, 2018).

Here are the highest-ranked skills, according to their survey:

1. Building good working relationships with people at all levels.

Recommended by 79.9% of managers surveyed.

The most important management skill, the survey found, is the ability to build good relationships with people at all levels. For example, an approach to relationship building described in the book focuses on creating "high-quality connections" through respectful engagement.

2. Prioritizing tasks effectively for yourself and your team.

Recommended by 79.5% of managers surveyed.

"All of us have a huge number of things that we want to do or have to do," Birkinshaw says. "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." A particularly useful approach to this the book recommends is called the Action Priority Matrix.

3. Considering many factors in decision-making.

Recommended by 77.8% of managers surveyed.

We've all seen how bad decisions can be when they're rushed or when financial concerns are the only criteria 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—which stands for Opportunities, Risks, Alternatives and Improvements, Past Experience, Analysis, People, and Alignment and Ethics—is a good example.

4. Knowing the key principles of good communication.

Recommended by 77.7% of managers surveyed.

"Management is about getting things done by working with people," Manktelow says. You can do this only if you communicate effectively. This is where the 7 C's of Communication—clear, concise, concrete, correct, coherent, complete, courteous—can help you get your message through more clearly.

5. Understanding the needs of different stakeholders and communicating with them appropriately.

Recommended by 75.8% of managers surveyed.

As you spearhead 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.

6. Bringing people together to solve problems.

Recommended by 75.0% of managers surveyed.

"It's often tempting to try to solve problems on your own," Birkinshaw says. "But there are very many reasons why it pays to bring together a team of experienced people." Gathering people for brainstorming sessions is a good start, but it also pays to understand structured problem-solving processes, know how to facilitate meetings well and be skilled in managing group dynamics.

7. Developing new ideas to solve customers' problems.

Recommended by 74.4% of managers surveyed.

A vast number of products and services now sell based on customer ratings and reviews. To get top reviews, 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 deliver a satisfying customer journey.

8. Cultivating relationships with customers.

Recommended by 73.6% of managers surveyed.

"The way you do this depends on whether you serve consumer or business markets," Manktelow says. "When you're dealing with consumers, you'll get great insights into customer groups by segmenting your market and by developing customer personas representing these different segments."

9. Building trust within your team.

Recommended by 73.3% of managers surveyed.

When people don't trust one another in a team, they waste a huge amount of time politicking. By contrast, people in trusting teams work efficiently and well, 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.

10. Using emotional intelligence.

Recommended by 72.1% of managers surveyed.

"All managers need emotional intelligence to be effective," Birkinshaw says. "This means having the self-awareness, self-control, motivation, empathy and social skills needed to behave in a mature, wise, 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."

"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," Manktelow says. "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."

Desda Moss is managing editor of HR Magazine.

25 Essential Project Management Skills [2022] • Asana

Summary Anyone who oversees projects is a project manager, but to become a more thoughtful manager (with a higher impact), you need to develop the right project management skills. Learn what skills are necessary to become a successful project manager and how to build them.

At Asana, we believe that if you manage projects, you’re a project manager… even if that’s not your job title. In order for teams to effectively collaborate and get their best work done, they need a project manager like you to lead the way. But even if you’re already managing a project—or even multiple projects—how do you get better at being a project manager?

If you’re interested in honing and developing your project management skills, you’re in the right place. In this guide, we’ll cover 25 key skills you need to succeed as a project manager or project administrator, and how you can develop those skills over time.

What are project management skills (and why do they matter?)

Project management skills are the attributes you develop to become a more experienced project manager. Building a project management skill set includes learning technical and hard skills, such as portfolio management and project scoping, and soft skills (for example, adaptability).In honing these skills, you’re preparing yourself to more effectively perform in your role.

Project management is the practice of organizing and executing work efficiently—and helping your team do the same. For a while, project managers had to be trained and certified in complicated project management technology. Traditional project management tools were hard to set up and required constant maintenance, which is where the position “project manager” comes from.

Modern project management tools

Modern project management evolved from traditional project management in two distinct ways. As companies and teams democratized their project management processes, they needed more team members and team leads who were able to manage a process from conception to completion. In order to support those team leads, project management software has also evolved, from complex mechanisms to flexible and easy-to-use tools.

Today, any team member may be called upon to run a project and become the de-facto project manager—which is why modern project management tools are built to be flexible enough for anyone to use on any project, so you’re able to jump in and hit the ground running.

These tools, like Asana, make it easy to track, manage, and organize work—without the learning curve associated with traditional tools. With today's project management tools, you can easily implement project management best practices and bring a new level of clarity and visibility to your project team.

How to use your project management skills

Project management tools do the heavy lifting when it comes to reducing silos, increasing visibility, and facilitating cross-functional collaboration. As the project manager, you can use these tools to give your team the insight they need to get their best work done. While you don’t need to learn complicated skills or tools in order to become a successful project manager, there are hard, soft, and technical skills you can develop in order to improve your management and collaboration skills.

Some of these skills might not apply to you—while others might be things you’re already seasoned in. Like everything in the five phases of project management, approach this list with flexibility and work on the skills that are most relevant to you.

10 soft skills for project managers

Soft skills are what we call “non-technical skills,” or skills that can help you improve your quality of work—without a specific tool or technical requirement. These are also called “people skills” or “interpersonal skills” because they often help you work with and relate to others in your workspace. These 10 skills are the most important soft skills for project management:

1. Collaboration

Collaboration is the cornerstone of all project management skills. In project management, collaboration helps you get work done quickly and more efficiently. When you can coordinate across teams, you gain valuable insights into your project that you might not find within your team. If more minds are involved in the work, projects are inherently more creative and well developed.

To improve your collaboration skills, practice having conversations. Use techniques like active listening, where you stay engaged and focused when others are speaking to you. It sounds simple, but learning how to have open communication, reduce boundaries, and co-create are critical for a collaborative team.

2. Teamwork

Everyone on your team has something to bring to the table, and your team is more effective working together than they would be alone. Teamwork ensures that everyone feels welcome, valued, and they are supported to contribute.

If you’re working to boost your teamwork skills, dig deeper into team brainstorms, 1:1 conversations, and ask for feedback from your team—how can you be a better team member? Notice if there’s someone who hasn’t spoken up in a while, and be supportive when another team member has a new idea.

3. Communication

Miscommunications are common when you’re working with a group of people. Learning how to communicate well and avoid these will make projects run more smoothly and be more enjoyable.

To develop your communication skills, practice being open and honest with your coworkers. This requires a lot of trust between you and your team members. To build this trust, encourage your team members to bring any thoughts into a discussion—even if you disagree with them.

4. Time management

Time management and organization skills go hand in hand. As you become better at organizing your tasks, you’ll also have a clearer sense of everything that’s on your plate and how long your upcoming tasks are going to take.

Still, it can be hard to buckle down and prioritize your work. To improve your time management skills and reduce procrastination, try prioritizing tasks. When you’re clear on which tasks are higher priority, you can tackle them first, to make sure nothing gets left behind or falls through the cracks.

5. Leadership

Even if you don’t think of yourself as a leader or have a role in team management, when you’re managing a project, your project team is looking to you for leadership, guidance, and support.

To develop your leadership skills, practice approaching situations with empathy and understanding. Good leaders bring everyone together and make them feel supported to foster teamwork and collaboration.

6. Organization

For a lot of project managers, organization is the most intimidating soft skill. You might think organization is either something you “have” or “don’t have.” But, like every other project management skill in this article, you can develop your organizational skills and become a Marie Kondo in your own right.

The best way to become a better organizer is to create (and maintain) a central source of truth for your work and your team’s work. We’re often disorganized because work is disconnected—in fact, the average employee switches between 10 tools per day. Instead of splitting your time between 10 tools, try using a digital organization tool to act as that one central source of truth for your team.

7. Problem solving

Problem solving skills are collaborative, iterative skills that help you approach a problem and, ultimately, solve it. Developing problem solving skills isn’t about always having the “right” answer to every problem—rather, people with great problem solving skills practice approaching problems from new perspectives and methodically working towards a solution.

To become a better problem solver, use data-driven decision-making frameworks or routine analyses. For example, if you need to solve for how to boost sales by 10% over your competition, you can run a competitive analysis to determine where you currently stand in the market. Then, use that information to solve the problem of lower sales. In this case, you could develop a new marketing strategy coordinated with the sales team.

8. Critical thinking

Critical thinking, like problem solving, doesn’t have a “solution.” You can’t “win” at critical thinking, but you can practice approaching problems logically instead of making decisions based on your emotions. Good critical thinkers practice analyzing information in front of them and forming their own conclusions based on the facts—the way Sherlock Holmes solves a mystery.

To practice critical thinking, always take a step back and ask yourself: how did I come to this conclusion? Could there be another answer? Am I being swayed by something other than factual information? Emotional decisions aren’t necessarily bad—in fact, some of the best decisions are those we’re passionate about. But critical thinking is a helpful way to make sure you’re approaching a situation from the right perspective.

9. Adaptability

At some point, whether it’s this project or the next one, aspects of your project plan will change. Maybe your deadline or priorities shifts, and you need to adapt your workflow accordingly. Great project managers are able to pivot and adapt to new situations to continue steering their project team in the right direction.

Becoming more adaptable is all about understanding when and how to shift gears. To do this, you need to understand yourself. Developing other soft skills, such as self-awareness and mindfulness, can help you be more in touch with and manage your emotions, which are often in flux during times of change.

10. Conflict resolution

Inevitably, conflict will arise during the projects you manage. It could be that a stakeholder wants to change the project scope. Or maybe you missed your budget or deadline. Conflict resolution is about addressing both sides of the conflict so everyone feels heard and supported. If there are harmed parties, take the time to listen to them and try to find a solution that works for everyone. Even when that can’t happen, approaching the conversation with patience and empathy can help defuse a potentially frustrating situation and lead to a better result.

7 hard skills for project managers

Unlike soft skills, hard skills are quantifiable abilities. While the soft skills mentioned above are applicable for many work skills, these seven hard skills are relevant specifically to project management. Developing these will help you become a more well rounded and efficient project manager.

1. Project planning

At its core, a project plan (sometimes called a project charter) is a blueprint of the key elements your project needs to succeed. Typically a project plan will include seven things:

Some of these things, like your goals or your milestones, might already be defined in your project roadmap or brief. But your project plan is where all of these project elements come together to create a cohesive picture of your upcoming work.

A lot of planning goes into the beginning of the year for what our vision is and where we will be by the end of that particular year. Once that is done, we summarize it in a project so it's visible to everyone... Having that visual representation in Asana makes it easier to move things around.” — Sheryl Chopra, Project Manager, IPG Mediabrands

2. Project scoping

Project scope is the size, goals, and limitations deadlines and resources) for your project. Your project scope will define what you can achieve within a certain timeframe and budget. Setting and defining your project scope is important in order to prevent scope creep, which is when your project deliverables outgrow your original project scope.

In order to improve your project scoping skills, practice setting project scope early and often. Once you’ve set your project scope, share it with stakeholders and surface it frequently, so everyone is on the same page about the project’s aims and limitations. Use it as a point of reference, so you know when to say no to new asks.

We have been able to reduce the number of products that we’ve oversold and the number of times we have to contact the customer to push a ship date out.” — Andrea Georgi, E-Commerce Director, The Citizenry

3. Writing a project brief

Your project brief outlines your general project objectives and how you plan to get there. This can serve as a helpful North Star to guide planning sessions.

The most important thing to remember about your project brief is that it’s a living document. As you develop your project plan and get input from stakeholders, you can adapt and update your project brief. In general, your project brief should contain a link to your project roadmap if you created one, a list of your project stakeholders and their responsibilities (sometimes called a RACI chart), other relevant documentation or files, and any other high-level information your team might need.

Having executive oversight and insight into projects is key so we can quickly get up to speed on what is happening at any point.” — Jeana Abboud, COO, Social Factor

4. Hosting a project kickoff meeting

A kickoff meeting is an opportunity to align with your project stakeholders. This is your chance to clarify your project goals and scope, and share any documents you’ve already put together like your project roadmap, project brief, or supplemental documentation like a bill of materials for a marketing campaign or a creative brief for a design team.

To host a successful kickoff meeting, plan to share the documentation you have put together with project stakeholders. Then, host a brainstorming or Q&A session to align on any additional variables, like budget, resources, or final deliverables.

5. Project roadmapping

A project roadmap is a high-level overview of your project’s key deliverables and timeline. Project roadmaps are helpful for complex initiatives with a lot of stakeholders because they help the entire project team get on the same page before the project even starts.

Traditionally, project roadmaps are created in Gantt chart-like software, in order to display a general schedule of your project as a horizontal bar chart. To create a project roadmap, use a tool like Timeline in Asana to create a rough timeline of your project, adding key milestones or important dependencies.

6. Mapping your project timeline

Your project timeline is the order and duration of events during your project lifecycle. Knowing your project timeline helps your team track project success and deliver the right assets on time.

In order to build a great project timeline, make sure you clarify the start and end dates of your project, as well as any key milestones. As you continue building out individual tasks and deliverables, set dependencies between tasks, and clarify the start and end date of each piece of work.

7. Task management

Once your project is officially underway, task management refers to how well you manage your and your team’s time. The best project managers have visibility into what their team is working on in real-time, so they can help their team effectively prioritize and execute work.

But you don’t have to magically know everything that’s happening in your project—instead, use task management software. Task management software is more than a to-do list—it’s a way to get a holistic view of all of the work happening in your project. With effective task management, you can empower your team to work more productively, efficiently, and effectively.

With Asana, we can see project progress and blockers, plus feedback and action items, all in one place. We're now able to complete work more efficiently and effectively, which has become even more critical while working from home. We’d be lost without it!” — Sarah Elliott, VP, Global Product Marketing, Integral Ad Science

8 technical skills all project managers need

Soft skills: check. Hard skills: got it. The only thing you have left to master are technical skills!

Technical skills refer to your knowledge of specific tools and softwares within project management. These tools aren’t hard to learn—as we mentioned before, modern project management is built to be flexible and easy to use. These eight skills are aspects of project management roles you should become familiar with, so you know when and how to leverage them.

1. Project management software skills

Project management software has come a long way from legacy tools that were difficult to use and required a project management professional to implement. But like any tool, even easy-to-use ones, the software you choose takes time to learn and truly master. Make sure the tool you select has a written guide and helpful videos to teach you the ins and outs of how to use it.

2. Gantt charts

Gantt charts are a way to visualize your project as a horizontal bar chart, where each bar represents a piece of work and the length of each bar represents the amount of time that work will take.

Project milestones

Dependencies

Real-time project progress

Start and end dates

Traditional Gantt chart technology can be tricky to use and limited in scope, which is why, at Asana, we took the best of Gantt chart technology and created Timeline, a Gantt-chart like tool that helps you see how all of the pieces fit together.

Launching an album has so many moving parts, and Asana helps us track every detail, who’s responsible for it, and when it needs to be completed.” — Brett Gurewitz, CEO, Epitaph Records

3. Kanban boards

Another popular type of visual project management is the Kanban board. Each column in a Kanban board represents a stage of work, like New, In progress, or Done. Individual work is represented by cards, which move through the columns until they’re completed.

Kanban boards tools are a popular visual project management tool for lean project management teams, particularly product, engineering, and software development teams. They’re an Agile methodology, designed to be adaptable and flexible to adjust to development needs in real-time.

4. Agile management

Agile management is a lean project management methodology that’s particularly popular with product, engineering, and software development teams. Agile operates on a system of continuous improvement and incremental evolution, and it encompasses several lean methodologies, like lean portfolio management, Scrum, and Kanban.

In order to manage an Agile team, it's the project manager’s job to coordinate between team members and stay flexible. This can mean changing the project schedule, aligning with teams working on a different project, or just staying in touch with effective communication.

5. Workload management

If you’ve managed projects before, you know how hard it is to gain clarity on who is working on what—but it doesn’t have to be. Workload management helps you measure your team’s bandwidth and make sure they aren’t over- or under-worked. It’s an interactive process that doesn’t have a beginning or end state—rather, an effective project manager will continuously monitor their team’s workload to ensure no one is burning out.

There are two steps to using workload management software. First, start by figuring out your team’s capacity, competencies, and current workload. From there, allocate resources based on individual workload, or rebalance workloads as needed.

6. Cost management

In project management, cost management is considering how each task impacts your budget at every stage of the project. Cost management is a key part of project leadership, and an important element of whether or not your project is a success. Staying within budget is as important as hitting your project due date, and cost management can help you get there.

To manage cost effectively, good project managers define their costs and budget at the beginning of a project. Make sure project stakeholders and team members all understand the budget. Then, during the project, keep cost and budget in mind. Check in on your spending several times during the project to make sure you aren’t overshooting your budget. Once the project is completed, tally predicted cost vs. actual cost to determine how effective your cost management strategies were. This can also help you benchmark for future projects.

7. Project portfolio management

With project portfolio management (PMM), you can get a bird’s-eye view of your team’s work across multiple projects. Unlike traditional project management, PMM involves working on multiple projects or large-scale initiatives simultaneously. Project portfolio management tools help you get a holistic view of all of your team’s work in real-time, so you can connect strategy to execution.

Portfolios are also a key Asana feature for our team. It is a great tool for our executive team so they can see our big pieces of work all in a single place with the status, progress and ownership. Our CEO visits our portfolio daily and adds comments. He loves to be able to see what's going on in a snapshot.” — Michael Chidgey, PMO & Programme Manager, SiteMinder

8. Change management

If you’ve ever rolled out a big organizational change, you’ve likely practiced change management, even if you didn’t know it. Change management is the process of introducing organizational change—like new processes or tools—over a set period of time to make them easier to adapt to.

At Asana, we use the Asana Way of Change, a six step process developed by our Customer Success team that incorporates proven change management strategies. To learn more, read our guide to change management.

The standard of our creative team, for a while, was just to react to work. But we’ll never do the best work we possibly can without a clear process.” — Joe Tornatzky, Art Director, Gear Patrol

How to build your project management skills

Twenty five skills might feel like a lot, but remember that you don’t need to master every skill in this list. Some, like Agile, are only relevant for specific teams. Others, like organization, become virtually effortless with a little focus and great tools.

Keep in mind that developing your project management skills takes practice. Challenge yourself to focus on one or two new skills for each project—whether that’s trying out a new visual form of project management like Kanban, drafting your first ever project plan, or leaning into time-management.

There are also classes you can take to develop hard and soft project management skills. Though you no longer need certifications in order to be considered a project manager, the Project Management Institute (PMI) offers courses, learning events, and their famous Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), which was the first project management guide ever published.

Finally, once you’ve selected a project management tool, you can also take their classes to learn technical project management skills. At Asana, we’ve developed the Asana Academy and How to Asana series to help new project managers learn new soft, hard, and technical skills.

Build your project management toolkit

If you manage a project, you’re a project manager—and you likely already have some key project management skills. The most important thing is to be intentional, listen to your team, and collaborate with your team members. The rest will follow.

What Are Project Management Skills?

The top 25 skills you need to succeed as a project manager

This project management skills list will give you the rundown of everything it takes to successfully lead a project.

To keep things a little more organized (you know, just like a project manager would do), we split these project management skills into two distinct categories: technical skills and soft skills.

Project manager technical skills

Technical skills (which you might also hear called "hard skills") is a term to describe all of the industry and role-specific knowledge and qualifications you need.

These types of skills are more quantifiable than soft skills, and are usually obtained through hands-on experience, education, or both.

1. Planning and forecasting

It goes without saying, but proper project management requires skilled planning. This can be challenging, especially since many project managers need to make educated guesses about timelines and required resources.

That’s where forecasting comes into play. Project managers need to use any information they have to make predictions and estimates that are rooted in information, rather than only hunches or gut feelings.

2. Risk management

Every project has risks. Perhaps a resource won’t be available when you need it, or delayed approval from a client will set your timeline back a few days.

Project managers are responsible for not only navigating around risks but anticipating them so that they can try their best to avoid them altogether (or, at the very least, adequately prepare for them).

3. Budgeting

The truth is that a project can hardly be chalked up as a success if it comes in way over the initial budget.

Project managers know that there are financial constraints they need to work within, and they use their budgeting and financial management skills to deliver winning projects within those limitations.

4. Tracking and monitoring

Project management isn’t just about completing a project — it’s about completing a successful project. That won’t happen if project managers fail to keep their fingers on the pulse of how the project is progressing.

They need to use their performance tracking and monitoring skills to ensure projects are running according to plan and still supporting the broader business goals. If not? They’ll course-correct when necessary.

5. Project management methodologies

From Agile to Waterfall, there are numerous project management methodologies and approaches. These outline specific principles for overseeing and completing projects.

Experienced project managers are familiar with those methodologies and can determine which ones are the best fit for their specific teams and projects.

6. Meeting facilitation

Kickoff meetings, status updates, retrospectives — the typical project process has many meetings, most of which are led by the project manager.

For that reason, a project manager needs to be skilled at facilitating meetings, including creating an agenda, guiding conversations, documenting notes, and following up on action items.

7. Subject matter expertise

Project managers work in a variety of industries, from construction to IT to marketing and everything in between. While it’s not an absolute necessity, it’s helpful for the project manager to have a basic familiarity with the industry and the types of projects they’re managing.

This level of expertise will help them more accurately estimate risks, costs, timelines, and resource requirements.

8. Quality management

Pretty much anybody can get a project over the finish line if they don't care about the quality of the work. But a successful project manager will pay close attention to the project's standards to ensure the final product meets or exceeds those expectations.

That's why quality management skills are so important. Project managers will keep a close eye on a project's progress to ensure that all of the different steps and deliverables meet their quality standards. If and when they see a problem, they'll take the appropriate corrective steps on the spot — rather than doing a bunch of rework at the end, which could delay the project.

9. Project management software

The best project managers know better than to try to coordinate all of the elements of a project with jumbled spreadsheets and random task lists.

Instead, they’re experts at using project management software like Wrike to centralize communication, streamline collaboration, and iron out project plans. And what’s more? They'll educate and encourage other project stakeholders to use the software too.

10. Writing and reporting

From project plans to status updates, project managers do a surprising amount of writing. They need to be skilled at sharing written information in a clear, organized, and digestible way.

Reporting also falls under the writing umbrella. Whether it's a resource report or a progress report, project managers will spend a lot of time gathering information about a project and compiling it into a summary that all team members and stakeholders can easily process and understand.

11. Research

While project management does involve some guesswork, those guesses are typically educated. Project managers ground their estimates and assumptions in past experiences and data.

That involves a lot of research. Whether they're analyzing how similar projects were completed successfully in the past or digging into a different type of project management methodology that could be a better fit for a specific project, project managers need to be skilled at finding new and relevant information.

12. Scope management

The words "scope creep" are enough to cue a horror movie soundtrack in the mind of any project manager. Projects can quickly balloon out of control, causing problems with the budget, resources, and timeline.

Project managers are the ones responsible for reining in projects when they start to expand beyond initial requirements and expectations. That involves proactively spotting issues, reinforcing expectations, and successfully communicating what's in and out of scope for a particular project.