Skills and competencies

Which managerial skills and competencies are most frequently used in managerial work? Obviously, the answer to this question will vary enormously from job to job. However, there are recognized ‘sets’ of skills and competencies. One such set of occupational standards for management and leadership has been developed in the UK by the Management Standards Centre. The broad categories of skills and competencies which they cover are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Skills and competencies

The diagram shows six functional areas (A–F) with Managing self and personal skills having a central position, indicating their contribution to the other five areas of competence. Each area contains a number of ‘units’ of competence. For example, listed under Working with people are 12 ‘units’ set out in Table 2.

1. Develop productive working relationships with colleagues
2. Develop productive working relationships with colleagues and stakeholders
3. Recruit, select and keep colleagues
4. Plan the workforce
5. Allocate and check work in your team
6. Allocate and monitor the progress and quality of work in your area of responsibility
7. Providing learning opportunities for colleagues
8. Help team members address problems affecting their performance
9. Build and manage teams
10. Reduce and manage conflict in your team
11. Lead meetings
12. Participate in meetings

Table 2 Units of competence

These 12 competencies recognize the importance of the so-called ‘soft skills’ which managers bring to their role. Overall, the standards are designed to act as a benchmark of best practice.

Katz’ management skills

A simpler scheme of management skills was suggested by Robert L. Katz (1986) in the Harvard Business Review. Katz, who was interested in the selection and training of managers, suggested that effective administration rested on three groups of basic skills, each of which could be developed.

Technical skills. These are specialist skills and knowledge related to the individual’s profession or specialization. Examples include project management skills for engineers building bridges, aircraft and ships. Katz pointed out that training programs tend to focus on skills in this area. These skills are easier to learn than those in the other two groups.

Human skills. Katz defines these as the ability to work effectively as a group member and to build cooperative effort in the team a person leads.

Conceptual skills. Katz saw these as being the ability to see the significant elements in any situation. Seeing the elements involves being able to:

• see the enterprise as a whole
• see the relationships between the various parts
• understand their dependence on one another
• recognize that changes in one part affect all the others

This ability also extends to recognizing the relationship of the individual organizations to the political, social and economic forces of the nation as a whole. This has since been called the ‘helicopter mind’, that is, being able to rise above a difficulty and see it in context. These conceptual skills are likely to be demonstrated by a manager or executive higher in the organization. Indeed, at these higher levels of management, organizations require these skills.

One area of skill that Katz did not list, but which is becoming increasingly recognized (though often grudgingly) as a basic requirement for managerial effectiveness is a political skill in handling organizational politics. These politics cover pursuit of individual interests and self-interest, struggles for resources, personal conflicts, and the ways in which people and groups try to gain benefit or achieve goals.

References

Katz, R. (1986) ‘Skills of an effective administrator’, Harvard Business Review, March/April, vol. 64, issue 2, p. 198.

Acknowledgements

Adapted from The Open University’s OpenLearn (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk) material entitled Managing and managing people under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. As such, it is also made available under the same licence agreement.