Managerial Skills

All managers need a number of specific skills if they are to succeed. One classic study of managers identified three important types of managerial skills: technical, interpersonal, and conceptual. Diagnostic and analytic skills are also prerequisites to managerial success.

Technical skills are the skills necessary to accomplish specialized activities. They are generally associated with the operations of the organization. For example, David Packard and Bill Hewlett understand the inner workings of their company, Hewlett-Packard, because they started out as engineers working in a garage. Project engineers, physicians, and accountants all have the technical skills necessary for their respective professions. They each develop basic technical skills by completing recognized programs of study at colleges and universities. Then they experience in actual work situations. These managers spend much of their time training subordinates and answering questions about work-related problems. They must know how to perform the tasks assigned to those they supervise if they are to be effective managers.

Interpersonal skills. Managers spend considerable time interacting with people both inside and outside the organization. Here is the description of how top managers spend their time: 69 percent in meetings, 6 percent on the phone, and 3 percent on tours. All these activities involve other people. For obvious reasons, then, the manager needs interpersonal skills: the ability to communicate with, understand, and motivate individuals and groups. So a manager who has good interpersonal skills is likely to be more successful than a manager with poor interpersonal skills.

Conceptual skills depend on the manager’s ability to think in the abstract. Managers need the mental capacity to understand various cause-and-effect relationships in the organization fit together, and to view the organization in a holistic manner. This allows them to think strategically, to see the “big picture”, and to make broad-based decisions that serve the overall organization.

Diagnostic and analytic skills. Successful managers possess diagnostic and analytic skills. A physician diagnoses a patient’s illness by analyzing symptoms and determining their probable cause. Similarly, a manager can diagnose and analyze a problem in the organization by studying its symptoms and then developing a solution. For example, a manager at a Texas Instruments plant recently noted that one particular department was suffering from high employee turnover. He analyzed the situation and decided that the turnover was caused by one of three things: dissatisfaction with pay, boring work, or a supervisor with poor interpersonal skills. After interviewing several employees, he concluded that the problem was the supervisor. He reassigned the supervisor to a position that required less interaction with other people, and the turnover problem soon disappeared. The skills to diagnose and analyze enabled him to define his problem, recognize its possible causes, focus on the most direct problem, and then to solve it.

Diagnostic and analytic skills are also useful in favorable situations. The company may find that its sales are increasing at a much higher rate than anticipated. Possible causes might include low price, greater demand than predicted, and high prices charged by a competitor. Diagnostic skills would enable the manager to determine what was causing the sales explosion and how best to take advantage of it.

In summary, then, successful managers are likely to have technical, interpersonal, conceptual, diagnostic, and analytic skills. It is also important to recognize that the importance of these skills varies as one progresses up the organizational ladder. As one progress up the organization, fewer and fewer technical skills are needed, because top managers spend little time in actual operating situations and are concerned with broader aspects of the organization. Conceptual skills become proportionately more and more important at higher levels of the organization. Interpersonal skills are important at all levels, but perhaps are slightly less important at the top. Similarly, diagnostic and analytic skills are also important for all managers, but their importance is perhaps a little greater for top managers than for lower-level managers.