Being A Good Manager Because Of People Skills Management Essay

Being A Good Manager Because Of People Skills Management Essay Being a good manager has less to do with knowledge of a companys main field of activity and more with displaying a range of so-called â€Å"people skills†. While this detail is common knowledge in todays business world, what exactly are the main skills in a managers arsenal remains a rather grey area. This situation stems from the fact that considering the management needs in the 21st century, the field of management as a whole has become increasingly divided and fragmented. If not long ago management was split into clear areas (such as HR management, financial management, operational management and others), today specific management positions may require processes from multiple areas thus blurring the borders. Therefore, correctly identifying a manager’s toolkit of skills can prove to be a challenge in itself. The Professional Development Module attempts to settle this grey area using a study by the Association of Graduate Recruiters. This study conducted among a larg e number of employers tries to identify the main management skills considered to be in short supply in today’s market. The study names â€Å"commercial awareness† and â€Å"communication skills† as the very top shortages identified by employers. With each harnessing the attention of 60% of the respondents, they stand well ahead of the next identified shortages: â€Å"leadership†, â€Å"teamwork† and â€Å"problem-solving abilities†. â€Å"Conceptual ability†, â€Å"Subject knowledge and competence†, â€Å"Numeracy† and â€Å"Foreign languages† follow, but each being named by less than 20% of the respondents. â€Å"Good general education† is the last of the skills considered in this study. The results confirm the initial premise that the aforementioned â€Å"people skills† are considered much more relevant in the field of management, while at the same time being severely scarce. Thus, the Professional Development Module places emphasis on these skills, while aggregating them into more focused categories. The Module accurately describes the manager’s toolkit as containing: communication skills, presentation skills, negotiation skills, and cross-cultural awareness, networking skills, team skills as well as conflict management skills. Having a head start given by an accurate identification of the market’s needs, the Professional Development Module proceeds to train these skills in an effective manner. It is notable that the module is divided into sections covering each of the identified skill categories. Each of these sections takes the time to properly define its area of emphasis, underlining its relevance and importance within the toolkit before proceeding to develop the subject and use real-life examples and exercises to help develop the skill. Facilitation is certainly one of the most important skills in the set described above. Sometimes presented as mediation or negotiation, in fact facilitation is a broader term that describes the activity of creating the proper environment so that participants in a meeting or discussion can reach a satisfactory agreement. The Professional Development Module segment dedicated to facilitation does a great job at describing the issues that fall under a facilitator’s jurisdiction. While meetings are part of any core process of any corporate activity, they can also be the very Achilles’s heels of the process they are used in. Since meetings bring together different people with different goals, different hopes, different expectations, different personalities and different view of the world altogether, conflicts appear very easily. Conflicts can result in disagreement, aggression or frustration, which lead the meeting away from its intended purpose and alienate the participants. While conflicts are the most common choke point in a meeting, there are many other pitfalls that can turn a meeting into a counterproductive activity. Having an individual or small group dominate the discussion is one such pitfall just as letting an otherwise productive discussion fall into running around in circles when conclusions are called for.