Becoming a professional and successful manager (especially one working in human resources) can be easy if you already have certain education and experience. On the other hand, you might still not be able to excel as a manager even when you are prepared. Hence, here are the seven skills that should be a part of every manager’s training.
1. Communication Skills
First of all, you need to have good communication skills. Indeed, these maybe some of the most important skills anyone should have, no matter whether you are working in human resources as a manager or in a completely different field. Communication skills allow you to have meaningful conversations with your co-workers and customers to be able to communicate what you want and understand what they want.
To develop your communication skills, practice is the best thing you can use. Start practicing with your family and friends because they are the people you will likely be most comfortable with. Then, start keeping up conversations with your colleagues. Make lists for the information you want to tell them about and then write down what they tell you. Learn complex English grammar and vocabulary to be able to word your sentences better.
2. Negotiation and Influencing
Another essential skill you need to develop is the ability to negotiate and influence. Both of these are closely related to communication and leadership skills, but it’s worth focusing on them more specifically to make sure that you really develop them. Being able to negotiate with and influence other people will help you find a common language with many of your co-workers and even your boss.
Negotiation skills will also help you settle down conflicts and solve arguments that arise in the workspace. At the same time, they can help you find a consensus with your team much faster. Influencing skills will make you a more authoritative figure with a better reputation that will be both trusted and respected at work.
3. Time Management Skills
Time management skills are often underestimated by many people, especially those that believe they know everything about the way they manage their time. But in most cases, people will still be late to events, will still push forward the deadlines, and will still be unable to do all the tasks they had promised to do within a particular day.
This is usually caused by delusions some managers hold about their own abilities. Of course, it’s important to have high self-esteem and confidence, but it’s still important not to overestimate what you can do and not to make promises you won’t be able to fulfill. In other words, you need to assess your own time management skills and see if you need to improve them in some way.
4. Business Strategy and Planning
Though HR and other managers don’t always get involved in the business processes per se, they still need to have some kind of idea about business strategy and planning. This will help you understand how your business works, who performs certain tasks, who is responsible for what, what kind of deadlines are set, and so on.
Moreover, having knowledge about business strategy and planning will allow you to streamline your working process even more by aligning your strategy to the strategy of the business or organization you work for. Planning is essential for any business, but it is also a big part of what managers do, so it shouldn’t be ignored by you if you want to perform well.
5. Leadership and Taking Initiative
As mentioned earlier, negotiation and influencing skills are both a part of communication skills and leadership. But leadership and taking initiative can also stand on their own as a separate skills you must learn to become better at your job. Though a manager is still someone who has a boss above them, they are a figure of authority and have a team to manage anyway.
Consequently, this means you will need to lead this team in some way and take initiative to make certain changes within the team. For example, if you are an HR manager who wants to see less rudeness in the workspace, you need to be the one to organize lectures about workspace etiquette and ensure that everyone attends these lectures and learns to be a more polite person.
6. Project Management Skills
Managers are often the ones working in different positions and departments in the business of all industries. But even so, almost every manager will work on different projects throughout their careers which means they need to have the project management skills necessary to oversee such projects.
Project management starts with development, then gets to organization and planning, execution, analysis and assessment, and so on. Project management skills, therefore, will need to be related to all of these stages of a project’s lifetime so that you are able to participate and manage the project during the entire time that it is held.
7. Business Finance Knowledge
Last but not least, as a manager, you are probably not required to have business finance knowledge because you won’t be dealing with this all the time. That being said, you still need to have some kind of knowledge of this topic (especially the information directly needed for non-financial management) to be able to perform your job well.
From the way that the business you work for earns its revenue to the way the employees need to be paid out – all of these things will help you better understand the inner workings of your organization and will allow you to become a much better manager.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, these seven skills will definitely help you become not just a better manager but the best manager you can be. Make sure to develop these skills in yourself even if you don’t have the slightest idea as too high you can properly communicate with people or how a project should be managed. Getting started is the first step that will help you build a foundation for yourself and go on to become a better manager.
