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What Are People Management Skills? 6 Skills Every Leader Needs

What Are People Management Skills? 6 Skills Every Leader Needs

By definition, a people manager is someone who oversees people in the workplace. It doesn’t matter if you have one direct report or many, either way, you are a people manager, and if you’re to succeed in it, you need a specific skill set. After all, your people management skills will allow you to achieve your mandate by motivating, empowering, guiding, and supporting the employees in your charge. So, what leadership skills do you need to succeed in 2023 and beyond, exactly? While there are many, based on recent research, six people management skills you should be actively working to develop include:

  1. Decision-Making
  2. Empathy
  3. Coaching
  4. Adaptability and Resilience
  5. Communication
  6. Self-Leadership

6 Important People Management Skills - Niagara Institute

 

Decision-Making

In 2022, decision-making was ranked one of the most important skills for those in people management to have in two completely separate studies. According to DDI, it’s one of the top five skills leaders themselves say they need to develop over the next three years. Employees, on the other hand, say a great manager is someone who has strong decision-making skills, is trustworthy, supportive, honest, and has a positive attitude (Zety).

Decision-making refers to one’s ability to seek out the facts, impartially weigh the benefits and consequences, draw a conclusion, and make a decision, even if it’s not the easy or popular one. It is informed by what we know, such as our business acumen which helps form a greater understanding of the consequences of decisions across an organization. It is also formed by experience. While you cannot fast-track your level of experience, you can advance your ability to make sound decisions by participating in development activities that provide general business knowledge and exposure to other people's decision-making processes.

 

Empathy

Catalyst defines empathy as “the skill of connecting with others to identify and understand their emotions, thoughts, and perspectives, as well as demonstrates care, concern, and understanding for employees’ life circumstances.”

In 2023, this is a people management skill that one cannot afford to overlook. One reason is that employees are more stressed now than they were in 2020, which is concerning given that stress at work can lead to performance issues, demotivation, turnover, and even health problems. Fortunately, not only can empathy help reduce stress, but research from Catalyst has found that employees who work for empathetic leaders benefit in other key ways as well, such as:

  • 47% of people with highly empathetic managers report often or always being innovative, compared to only 13% of people with less empathic managers.
  • 67% of people with highly empathetic managers report often or always being engaged, compared to only 24% of people with less empathic managers.
  • 42% of women whose managers are highly empathetic experience inclusion vs.9% of women with less empathetic managers. Meanwhile, 42% of men whose managers are highly empathetic experience inclusion vs. 22% of men with less empathetic managers.

While some people are more naturally empathetic than others, rest assured that empathy is learnable, like any other skill on this list. In fact, you can accelerate the learning process by investing in training that is specifically designed to build your confidence and equip you with practical tools you can rely on while on-the-job.

 

Join the free 30-Day Leadership Challenge and become a better manager. >> 

 

Coaching

One people management skill that continues to grow in importance and popularity by the year is coaching. People managers with coaching skills guide, support, and empower their direct reports rather than command and control them. Harvard Business Review explained, “An effective manager-as-coach asks questions instead of providing answers, supports employees instead of judging them, and facilitates their development instead of dictating what has to be done.”

In fact, in 2021, Gallup even published an article titled, Gallup Finds a Silver Bullet: Coach Me Once Per Week, and that article stated: “Gallup has discovered, through studying what the best managers do differently, that great managing is an act of coaching, not one of directing and administrating.” Meanwhile, Gartner has found that employees who report to managers who are effective coaches are 40% more engaged, exhibit 38% more discretionary effort, and are 20% more likely to stay at their companies than those who weren’t led by ineffective coaches.

 

Adaptability and Resilience

Two people management skills that go hand-in-hand are adaptability and resilience. In an article on the topic featured by the BBC, the difference between the two is clearly explained: “Adaptability isn’t just about surviving a change when it hits you - that’s resilience. To be truly adaptable, you need to be actively prepared for change, even advocate for it, and be consistently adding more capabilities into your repertoire so you can meet emerging needs.”

In a VUCA world that is as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous as ours, this could not be important if your goal isn’t just to survive but to truly thrive. Not to mention, adaptability is linked to greater personal growth, learning ability, confidence, and creative output, while resilience is associated with greater job satisfaction, work happiness, organizational commitment, and engagement.

Can adaptability and resilience be learned, though? According to Psychology Today, the answer is yes. They explain, “Many factors that determine resilience - such as genetics, early life experiences, and luck - can’t be modified. But specific resilience-building skills can be learned, including breaking out of negative thought cycles, pushing back against catastrophizing, and looking for upsides when faced with setbacks.”

 

Communication

Clear, concise, and inspiring communication is a fundamental people management skill. Yet, research has shown that it’s not as well-developed as it maybe should be. For instance, Harvard Business Review found that 69% of managers are not comfortable communicating with their employees. Meanwhile, in another study of 1,000 employees, 91% said their boss lacked communication skills. This is a cause for concern, given that a people leader’s ability to communicate can have a direct impact on employee engagement, motivation, and productivity.

Fortunately, with practice and coaching, a leader can develop these much-needed skills. As Bart Egnal, Chief Executive Officer of The Humphrey Group and a Niagara Institute partner, explains, “Leadership takes place through communication. Every leader knows the best ideas are useless if you cannot inspire others to act on them. That’s why it is key that you are intentional about how you prepare for and capitalize on every communication opportunity.”

 

Self-Leadership

Self-leadership refers to your ability to work independently, self-motivate, hold yourself accountable, own your mistakes, take control of your time, stay organized, and manage your output.

It’s a particularly important people management skill, given that employees look to you, their leader, for cues on what is acceptable vs. what isn’t in the workplace. They will then model their own actions, decisions, and words after the example you set for them. This begs the question: Are you modeling the behaviors you would want your employees to repeat?

Remember, as much as people management is about leading others, it’s about leading yourself too. So, invest the necessary time, leadership training, and energy into self-leadership. It’s as the well-known leadership coach and author John C. Maxwell wrote in his book, Leadership Gold: “Thomas J. Watson, the former chairman of IBM, said, ‘Nothing so conclusively proves one's ability to lead others, as what they do from day to day to lead themself.’ The smallest crowd you will ever lead is you, but it's the most important one. If you do that well, then you will earn the right to lead even bigger crowds.”

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