14 Top
Management Skills Every Good Manager Should Know
Management skills are essential for any ambitious leader. Whether you are an entrepreneur, current manager or soon-to-be manager, we have created a guide of the top management skills to help you on your leadership journey.
How to Be a Good Manager
Strong Leadership Skills: You don’t have to be a natural-born leader to be an inspirational manager. Leadership can and should be learned. As a leader you need to have strong influence and a desire to make an impact on the people around you. Learn our basic leadership skills in our primer.
Strong Interpersonal Skills: Managers constantly are communicating with others — whether that’s hiring a new employee, solving conflict or trying to bring together a team. It’s incredibly important for managers to have exceptional interpersonal skills. Dive into our interpersonal primer here.
Strong Body Language Skills: Didn’t expect to see body language on this list? Here at the Science of People Lab we believe that nonverbal intelligence is an essential skill for every manager. You need to know how to both decode other people’s nonverbal cues and control your own. Start with our body language primer here.
What Makes a Good Manager
There is no perfect recipe of management skills to make a good manager. However, we can get pretty close.
As lead investigator at my human behavior research lab, Science of People, I have worked with thousands of managers from companies all around the world. From Fortune 500 companies to small businesses to sole proprietor entrepreneurs, I have found that there is one common trait of a successful manager.
A good manager, or rather, a GREAT manager is obsessed with potential. They feel they have great potential to change the world AND want to activate that potential in others. I have put together my top management skills for activating potential in your team, your colleagues and yourself.
To your success,
Vanessa Van Edwards
Author of the best-selling book Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People
How to Warm Up a Meeting
As a manager you will lead lots of meetings. It’s crucial that you set up yourself and your team for success. Here’s how to prep for an amazing meeting:
- Meeting goals. What are your meeting goals? Is this a creative meeting or a strategic meeting? Do you want people to bond or be productive? Knowing your goals is an important first step.
- Meeting warm-ups. Athletes warm up before a game. Musicians warm up before a performance. Why don’t professionals warm up before meetings? Every good manager should not only think about the agenda of a meeting, but also the warm-up.
- Agenda. Set your agenda for the meeting and send this out to attendees. This is important because it helps people mentally prepare for the meeting AND makes sure you use the time efficiently.
- Post-mortem. What needs to happen after a meeting? This could be assigning to-dos. But it also could be thanking a meeting attendee for a great idea or participation. Don’t underestimate the power of the follow-up.
How to Manage Employees
Being an effective manager means understanding and relating to your employees. The most important management skill you can hone is your ability to decode personality. A team can have many different personalities in the mix. How do you balance them? How do you leverage them? In my book, Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People I teach managers how to decode someone’s personality using the Big 5 personality traits. This is the only science-backed personality framework in the industry (Nope, colors, Myers-Brigg or Enneagram have not been proven true). Learn how to decode your employees and your own personality!
Increase Your Influence
To be a great manager you have to hone your own influence. This is done a few different ways. First, you are contagious. Your moods, ideas and feelings are contagious and can affect your team (in both good and bad. See the video to see how:
Need to get yourself psyched up before a meeting? Need to make sure you are positively contagious? You also might try incorporating one of our pre-performance rituals into your prep routine.
How to Manage Difficult Employees
Do you have a difficult employee? This might be one of the hardest management skills to master. Depending on what type of difficult employee you have, here are a few resources to manage them effectively:
- How to Deal with a Narcissistic Co-Worker or Boss: Do you work with a narcissist? They can be challenging for a manager to deal with but not impossible!
- 4 Types of Difficult People: I have categorized 4 types of difficult people and how to deal with them.
- Get People to Be Less Rude: Maye you have someone on your team who needs to be a little less rude. This article gives you a specific strategy for how to encourage team members to be kinder.
- How to Get Someone to Confess: Not sure what is plaguing your difficult employee? They might need to confess or divulge a secret resentment or grudge.
Learn How to Manage a Team
Being an effective manager is one management skill. Learning how to build and run a team is another. There is a science to effective team-building that you need to know to encourage a cohesive and productive team.
Be a Manager Coach
The best managers are both bosses and coaches. They know how to inspire their team members to be great individual contributors as well as integrated team members. But how can a manager learn to coach and motivate their employees? Here are 3 steps to get you started:
- Learn our 5 Research-Backed Coaching Strategies to Turn Your Team Into All-Stars
- Use the Expectancy Effect: Improve Performance With This Human Behavior Quirk
- Get Motivated with our 10 Self-Motivation Tips — and show up as an inspiration to your employees.
My Single Best Team Building Exercise
This is my absolute favorite management skill on this entire guide! Right now, put a team building meeting on your calendar to do this exercise. It will help you identify your team’s strengths, weaknesses and skill gaps. It’s also a great way to bond! Set aside at least an hour to do this on your next retreat or monthly meeting.
Manage Up To Your Boss
You might be lucky enough to be your own boss — but likely you have someone to answer to above you. Great managers know how to manage up. Having a strong relationship with your boss is essential to being a good manager for your team. First, learn how to decode your boss’s behavior and personality.
Second, you should know how to snap your boss out of a bad mood. You know what I mean…when your boss is in a bad mood it ruins everyone’s day! Learn how to change it.
Be an Exceptional Interviewer
As a manager you likely will be building your own team. This might mean hiring candidates through screening interviews, phone interviews and intake interviews. How should you interview? We have compiled a list of the 10 best behavioral interview questions that will help you get to know someone’s behavioral needs before bringing them onto your team.
…too deep? Try our 5 basic interview questions instead.
Virtual Team Management Skills
Have a virtual team or any remote workers? You might need special management skills. If you have a semi-remote team, you are going to need to work extra hard to build team cohesion and emphasize easy distant communication. Our team at Science of People is remote and we sat down to share our strategies with you.
Know How to Sell Your Ideas
Managers have an interesting line to walk. They must be able to pitch ideas to their own team AND sell their ideas to their superiors on their team’s behalf. Whether you are in a sales role or not, you should understand the science of sales. In fact, we have 6 new rules of sales that help you sell your ideas and sell yourself without being inauthentic or scammy.
Improve Your People Skills
You never know what kind of interpersonal situation you will be put into as a manager. Will an employee need a shoulder to cry on? Will you need to let someone go? Are you having office drama between two employees? This is why it is essential that you have high interpersonal intelligence or PQ.
Take Your Management Skills To The Next Level
Science of People can help you take your passion for learning to a new level. Check out our professional training options.
Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People
This is the first comprehensive, science-backed, real-life manual on human behavior and an entirely new approach to building connections.
Advance Your People Skills with People School
Intensive online training to level up your charisma, communicate powerfully, and take command of your presence.
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