8 Critical People Skills for Management Success & How To Improve Them
To manage others successfully you need good people skills. But which ones to focus on? I share 8 critical people skills for management success. If you don’t work at improving these leading up to and throughout your management career you will not be as successful, nor progress as far.
The most critical goal or outcome of any manager is to increase their team’s performance. Your impact on team performance as a manager, 9 times out of 10, will add far more value to the business than anything else that you do.
I have led teams in top companies. Transformed the worst team in a business into one of the best, in multiple different companies. I have been promoted 13 times all the way up to board level. Won Best Team prizes and more.
The more that you can prioritise your efforts to become good at the most impactful people skills first, the more quickly you will progress your management career, the easier you will find it to manage others, and the more you will enjoy managing teams.
8 Critical People Skills for Management Success & How To Improve Them
- Keep your ego in check
- Stay curious and adopt a learning mindset
- Demonstrate empathy and put yourself in other’s shoes
- Show good emotional self-management.
- Improve your listening skills
- Learn how to communicate diplomatically, honestly and concisely
- Get good at negotiation
- Be solution focused
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The first critical people skill for management success is to keep your ego in check
Thinking you are more important than your team members. Believing your way is right way. Putting looking good personally ahead of doing what is best for your team overall. Choosing the easy option over the best option. Expecting your team members to agree with you.
All these are signs that your ego is probably holding you back as a manager. To be successful in leading people and getting more from teams, it can’t be about you. It must be about your team. Keeping your ego in check is not easy. Keeping your ego in check is a critical people skill for leaders..
Spend more time listening than talking. Find out about other’s ideas, viewpoints and problems. Speak last not first. Stay curious and always look to learn – from every person and situation you are involved with. Put the team before yourself. Care about your team.
These are all good actions to demonstrate to your team, that the team is more important than you. Do this consistently and your team will love working with you. They will work harder and smarter. In short, they will perform a lot better.
One of the most important people skills for managers is keeping your ego in check.
The third of the critical people skills for leadership success is demonstrating empathy and putting yourself in other’s shoes
Putting yourself in other’s shoes is pretty essential to understand their position, to improve your negotiating skills, to avoid political landmines and generally get others on side.
Spend time thinking what your ambitions might be, what challenges you would face, what priorities you would have and what resources you would have to work with IF you were doing THEIR JOB in this company. Then you can empathise and have great insights into their world. Both critical people skills for management success.
To further develop empathy ask yourself: What you would be thinking and feeling in their position. How would being in their position effect your state of mind, your emotions, your decisions, your behaviours and your actions. Demonstrate you have taken the time to think about them. Even better, act on the insights gained to help them reduce their pain and increase their gain.
Helping others is one of the best ways to get help in return. Being empathetic helps you persuade and influence. Being empathetic builds connections and relationships.
Become good at putting yourself in their shoes – one of the critical people skills for managers.
4 – Develop good emotional self-management
Being aware of your own emotions, your reactions, your beliefs, your values and your hot buttons will make it a lot easier to control how you express your emotions and thoughts. How you feel and what you believe impacts pretty much everything you do at work – your decisions, your actions and your behaviours.
Even more important, your actions, behaviours and decisions have a big impact on your team – their emotional state and their performance. For example, if you express your anger by shouting at team members and blaming them for your challenges, they are going to become fearful and demotivated. Their performance will drop which in turn will increase your problems.
If you are always calm under pressure or in a crisis AND able to take sensible actions, you will gain a lot of respect and authority just because you react more constructively than team members in tough situations.
Managing your own emotions and reactions and expressing them in constructive and useful ways to the team are critical people skills needed for success as a manager
The fifth critical people skill for management success is building great listening skills
Listening is one half of communication. Listening is great in building relationships, understanding other people’s positions and understanding ideas, problems and solutions. Listening is great for calming others down too.
If you don’t invest time to improve your listening skills, you seriously handicap yourself as a manager. You miss out on so many ideas and solutions, You miss out on goodwill and understanding how your team feel and think. I personally think your skill as listener is directly tied to your success as a manager.
Ask a lot of open ended questions. Find about everything you sensibly can about your team, what they are working on, how they are feeling, what they are thinking, what problems and solutions they have and what they do outside of work.
The more you listen, the more other people will tell you. You have no shortage of opportunities to practice listening. Ask a question, maintain good eye contact, use attentive body language and then don’t speak until the other person has really finished speaking. If you can summarise everything they have said, you were listening properly. If you can’t, keep practicing.
The more you listen, the better you will be able to lead.
6 – learn how to communicate diplomatically, honestly and concisely
Leaders and managers need to provide direction. They need to get others to do what they want, when they want it. Managers need to persuade and influence. Leaders need to set out a clear vision. Managers need to build a lot of relationships with a wide range of people.
Communication skills are at the heart of all these needs.
How you communicate builds trust or destroys it. The more trust you build with a team, the more you can influence them, get them to do what you ask quickly, and increase team performance.
Communicating diplomatically is about choosing the words you use carefully and delivering your messages calmly and professionally. Your aim is to minimise upset and emotional reactions to INCREASE the chances the other person will listen, take in and understand what you are communicating.
I also think it very important to COMBINE diplomacy with being honest. That is being truthful about the upsides and downsides. Honesty is telling it how it is. Honesty is providing useful, specific feedback regularly. Being honest is ensuring people know where they stand with you.
Finally, time is precious. Those above you have less time than you do. The more concisely you can communicate your message, the less time this take and the easier it is to understand. Practice distilling complex situations down into a few core sentences when you communicate.
Communicating diplomatically, honestly and concisely is a key people skill for management success.
Seventh, another critical people skill for management success is negotiation
Negotiation comes in many forms. It might be agreeing what your team members are going to deliver and when. You negotiate with your boss in the same way. You negotiate with pretty much everyone at work at some level.
The better you are at negotiating, the greater the advantage you will gain for yourself and your team. The better your negotiation skills, the more you will deliver, the more your team will deliver, which turns means better personal rewards.
Improve your negotiating skills by spending more time asking questions and listening than speaking. Put yourself in their shoes and figure out what they want and need. Think about what you can offer that is more valuable to them than you. Don’t be afraid to afraid to say no or to ask without giving. Finally, aiming for a win-win outcome will make negotiating a lot easier and quicker for both parties.
One of the most people skills you need for leadership success is negotiation skills.
Eighth, for management success – be solution focused
Being solution focused is a mindset. A mindset for you and one to instil in your team IF you want an easier life as a manager and a much more successful one.
You want team members to contribute ideas. You don’t mind where the solution comes from as long as it solves the problems in a good way. You don’t mind some mistakes being made on the way to getting a great result. You want others to challenge and ask questions in service of getting the best solution and outcome.
To be more solution focused, learn to:
- Define problems in terms of desired outcomes rather than frustrations
- Move the conversation towards actions, plans and the next steps
- Offer options rather than observations
- Reduce time spent on blame, what when wrong and circular discussions
- Use problems as a starting point of action and solutions.
Help your team do exactly the same, by encouraging the same behaviours in them.
Be very solution focused. It is a great people skill to be very successful in management.
in summary
To manage others successfully you need good people skills. I have shared 8 critical people skills for management success that I has focused on a lot over my management career. 13 promotions have been the result.
As a reminder the 8 people skills for management success are:
- Keep your ego in check
- Stay curious and adopt a learning mindset
- Demonstrate empathy and put yourself in other’s shoes
- Show good emotional self-management.
- Improve your listening skills.
- Learn how to communicate diplomatically, honestly and concisely
- Get good at negotiation
- Be solution focused
If you have any questions on “8 Critical People Skills for Management Success & How To Improve Them”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
