Practical Experience Helps You Develop Management Skills
Management skills generally fall into three categories – technical skills, people skills, and self skills. Developing management skills must follow practice-based and experiential approaches that take into account how the different kinds of skills are interdependent.
Technical skills are about management discipline and practical craftsmanship. Functional skills fall into this category – operation manager skills, product manager skills, sales management skills, business development management skills, and risk management skills.
People skills are about managing social processes of work. Many people skills have a technical dimension to them. For example, delegation becomes effective if it follows a structured process. In the same manner, relationship management, stakeholder management, or team management are classic interpersonal management skills, but also typically benefit from structured approaches.
Self skills pertain to how managers lead themselves in their roles. Conflict management, for example, is as much about managing a social process as it is about managing self and emotions. Time management, prioritization and emotional intelligence in the workplace are also important self-management skills.
A well developed manager shows competence in the technical skills, people skills, and self skills in an integrated fashion. Dividing these skills into three categories and individual skills and competencies within each category (or across categories) can serve to identify areas for development and inform learning interventions.
At the same time, while this is helpful for structuring development priorities, such a categorization will remain somewhat artificial for management practitioners since managing oneself, others, and technicalities are interwoven in practice – a technical question, for example, can quickly become tense, its analysis a matter of prioritization and thus of managing oneself.
As a result, effectively developing management must always follow approaches that take into account the integrated fashion in which management skills are applied. One of the best, proven approaches is to develop these skills in practice.
When learning these skills, the most effective and lasting impact is created through practical experience, which is supported by feedback (from coaches, colleagues, or leaders) and resources (including knowledge, trainings, time for reflection, and learning oriented work environments).
