Top 10 Management Skills that You Must Acquire in 2024

Managing a team is a complex role, and organisations today need adaptable managers who have the top management skills. Find out the most essential ones that employers and your team will value today. 

When you are called for the managerial interview round, the recruiter gauges your ability to apply the skills you have adopted from management courses or during your previous job. Even if you are an aspiring manager, developing the right management skills will get you far. But good managerial skills are not just for professionals moving up in their careers. Entrepreneurs also need to have such skills to run their businesses smoothly. 

What are Management Skills?

Management skills can be defined as traits necessary for implementing management functions and getting tasks completed. 

Learn about – What is management?

They are essential because, in a formal organisation, managers need to maintain the hierarchy and unity of command and carry out the vision of the leader’s decisions. A team generally does not function without a manager, as far as delegation and conflict resolution are concerned. 

Managers need to have a multi-skill set to ensure that the team is able to complete tasks and meet the organisational goals without any friction. 

Managerial traits such as problem-solving, flexibility, etc., are becoming extremely crucial for all levels of managers and professionals today. In fact, it has been predicted that they are among the most important skills until 2025 (World Economic Forum). Other than these, mentoring, decision-making, etc., are building blocks of good leadership qualities. 

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Basic Types of Management Skills 

Management skills are related to leadership skills to a great extent. In his paper called Skills of an Effective Administrator, 1955, in Harvard Business Review, theorist Robert Katz mentions three basic skills for leaders/managers. 

• Technical Skills – These are specific to the domain of the manager. These professionals need proficiency in the tools required for tasks in that domain. For instance, a manager in the IT department is expected to have programming capability.
• Conceptual Skills – They are based on managers’ cognitive skills required to provide a strategic direction for the organisation. These skills are necessary for managers moving up to senior roles. 
• Human Skills – These are interpersonal in nature required for motivating employees, building an atmosphere of trust, etc. 

10 Best Management Skills You Need for 2024

Irrespective of job and academic experiences, here are the most important management skills that will give you a competitive advantage in the coming year and beyond. 

Organising

Managers need to be organised to the fullest extent. To get into this role, you must be able to multitask. You will be expected to supervise your team members, train new joinees, make reports, schedule meetings with senior-level management, etc. 

If you are not organised, one or more tasks mentioned here will begin to suffer. Chances are, your team members will lose motivation, and they may end up being stressed considering that you won’t be able to assign tasks correctly due to poor organisation practices. 

Problem-Solving

Being good at problem-solving will help you overcome the daily workflow and future decision-making challenges. It can boost team morale and help complete tasks on time. 

One of the most important aspects to consider here is being highly attentive to details. You should be able to notice the red flags and take actions proactively than reactively. 

Teamwork

Here, effective communication plays a big role. For a team to achieve goals successfully, it is essential that the team members know what and how to achieve. There should not be any bottleneck, but sometimes it cannot be predicted. 

If, as a manager, you are able to clarify the goals, prepare and provide alternative solutions to unforeseen obstacles, etc. you can help the team grow. 

Things to avoid in teamwork are simply delegating tasks without putting yourself in the team members’ shoes, and not being transparent in communication. 

Time Management

Time management is an extension of your organising skills. Good time management practices includes the ability to prioritise and setting goals. These require recognising your personal patterns of productivity and leveraging them to your advantage. You can use a priority matrix for that. And if you are in an agile environment, the timeboxing technique is mostly used, where you book a slot for a task beforehand, before moving on to the next objective. 

Another best practice to efficiently utilise time at work is to schedule your tasks beforehand, but with some scope of flexibility. You can also use project management tools to streamline your tasks and track your time for completing them. 

Cognitive Flexibility 

According to World Economic Forum, cognitive flexibility is one of the latest trends in expected professional skills since 2020. 

Cognitive flexibility means the ability to switch thinking between multiple concepts that are different from each other. In short, it is the ability to think about multiple concepts simultaneously. 

According to Forbes, cognitive flexibility “builds a level of empathy for others because you are willing to see it from their view”. Apart from that, it is necessary for planning for business transformations and can enable faster problem-solving. 

One way to go about it when building such a competency is taking psychology courses. 

Resilience

Resilience is an essential management skill for managers who can promote well-being among team members in times of stress and change. According to Driven, employees with higher resilience have 83% more job satisfaction. 

Resilience as a skill is not only important for managers for their personal growth, but also for encouraging team members to build it for themselves.

Conflict Resolution

Conflict management is one long-remaining valuable management skill in all sizes of organisations. It is the process of dealing with disagreements at the workplace by leveraging empathy, active listening, and negotiating. Emotional intelligence is an essential trait. 

Planning & Ideation

Applying the different types of planning can speed up processes and give a direction to achieve goals without hassle. 

Ideation is a complex task, but it can contribute a lot towards the plan created. Much like problem-solving, it requires brainstorming, asking the right questions, researching, and testing. 

Mentoring 

Mentoring team members can help them complete tasks and improve overall productivity in the team. Managers should be able to apply various mentoring techniques that help employees. 

Business Awareness

Knowledge of the dynamics in the market in the context of the organisation is precious. As market conditions change, the organisation needs to adapt to succeed. 

For managers, business awareness means understanding the values of the organisation. It also means that managers are aware of the top competitors, the financial priorities, and similar.

Parting Thoughts

These are the top management skills that will help improve your resume. To develop them, you can take up courses on management online and gather some work experience to apply them practically.