Management and Leadership Skills - Coursework Example

Management Skills 1. Introduction People who are given authority, acknowledged responsibility, and are held responsible for the results they achieve and the resources they used are in positions of command. People in positions of command will be more successful if they can manage and lead. The possession of managerial skills is commonly recognized as an advantage and a person who manages an organisation must have these managerial skills in order to succeed. Several skills are required to master the exigent nature of managerial work to meet the shifting trends in management. The most significant skills and proficiencies are those that allow managers to assist other in becoming more efficient and creative in their work. The following section of this paper discusses these managerial skills and their importance. 2. Management The term ‘management’ has both a universal and a more explicit, historical meaning. The universal meaning arises from out comparatively open relationship to the world (Burgoyne and Reynolds 1997, p.162). The basic meaning of ‘management’ is ‘getting things done’ through other people. However, we need to understand that management is a very complex task that needs more than just ‘getting things done’. Management according to Montana and Charnov (2000, p.2), is “working with and through other people to accomplish the objectives of both the organisation and its members”. This means introducing much importance on the members of the organisation and concentrating on the outcomes to be achieved rather than just objects or activities. This definition complements the perception that achievements of the member’s personal objectives should be incorporated with the achievement of organization’s objectives. The main purpose of management should be to obtain the ‘maximum prosperity’ for the employer, together with the maximum prosperity for each employee (Taylor 2004, p.3). ‘Maximum prosperity’ here is not the hefty profit of owner but bring the business to the highest level of excellence in order to make the prosperity stable. In the same way, it is not more earnings for the member of staff but the development of each individual to the highest level of maximum efficiency in order to accomplish the maximum quality of work his ability can do. Many managers are more interested in setting objectives that are more concern of various activities rather than the outcome to achieve which according to (Payne 1999, p.5) is flawed since objectives are much more positively stated as results. Although the objectives are very clear to the to the person who set it, lots of supposed ‘objectives’ are extremely oversimplified to be of real significance to the people who is going to perform it, as they are mostly unaware of the full requirements of the objectives. High-quality or effective management suggest that a manager must only state the nature of the job and the time of implementation and refrain from telling his team members how to perform the job. A manager is expected to achieve outstanding results because his success will affect the future of whole organisation (Sloma 2000, p.6). The activity of management was characterized by five specific functions. These functions are planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. Consequently, all managers plans, organises, staffs, coordinates, motivates, leads, and controls (Montana and Charnov 2000, p.6). Numerous skills are necessary to master the demanding nature of managerial job to endure the shifting trends in management. The most significant skill and competencies are those that let managers help others to become more efficient and creative in their work. These skills classified in three categories operational or technical, human, and conceptual. Although all three skills are crucial for managers, their relative significance tends to diverge by level of managerial accountability. Management is best defined as a set of competencies, approach, and qualities widely spread throughout the organisation and not as a limited number of ‘top’ or ‘leading positions’ since “management skills are not the property of the few” (Rees and Porter 2001, p.3). 3. Management Skills Managerial competency is a skill that contributes to a high performance in a managerial job thus the manager must develop personal competencies. These competencies include ‘leadership’ or the ability to influence others to carry out the task, ‘self-objectivity’ or the skill to assess oneself pragmatically, analytical thinking or the skill to understand and explicate relationships in information and behavioural flexibility or the skill to adjust personal behaviour to attain an objective. In addition, oral and written communication, personal impact, resistance to stress, and tolerance for uncertainty (Montana and Charnov 2000, p.9). The possession of skills is in general an asset and in numerous cases rather crucial. A manager managing an environment he does not understand then he will be in great and probably problematic situation. Management requires skills and knowledge since management does not take place in a vacuum but in specific set of conditions (Rees and Porter 2001, p.5). In a research into the careers of successful managers, a number of managerial skills, personal traits, and values have been identified as important. They are individuals who get things done, setting challenging goals for oneself, confident in expressing ideas, an forceful communicator, technically proficient, have team leading skills, loyal and sympathetic to management and contemporaries, having an optimistic approach to difficulties, prepared to make sacrifices for career, and having a personal meaning in life. In contrast, a number of characteristics have been also identified with careers, which have ended too early. These managers have specific performance problems, inadequate interpersonal skills, inadaptable, failures in staff selection and development, over managing, failure to develop an effective team, and over reliant on assistance of another (Hannaway and Hunt 1995, p.3) 3.1 Leadership skills Leadership skills are jointly recognised, as key elements in management because an excellent manager by description is a ‘leader’ and similarly a good ‘leader’ will also be a manager. No one can educate a manager on leadership as it is something that is learned from experience or practice. Audacity and persistence tend to make an individual a leader in all situations. “They are natural or born leaders” (Adair 1998, p.3). However, there are a number of complications to this approach. First, leadership qualities found in studies or books on leadership have significant disparities in describing individuality and character. Next is the assumption that leaders are born and not made is not going to stand on its own since it is not correct. This is because there are variations in terms of one’s potential for leadership and this potential could be developed. The skill of a manager who works hard at leadership will become more consistent or unconscious and he will turn into a natural leader. Personality and character is indispensable on leadership and there are qualities that a manager should have. Fundamentally, managers should demonstrate, and perhaps even show the virtues expected or required in a working group. This is because these skills are very essential to the credibility of a manager to lead. However, these qualities are not by themselves adequate to create an effective leader since interest, veracity, toughness, fairness, warmth, humility, and confidence are also necessary (Adair 1998, p.5). Successful leaders inspire people to take on the organization’s objectives as their own and to do their best to realize that objective. They motivate people to accomplish more than they ever thought they could. They create loyalty to the organisation and get people work mutually rather than against one another. In essence according to Gorman (2003, p.43), leaders must build trust, share a vision, direct people on the right tasks, create accountability, maintain alignment, and coach and mentor. These skills are more intricate and more complicated to learn than management skills but they are skills that a leader must learn, practice, and use. Leaders build trust by taking into account the good of every stakeholder when making decisions and using their authority appropriately. Successful leaders build trust by promoting teamwork since it makes people trust one another, share information openly, give their best effort, and support one another. Trust on people does not necessarily mean liking them as it is not based on personal affection but anchored in respect and expectations. Similarly, stakeholders do not need to like their leaders nor does the leader have to like all of them. Excellent leaders are learner of human nature and they understand that people want a sense of purpose, “a mission they can believe in” (Gorman 2003, p.45). Leaders recognize the significance of generating share vision as people with a vision will do their job better and with better sense of achievement than they ever would for just wages. Successful leaders direct people’s interest on the most important tasks, tasks that make the organisation move forward towards realization of its vision and attainment of its objectives. They hold people responsible by allowing for mistakes and failures and appreciating that they are part of the process, predominantly when people are trying to pursue challenging goals. In the same way, leaders hold themselves responsible for the things they say, do, and deliver since he demean his integrity and trust if he fails to “hold himself to the same level of accountability as he holds his people” (Gorman 2003, p.49). Organisational alliance demands that strategy, structure, resources, beliefs, words, actions, and goals all line up logically and fairly. Stability and similarity produce organisational alignment. The communication from management and the commitment of resources must be aligned with one another and with the company’s goals and strategies. A true leader must also be a coach and mentor. Coaching and mentoring bring all the other leadership skills down the person-to-person level. Coaching and mentoring are ways by which “a leader can build trust, share his or her vision, focus people on the right tasks, create accountability, and maintain alignment” (Gorman 2003, p.49). 3.2 Self-objectivity People do not on average look for or quickly acknowledge information about weaknesses and this information is only helpful if the self-reflection, self-objectivity, and insight are already present (Murphy and Riggio 2003, p.254). Truthful self-assessment is a competency in which people have a realistic or grounded observation of themselves. These people understand their strengths and weaknesses and recognize their boundaries. Boyatzis (1982, p.134) explain that these people can exhibit self-assessment skills and reality testing skills to test their insight and belief about themselves against some other view. People who possess precise self-assessment act in positive ways. For instance, they are capable of describing and evaluating the usefulness of their actions in specific circumstances. Outcome of a particular actions are attributed to personal strengths or weaknesses. However, people such as these are not essentially modest or demonstrating modesty because they easily acknowledge their strengths. At the same time, these strengths are not exaggerated or glorified. The strengths are in the perspective of admitting limitations or weaknesses. People with accurate self-assessment generally recognize and ask for help or activities to deal with their weaknesses. This behaviour can be observed ore often in people who has both accurate self-assessment and ‘proactivity’. This skill appears associated to effectual performance as a leader and could be considered a threshold competency (Boyatzis 1982, p.134). 3.3 Analytical Thinking “Intuition relies on experience whereas analytical thinking relies more on abstract logic” (Burker and Cooper 2005, p.101). Numerous barriers to critical thinking such as lack of motivation, impulsive decisions, and delay are associated to a lack of self-management skills (Gambril 2006, p.213). People with critical and analytical thinking competency frequently examine basic assumptions about work and how it gets done, distinguishing core principles, root causes, and details by breaking down information and data and their inference, and drawing conclusions based on their analysis. They appreciate the intricacies of particular issues and improve the components of those issues to make them more controllable by applying sound reasoning (Tobin and Pettingell 2008, p.71). This type of thinking slices complex problems into smaller, more manageable sub problems so that they can be deal with independently. The core assumption upon which analytical thinking originated from the notion that “if we makes each parts of a system perform to its maximum capability, the system as a whole will benefit” (Dettmer 1998, p.7). There are leaders who tend to be linear thinkers and are fascinated with rules, regulations, and protocols. They are structured in the way they accomplish things. They tend to be organized and to resist change. The structured thinkers can be compared with people who tend to be analytical in their thinking. These are the problem solvers who are very rational and enjoy abstract thinking. They recognize problems that can result in significant opportunities for the organization (Thierauf 2001, p.81). “They like to put facts and numbers together and these are good managers” (Rowitz 2008, p.42). Analytical thinkers rely upon thorough analysis, assessment, deductive and inductive logic, and clear thinking. They have critical cognitive skills to understand, scrutinize, assess, deduce, elucidate, and self-regulate. Analytical thinkers are curious, sensible, truth seeking, confident in reasoning, unbiased, and organized (Wescott 2006, p.362). 3.4 Behavioural Flexibility Relational competencies include a collection of abilities and skills that facilitate multifaceted interactions with organization subordinates, peers, and superiors. These competencies include behavioural flexibility, negotiation skills, conflict management, persuasion, and social influence skills. Complex problem solving necessitates behavioural flexibility if a leader is to react appropriately to a numerous organizational situations. Behavioural flexibility is associated with social knowledge structures, event schema or scripts that determine a wide range of suitable leadership reactions to the several problem scenarios that can take place in organization domains. Essentially, to act flexibly, leaders require a large response repertoire and the skill to choose the right response for particular situational demands. “A large repertoire is reflected in the number of different social knowledge structures encoded by an individual” (Riggio et. al. 1999, p.42). The concept of flexibility as a key leader quality has turn into an important theme in studies concerning managerial leadership. Effective leadership is the ability to carry out the numerous roles and behaviours that define the requisite variety implied by an organization or environment context. Thus, leader effectiveness requires the mastery of opposing behaviour patterns (Riggio et. al. 1999, p.42). Research explaining that behavioural flexibility is linked to leadership comes from two sources. One source is experimental studies using rotational designs in which subjects are rotated across group tasks. This research shows that stable individual differences are associated with leadership emergence and that these leaders appear to changing their behaviour to meet task demands. The second involves linking individual difference in self-monitoring capacity with leadership emergence or perceptions. Although self-monitoring has a component linked with social wisdom, it is generally a measure of behavioural flexibility (Hogg and Tindale 2003, p.295). In an assessment of the relationship between interpersonal sensitivity and perceived leader status across different group situations, research found that 59 percent of the discrepancies in leadership emergence were trait based, and suggested that behavioural flexibility and social perceptiveness were the core leadership traits that accounted for this variance (Greenberg 1994, p.48). Social intelligence is a multifaceted process consisting of the ability to perceive and accurately construe critical situational eventualities and utilize this information to obtain, choose, and employ the behavioural responses most suitable for each situation. This concept includes skills related to social perceptiveness and behavioural flexibility. Behavioural flexibility skill is important because in making and communicating sense to team members, “team leaders may often have to perceive and understand subtle social cues” (Day et. al. 2004, p. 319). 3.5 Oral and Written Communication “Communication skills are vital to leader’s role as a sense maker” (Day et. al. 2004, p.319). It is the process by which information is exchanged clearly and accurately between two or more members in the agreed manner with the appropriate terminology. It is the skill to make clear or acknowledge the receipt of information. It is through communication that leaders can build a hybrid third culture that make use of the cultural diversity present within the team, which is then embedded within the shared mental models that motivate effective coordination (Day et. al. 2004, p.319). Leaders must be a master of communication and most leaders already possess outstanding communication skills, as they could not make to where they are now without them. However, training in effective communication is still preferable though it is only refresher training for some. The leader must communicate the vision to the other members of the organization and communicating a vision is a much different task than communicating directives or concrete ideas. Visions of organizations that embody abstract values are unavoidably abstract in nature and to put across the vision to others, the leader must translate the abstractions to concretes (Pyzdek 2003, p.154). 3.6 Personal Impact Decisions made by leaders influence the fidelity and loyalty of their followers and their works overall. Decisions have both direct and indirect consequence. Direct consequence have an instant, personal impact on followers, whereas indirect consequence take time to assess, are personal in nature, and frequently cause a chain reaction. “Whether a decision has direct or indirect effects on the followership, the leader’s decision allows subordinates to rise in glory or go down in flames” (Weller 2001, p.25). Leaders have a deep personal impact on the mood of the organization or organizational area they direct. Largely, employees judge an initiative by the person who is leading it. Many things are said, but it is ultimately, “what leaders do that makes the difference” (Spitzer 2007, p.128). People observe the leader most of the time, looking and listening for the messages he or she will express in managing them. Consequently, a leader must be very conscious of the delicate messages he or she is transmitting to others. All of this plays a part to a leader’s personal impact. High impact leaders use influential words to make team members think that they are more valuable than the business. Leaders do this in a natural way because it will appear as artificial and counterproductive in the end if it is perverted. Personal impact power entails the use of individual qualities, such as elements of personality, personal style or charm, or physical features or charming appearance, in order to persuade others (Harkins 1999, p.146). 3.7 Resistance to stress “Knowing how to manage stress will help you become a better leader” (Baillie et. al. 1989, p.259). Maintaining self-control in traumatic situations or when being given bad news was another critical skill that set distinguished outstanding leaders from their peers. Having the skills to manage stress provides leaders with the ability to keep their composure or prevent them from being overpowered by emotions in stressful situations. This ability is to remain calm in stressful situations help leaders make sound and critical decisions in circumstances when their organizations have the greatest need and reliance on them. Confidence plays a significant role in the management of stress. Leaders have to trust that they have the potential and skills to counter any difficulty that would come up from a dynamic business marketplace. The underpinning of leader confidence is technical and strategic proficiency as it provides leaders with the knowledge base to productively solve problems and make sensible decisions. More importantly, leader’s level of physical fitness plays a considerable role in combating stress, as good physical conditioning tends to strengthen leaders’ confidence by helping them deflect the decline in cognitive efficiency linked with continuing exposure to stress (Crandall 2007, p.114). 3.8 Tolerance for uncertainty Tolerance for uncertainty is part of the social context of cognition as well as part of cognition itself. Although it restrained the interpersonal interactions within organization, it is also important in risk assessment and decision-making. Tolerance for uncertainty illustrates the level of risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity acceptable by members of a group (Rouse and Boff 2005, p.244). It refers to the extent to which a leader is able to tolerate uncertainty and delay without anxiety or getting distressed. “Leader’s ability of coping with uncertainties is found positively associated with innovativeness” (Aydogan 2008, p.122). People with a low tolerance of uncertainty like to know all the rules and facts before they act, to reduce the risk of mistakes. This means they can waste time searching for rules and structures instead of getting on with the job. In contrast, people with a high tolerance of uncertainty favour thinking on their feet and getting down to work, even if they are uncertain of some facts (Cullingworth 2004, p.298). 4. Conclusion Development of personal competencies is essential to people with managerial job. These competencies are skills that are necessary for better performance and quite indispensable. Leadership, self-objectivity, analytical thinking, behavioural flexibility, communication, personal impact, resistance to stress, and tolerance for uncertainty are the most important skills a leader should possess. Leadership skills are the key ingredient in management. Effective leaders motivate, inspire, and generate loyalty to the organization. They build trust, share a vision, focus people on the right tasks, create accountability, maintain alignment, and coach his members. They see their strengths and weaknesses and know their limitations. They understand the complexity of certain issues and crystallize the components of those issues to make them more manageable by applying sound reasoning. Effective leaders perform multiple roles and behaviours that circumscribe the requisite variety implied by an organization or environment context. They possess exceptional communication skills and profound personal impact on the climate of the organization or organizational area that they lead. They are not overwhelmed by emotions and keep their composure in stressful situations. Finally, they can tolerate uncertainty without anxiety or getting upset. 5. Bibliography Adair John. 1998. Leadership Skills: Management shapers. CIPD Publishing, U.K. Aydogan. 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