Basic Skills, Traits, and Competencies of a Manager

1. BASIC SKILLS, TRAITS, AND COMPETENCIES OF A
MANAGER
MAHAROOF PULLARAT & SHAARIQ AHAMED

2. FEW HYPOTHESIZE STATEMENTS ARE
 Managers are born and made. Some folks have a natural flair to be a manager and some
acquire essential skills to be a manager in a given situation.
 Not everyone may enjoy being a manager. While you may be ‘promoted’ to become a
manager, you may find that you don’t really enjoy the time spent talking to people, driving
them to results, and compiling status reports for your management.
 It appears that good managers do have many things in common, even though they may have
their own style of execution.

3. SKILLS, TRAITS, TALENTS, AND COMPETENCIES
Skills
Skill is defined as the ability or capacity to do something, acquired through specific training.
Traits
Traits are at the other end of the spectrum. Traits are personal. Traits are often linked to a
person’s character. Being shy is a trait. Some people are introverts and others are extroverts.
Talents
Talent is an oft-used word in business today. A pure definition of talent from Webster’s
Dictionary (1913) is as follows: Intellectual ability, natural or acquired; mental endowment or
capacity; skill in accomplishing; a special gift, particularly in business, art, or the like; faculty.
Competencies
Competencies are behaviors an employee displays in order to translate the knowledge and skills
and leverage the traits to deliver a performance on the job.

4. LOVE OF WORKING WITH PEOPLE
 Most managers will spend a majority of their time managing people.
 If you find satisfaction in just being with people and helping them achieve their results, you
have a primary quality to be a manager.

5. EASY TO APPROACH
 While you may love to work with people, the people around you should also love to work with
you, and a measure of that is the number of people who feel comfortable coming up and
talking to you.
 Do people come to you for problem solving and leave with more problems to solve? Do they
come to you to share the overload of work and leave with more work to do? Is there a fair give
and take in your interactions with people?

6. FARMER MENTALITY: SOW, NURTURE, GROW, REAP
 Farmers go through a cycle of preparation, investment, nurturing, protection, seeing it grow,
and then enjoying the benefits of all the effort. They go through this year after year and while
they make it better every cycle, they take the losses when decisions go bad. Nevertheless, the
basic approach remains the same
 Managers need to develop the traits of a farmer. You need to have a sense of preparation and
investment, since it’s the most basic, key part of the process and then wait while nurturing and
supporting for the benefits to roll in. This needs to be done with every person, process, and
project.

7. CORE VALUES: HONESTY, INTEGRITY, TRUTHFULNESS,
TRUSTWORTHINESS, CONSIDERATION FOR OTHERS,
AND MORE
 There is no substitute for core values like honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness. These are
very important for any employee in general, and are even more important for managers, as
managers have a high impact on people and processes.
 Values are the foundation of good behaviour and nothing less is expected from a leader

8. TOLERANCE FOR AMBIGUITY AND PATIENCE
 We all know: the better the map, the easier it is to follow, but unfortunately the working map
in an organization is not always clear.
 Ambiguity is the order of today’s knowledge industry. A lot of things are fuzzy and need
definition. It takes time to remove some of the fuzziness, and a manager needs to deal with it.
It will require tolerance for fuzziness and patience to figure it out.

9. GOOD COMMUNICATION SKILLS—ESPECIALLY
LISTENING
 Communication is the bread and butter for a manager.
 Not everyone may enjoy being a manager. While you may be ‘promoted’ to become a
manager, you may find that you don’t really enjoy the time spent talking to people, driving
them to results, and compiling status reports for your management.
 It appears that good managers do have many things in common, even though they may have
their own style of execution.

10. TEAM BUILDING—HIRING, RETAINING, DEVELOPING
GOOD PEOPLE, AND NURTURING TEAM SPIRIT
To start with, building teams requires good hiring skills. It requires:
• Position identification.
• Defining skill requirements for the position.
• Defining the process for identification and skills testing. Most organizations will have a pre-
defined process and supporting team to do this.
• Look for fitment.
• Deciding appropriate compensation.