Ten Skills Every Manager Needs

1. Every manager needs to be able to ask for and take in feedback from their
employees. This is a fundamental leadership skill that most managers lack

2. Every manager must develop the ability to take an employee's perspective and
see things from the employee's point of view.

3. Every manager needs to understand how his or her function fits into the
overall organization and how their business competes in its marketplace.

4. Every manager needs to learn self-reflection. They need to notice their own
fear reactions — for example, when their boss is upset with them or when they are
upset with one of their employees.

5. Every manager needs to know how to acknowledge and reinforce employees .

True leaders accept their employees' mistakes as their own learning
opportunities — after all, being a leader means taking responsibility for
everything that happens in the department.

6. Every manager needs to learn to stand up for their teammates when a higher-
up manager gives an order that isn't feasible or achievable. Leadership means
facing fear and stepping through it, but this aspect of leadership gets short shrift
in traditional leadership training. If you can't stand up for your employees when
there's pressure on you to conform, you might be a supervisor — but you are not a
leader.

7. Every manager needs to learn to manage his or her own career, completely
apart from managing their department.Leadership training can incorporate the
idea of career self-determination and help managers develop their own long-term
career plans.

8. Every manager needs to learn to communicate with people of different ages,

ethnic backgrounds, religions, political stripes and personality types and must
learn to be open to a wide range of perspectives. It takes patience and focus to
step out of our traditional biases, but it is part of every leader's job to do so.

9. Every leader must learn how to build trust and community at work. Without
trust, a department can't function the way it should.

10. Finally, every manager must learn to be human at work, especially when
conditions are ripe for fear-based management tactics to creep in. When we lose
our humanity at work, we are no longer leaders.