Managerial skills for today

PUBLISHED FOR EDUCATIONAL REASONS FOR KISHOR

In order to build and sustain an effective organisation, we need to have competent managers. Management becomes the vital link between economic progress, organisational effictiveness and peoples performance.

Senior managers play a signigficant role in their organisation and the development of their nations.

Therefore, the importance of managers in ensuring the success of an organisation is an undeniable fact.

What constitutes a competent manager in the 21st century?

What are the essential managerial skills required in managing subordinates and in planning, coordinating as well as making decisions effectively at different levels of management?

According to (Katz 1974), a manager is one who directs the activities of other persons and undertakes the resopnsibility for achieving certain objectives through their efforts. A skill signifies an ability that can be developed and not necessarily inborn.

An effective manager in the 21st century should possess eight essential skills. They are Technical skill, Human skill, Conceptual skill, Political skill, Social skill, Creative skill, and Spiritual skill.

Techinical skill:

According to (Katz 1974), technical skills signifies an understanding of and a proficency ina specific kind of activity, particularly those involving methods, processes, procedures or techniques. Technical skills encompass specialised knowledge, an analytical ability whithin that speciality and facility in the use of tools and techniques of the specific disciplines.

Human skill:

The nation of human skill refers to the manager's ability to work effectively within the team one leads (Katz, 1974). This skill is principally related to working with people. It is demonstrated in the way the individual perceives, the extent to which one is aware of one's own attitudes, assumptions and beliefs about other individuals.

Conceptual skill:

Katz describes this skill as the ability to see the enterprise as a whole, including recognizing how the various functions of the organisation depend on each other; the changes affectiong all the others; the relationship of the individual business to the industry, community as well as the political, social and economic forces of the nation as a whole.

Political skill:

According to Ferris et. al. (2000), political skill involves and interpersonal style that combines social awareness with the ability to communicate well. Political skill is not a single trait or skill. Rather, it reflects an integrated composite of internationally consistent, mutually reinforcing and compatible skills and abilities that create a synergistic social dynamic that defies precise description.

Social skill:

Ferries et. al. (2000) postulate that with the nature of jobs today, social skill plays an important part such as in facilitating, coaching, influencing and coordinationg with others. Social skill encompasses Social intelligence, emotional intelligence, ego-resilency, social self-efficiency, slef monitoring, tacit knowledge and practical intelligence.

Social intelligence:

This pertains to the ability to understand and manage people. This concept plays a vital role in political skill as well because it concerns understanding and managing people in work or organisational settings.

Emotional intelligence:

This deals with the ability to monitor onew own and others' feelings and emotions and to apply this information in one's demonstration and regulation of emotions. It can be seen as encompassing the ability to control impulses and delay gratification, to regulate one's moods and to be able to empathise.

Ego-resilency:

It is a form of social skill that basically leads to effective environmental adoptation via the capacity for self-regulation of bahaviour towards differing and shifting environmental demands and cues.

Social self-efficiency:

Relates to judgement of personal capability in social interactions and contexts. It is a fundamental belief in one's ability to control social sitautions that leads to an optimistic attitude and positive behaviour.

Self-monitoring:

It is a ability to understand what is socially appropriate in specific circumstances. It signifies the ability to control one's emotional expression and the ability to use this effectively to project desired expressions.

Tacit knowldege and practical intelligence:

Pertain to action-oriented relevant knowledge that permits people to achieve goals they personally value. It is knowldege acquired without the assistance of others, pertaining to practical intelligence based on unspoken rules a the workplace.

Creative skill:

This skill is essential for competent manager in the 21st century because one needs to deal with a highly competitive business environment which requires one to overcome one's own challenges creatively before one can achieve competitive advantage over competitors.

Adversity skill:

This skill is associated with the ability to overcome any obstacle encountered by any person. Such an ability is also essential for a competent manager in this century because one must be able to surpass any difficulty to reach one's target.

Spiritual skill:

Finally, spiritual skill is essential for competent manager in the 21st century because one must possess the spiritual strength to handle a complex and swiftly changing environment; otherwise the manager might succumb to pressure and become incapacitated.

In a nutshell, these eight managerial skills are essential for a competent manager in the 21st century to ensure that one has all the basic skills to deal with a highly competitive, complex and fast shifting business environment.

What all managers have to learn is that to be successful, they must manage in a manner that fits each of their unique personalities.

Source: The star, 30/01/2006

Meauring HR's contibution:

PUBLISHED FOR EDUCATIONAL REASONS FOR KISHOR

Readers encouraged to mail me at: shrs_kishor@hotmail.com

STRATEGY, METRICS AND THE HR SCORECARD

Info: This will provie a good example that ilustrates HR's role in formulating and esecuting company strategy.

Strategy: The company's long-term plan for how it will balance its internal strengths and weaknesses with its external opportunities and threats to maintain a competitive advantage.

HR's priorities and tasks evolve over time, because they need to fit or make sense in terms of the company's strategic direction. As well see through out this article, HR's central task is always to provide a set of servi es that make sense in terms of the company's strategy.

A strategy is a the company's plan for how it will balance its internal strengths and weaknesses with external opportunities and threats in order to maintain a competitive advantage. Ferrari therefore has different HR policies and practices than does Ford, and Wal-Mart has different HR policies than does Neiman Marcus.

Trends like globalization and increased competition have placed HR front center in most firm's strategic planning efforts. For example, we will see that HR managers today are more involved in partnering with their top managers in both designing and implementing their companies strategics. Today's emphasis in gainng competitive advantage through people makes input from the department that helps to screen, train, appraise, and reward employees too important to ignore when the company is reviewing its strategic options. Today's focus on competitiveness and operational improvements also means that all managers - including HR - must be much more adept at expressing their departmental plans and accomplishments in mesurable terms.

Top management wants to see, precisely, how the HR manager's plans will make the company more valuable, for instance by boosting morale and, thereby, improving performance.

An Emphasis on Performance

A recent survey of HR professionals shows that the pressure for more performance hasn't been lost on HR mangers. [When asked to rate the importance of various business issues, their five top choices were competition for market share, price competition/ price control, governmental regulations, need for sales growth, and need to increase productivity].

HR managers also know that establishing competitive, high-performance work systems under condition of rapid change isn't easy. This helps to explain why another survey of HR executives found that their main concern is "Managing change". So, today's successful HR manager must have the capacity to visualize how he or she can adopt HR systems to support the companies strategic needs and the ability to execute the required changes. These changes may range from new incentive plans that encourage employee innovation, to centralized HR call centers to boost the HR unit's efficiency, to moving more HR activities onto the web, and to organizing telecommuter programs.

For HR, this focus on performance also requires more measurability. Management expects HR to provide measurable benchmark based evidence for its current efficiency and effectiveness, and for the expected efficiency and effictiveness of new or proposed HR programs. In other words, management expects solid, qualified evidence that HR is contributing in a meaningful and positive way to achieving the firm's strategic aims.

Continue from the last posted.

PUBLISHED FOR MY OWN EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY

Technology is not the only trend driving this change from "brawn to brains". Today over two-thirds of the US workforce is employed in producin and delivering services, not products. Between 1998 and 2008, the number of jobs in goods- producing industries will stay almost unchanged, at about 25.5 million, while the nmber in servie-producing industries will climb from 99 million to 118.8 million. Several trends account for this with global competition, more manufacturing jobs are shifting to low-wage countries, as noted. For example, Levi Strauss, one of the last clothing manufacturers in the US, closed the last of its American plants in 2003.

There has also been dramatic increase in productivity that lets manufacturers produce more with fewer workers. Just-in-time manufacturing techniques link day-to-day manufacturin schedules more precisely to customer demand, thus squeezing waste out of the system and reducing inventory needs.

As manufacturers integrate Internet-based customer ordering with just-in-time manufacturing systems, scheduling becomes even more precise. More manufacturers are partnering with their suppliers to create integrated supply chains. For examples, when a customer orders a Dell computer, the same Internet message that informs Dell's assembly line to produce the order also signals the video screen and keyboard manufacurers to prepare UPS to pick up their parts at a particular time. The net effect is that manufacturers have been squeezing slack and inefficiencies out of the entire production system, allowing companies to produce more products with fewer employees.

In general, the jobs that remain- and especially the manufacturing jobs - require more education and more skills. For example, the five occupations projected to grow fastest in a first decade of the 2000s depend on computers - computer engineers, computer support specialists, computer systems analysts, database administrators, and desktop publishing specialists.

Furthermore, automation and just-in-time maufacturing systems mean that even manufacturing jobs require more reading, mathematics and communication skills than before.

Skilled machinist "A" illustrates the modern blue-color worker. After an 18-week training course, this former college student now works as a team leader in a plant where about 40% of the mahcines are automated. In older plants, machinists would manually control machines that cut chunks of metal into things like engine parts.

Today "A" and his team spend much of their time typing commands into computerized machines that create prescsion parts for proudcts including water pumps. Like other machinists, he earn about $45,000 per year (including overtime).

Also reflecting the desires to keep costs down, there has been a shift to using nontraditional workers. Nontraditional workers include those who hold multiple jobs, or who are "contingent" or part-time workers, or people working in alternative work arrangements (such as a mother-daughter team sharing and glight attendant job at JetBlue Airlines). Today almost 10% of American workers - 1.3 million people - fit this nontraditiona workforce category of these about eight million are independent contractors who work on specific projects and move once the projects are done.

For mangers, this means a growing emphasis on knowldege workers and human capital.

Human Capital Refers to the knowldege, education, training, skills and expertise of firm's workers. Today, "thecenter of gravity in employment is moving fast from manual and clerical workers to knowldege workers, who assist the command and control model that business took from military 100 years ago." In this environment, managers need new world-class HR Management systems and skills to select, train, and motivate these employees and to get them to work more like committed partners.

Workforce Demographics: At the sametime, workforce demographics are changing. Most notably, the workforce is becoming more diverse as women, minority - group members, and older wokers enter the workforce.

Between 1992 and 2005, wokers classified as Asian and others will jump by just over 81%, Hispanics will represent 11% of the civilian laborforce in 2005, up from 8% in 1992.

About two-thirds of all single mothers (seperated, divorced, widowed, or never married) are in the labor force today, as are almost 45% of mothers with children under 3 years old.

The labor force is also getting older. As the baby boomers born between 1946 and 1960 prepare to leave the labor force in the next few years, employers will face what one study calls a "severe" labor shortage, and will have to "rethink attitudes toward older workers and re-examine a range of established practices, from retirement rules to employee benefits."

About 11% fewer American born between 1966 and 1985 than were born in the 20 yrears of World War II, so there will be fewer people to replace the baby boomers. Furthermore, over the past 50 or so years, the proportion of women in the workforce has risen dramatically, but is now projected to stop gorowing. America thus can't depend on the entry of women into the labor force to counterbalance the existing baby boomers.

With the aging of its workers, "America is facing a demographic shift as significant as the massice entry of woemn ito the owrkforce that began the 1960s. From the 1970s through the 1990s, many emploers improved their competitive positions by instituting policies and benefits (such as more flexible hours) that attreacted more women to the workforce. Employers will now have to take similar steps to fill the openings left by retiring employees - probably by rehiring retirees.

Many frims are already instituting new policies aimed at encouraging aging employees to stay, or at attracting previously retired emplyees. Aerospace Corp. lets employees coninue to work part time rather than retire completely. Oracle Corp. retrains older recruits to be Information Technology workers. Ford offers numerous new elder care services to employees, to help current employees better cope with the demands of supporting elderly family members.

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