What skills are needed for a manager to be effective

1.0 INTRODUCTION
The success of an organization is attributed by effective skills managers exhibit in running the affairs of the organization as they persuade employees to employ efforts and any other necessary resources that make the organization to achieve the desired results. An “effective” manager takes responsibility for ensuring that each individual within his department succeeds and that the team or business unit achieves results. Successful managers require both talent and skills. Management skills can be cultivated, developed and learned. Effective management skills can be developed through training, mentoring, and experience (Profiles International, 2013, 10:15). For the manager to be effective, there are some skills that must be exhibited and practiced in order to enhance organizational performance and these include; leadership and positive attitude skills, ability to manage, planning, delegating, coordinating, communication, team- relationship building, talent developing, problem solving, project management, and financial skills (Harwell, 2009). Elizabeth Best wrote in her 2009 publication of “Effective management skills,” that” effective management skills are now the currency of success. Whether your organization is concerned with business, commerce or industry, it will need managers who have well developed leadership skills, are excellent communicators and also effective strategic thinkers”. This publication will cover the skills the manager needs in order to be effective and how these possessed skills enhances organizational performance. It will also give impetus practical examples on how these skills are enforced and utilized in Zambian firms for instance, telecommunication’s company.

2.0 SKILLS REQUIRED FOR A MANAGER TO BE EFFECTIVE FOR AN ENHANCED ORGANISATIONAL PERFORMANCE Understanding what it takes to be a manager is not always easy. Many people- employers included- think that all it takes is being the person with most seniority or the best people skills. Fact is that to become an effective manager, you need to be efficiently and successfully integrate people and activities in order to meet your team’s needs and organization’s goals. Among the fundamental skills a manager needs according to Sunrise information services (1999-2013), are:

1. TECHNICAL

The manager should be proficient at specific tasks. This in turn helps to
provide the credibility or knowledge to persuade people to do certain things.

2. HUMAN
The manager has to know how to work with people.

1. CONCEPTUAL
The manager can see the organization as a whole. In other words, there has to be some knowledge of the organization and what it does and it interacts with other organizations.” Meanwhile, a management expert by the name of Charles Gibbon described the key elements of a quality manager as follows: “1. Possess well- defined goals.

2. Be able to allocate resources according to priorities. 3. Be able to make decisions, act upon them, and accept responsibility for them. 4. Be willing to compromise.

5. Be able to delegate and to depend on subordinates. 6. Be self- motivated and self- controlled. 7. Be able to organize, plan, and communicate for effective use of resources. 8. Maintain good relationships with others. 9. Possess emotional maturity and the internal resources to cope with frustration, disappointment, and stress. 10. Be able to appraise oneself and one’s performance objectively, to admit to being wrong. 11. Expect that one will keep on growing, improve one’s performance, and continue to develop.” (Person 1983, p.334) He further stated that a manager should do the following points in order do well; 1. If not in survival mode, a manager should avoid creating hierarchies in an organization as this will only create inferiority and superiority complexes in people after a while and will reduce the full potential of everyone. 2. Consistency in behavior is an important characteristic of a good manager. 3. Managers should perform their work exactly as they preach to others. This is all part of consistency. As Marion Nicolson, managing director of the Australian firm Library Locums, said: “Our philosophy is simple- we treat people with respect and do what we say we’ll do.” 4. Managers should be approachable.

5. Communicate with everyone regularly and when it is necessary. 6. Managers should support their staff through praise, encouragement and improving the work environment. 7. Managers should be leaders. They must have creativity and not just the practical skills to solve problems. 8. Managers should have the ability to confidently and appropriately direct others to work if they have not yet actualized and reached the level of being self- managed. Margaret (2007), states that “an effective manager should have the following skills:

1. CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS

The manager should describe and analyze a problem, identify causes of a problem, developing creative options and choosing the best course of action, and implement and evaluate effective and efficiency of the decision.

2. COMMUNICATION SKILLS

For a manager to be an effective communicator, he must have: listening skills, presentation skills, feedback skills and report writing skills respectively. Meanwhile, profiles international (2013) states that “a manager with good communication skills is able to instruct as well as he listens. Managers who can communicate effectively can process information, and then relate it back to their teams clearly. Effective managers should be able to understand, decipher, and relate the organization the organization’s vision back to their employees in order to maintain productivity.” Manager’s effective communication skills in any type of organization are key in promoting loyalty among employees. If you want your employees to work hard and be committed to your business, you have to keep them in the loop. Open communication helps foster loyalty and gives employees a sense of pride. It helps them understand how their work contributes to the company’s success.

3. CONFLICT MANAGEMENT SKILLS

Identifying sources of conflict- functional and dysfunctional conflicts, understanding personal style of conflict resolution, choosing the best strategy for dealing with a conflict, and developing skills in promoting constructive conflicts in organization and teams should be an ingredient of an effective manager. Conflict management skills are very much useful to cases that arise between a supervisor and a subordinate. The manager has to sort out the conflict amicably and tactfully by ensuring that no party is injured which might put them off from contributing the best input for an enhanced organizational performance. If there is conflict in an organization where the employees rise against management demanding improved conditions of services, what needs to be done is to develop workable in-house staff-management relation through regular communication and staff participation. Improve your human resource management practice, and develop a system of regular consultation through mutual respect to replace confrontation and accusation.

4. NEGOTIATION SKILLS

A manager should be able to distinguish distributive and integrative negotiations, position and principle negotiation, identifying common mistakes in negotiation and ways to avoid them, developing rational thinking in negotiation, and developing effective skills in negotiation that benefits all parties involved. The skill suits well in marketing and customer service delivery where customer service skills are very much needed to persuade the customer accept the price and product. It also helps in reasoning with the concerned customer who might be probably grieved in some way or the other. This skill in most cases is applied in persuading employees who might be demanding for some improved conditions of service.

5. SELF- AWARENESS AND IMPROVEMENT

Another skill is to be able to understand the concept of self- management, evaluate the effectiveness of self- management, developing creative and holistic thinking, understanding the importance of emotions in works as well in self- development, understanding of self- motivation, and effectively managing self- learning and change.” An effective manager is aware of their own personal development. In order to successfully develop and lead others, managers must seek improvement in themselves. A manager who is willing to learn more and use their natural talents to the best of their ability will be able to encourage the same behavior in employees (Profiles international, 2013, 09:20). A manager who is developed and learnt will know what skills to give his team which correlate with their work that will improve productivity and performance in general. This skill can be traced to firms dealing in sales delivery where the sales manager looks at himself and his employees so that the employees can be put in right positions and see the gaps in their skills which need to be closed in order to further performance by those employees thereby enhancing organization performance. 6. PLANNING SKILLS

Planning is another skill that managers will need to develop so that they can continue to oversee the operations (Melvin, 2009). A manager has to take a long- term view; while a team member will be working towards known and established goals, the manager must look further ahead so that these goals are selected wisely. By thinking about the eventual consequences of different plans, the manager selects the optimal plan for the team and implements it. The manager ensures that work is not repeated nor problems tackled too late, and that the necessary resources are allocated and arranged (Margaret, 2007). When planning skills are applied by the manager, organizing all necessary resources required to be employed in order to achieve the needed results. If there is effective planning by the manager the correct resources will be employed and utilized for the intended purpose and each employ will be aligned with the organization objectives, goals and targets, as well as what they are expected to do and contribute. This implies that the organizational performance will be enhanced because each and every employee knows the expectations from them.

7. LEADERSHIP SKILLS

An effective manager needs leadership skills as well as leadership is a specialized form of persuasion focused on getting other people to follow you in the direction you want to go. It’s assumed that the leader will match into battle at the army, so be prepared to make sacrifices you’re asking your employees to make (Harwell, 2009). A good manager should have all the basic leadership skills. There are various ways in which a person can handle different situations through various leadership roles. A good manager should be able to guide his/ her teammates to be able to perform well. Leadership does not mean dominating people. It means encouraging them such that they work to the best of their abilities and produce positive results (Kashmira, 2011). This skill can be enforced and utilized by a construction manager, say; in road construction this manager can take an active role by showing a paver how to pave the road especially when a paver encounters difficulties. This will improve performance of that employee leading to enhanced organizational performance in terms of achieving objectives, goals and results as a whole according to time schedule.

The government can help bring change in economy through the way the leaders handle certain situations as evidenced in the current Zambian president- President Sata’s leadership skills, and I quote, “Mr Dodia said in a statement at the weekend that the president was cognizant that Zambians must work, grow and be supported to build their businesses from micro enterprises into the large businesses of tomorrow through Government support and guided facilitation. In his recent letter to town clerks and council secretaries, President Sata urged councillors to immediately stop harassing street vendors and car wash operators and concentrate on garbage collection and unblocking of the drainage systems.” (TradeMark Southern Africa, 2011)

8. TEAM BUILDING SKILLS

Again, a manager needs team building skills in order to be an effective manager. Team building is not a simple task and the test of a good manager lies in the fact whether he can build a great team. For this, it is necessary that he learns what the skills of each team worker are and makes use of them in the best possible manner for the greater goal. He must possess the ability to listen and encourage his team as well. For a team to perform efficiently, a good manager should be able to motivate the team for their tasks. He/she should tackle the situation with professionalism to reach a positive conclusion. Effective managers should strive to build personal relationships with their teams. Employees are more likely to exceed expectations when they trust their manager. When managers establish a relationship with employees, it builds trust and employees feel valued.

Valued employees are more willing to get the job done right. The best managers know when their employees need more development, and how to ensure those developments are successful. Developing others involves cultivating each individual’s talents, and motivating those individuals to channel those talents toward productivity. Team building enables the manager to have a motivated workforce which is so determined to achieve results because everyone will be ambitious to achieve results with a view to expecting appreciation from the manager. This can be traced in Zambian firms such as mining firms, government institutions, construction companies and service industries. For instance, a shift manager in the pit would jump on an excavator to show an operator how to load trucks in an efficient manner by meeting the truck loading cycle, without delaying production, and without harming equipment in any way. This instills confidence in an operator as he is motivated by his manager.

9. ATTITUDE

An effective manager need to have a positive attitude day in and day out. Managers need to be able to keep an upbeat attitude. An attitude of this sort entices others to want to work for you. Because are enticed to put in the best performance, the objectives are achieved.

10. MANAGE

Managers need to manage the day to day operations within their department. Sometimes managers need to watch expenses to make sure they don’t get out of hand. This in effect, allows matching the projected results and the resources used up in achieving such results thus used as a measuring stick for performance of an organization as a whole. Time management skill is another aspect of an effective manager. Again, this can be witnessed from the move made by the Zambian government led by President Sata in quest of developing the nation through careful implemented policies and effective managing national resources as reported in African Economic Outlook (2013) that “Growth in other sectors is expected to remain equally robust, supported by infrastructure development and improvements in the business environment. In the agriculture sector, the government’s input subsidy to smallholder farmers will continue while growth in construction and transport will benefit from the government’s Link 8000 road infrastructure project. Expansion in energy infrastructure, a boost in the services sector from rising urban incomes and improvements in the regulatory environment will further strengthen Zambia’s medium-term growth.”

11. DELEGATE

Managers need to delegate authority and responsibility from time to time even though they are ultimately responsible for results. In essence, managers cannot be all over the show where employees are working to monitor their performance hence the need to delegate so that performance of employees is enforced well.

12. COORDINATE

An effective manager must be able to coordinate all the activities that take place within their department. For enhanced performance to be effected, the activities of the department must be coordinated well so as to achieve the projected results.

13. PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Harwell, (2009) states that “although both “Management” and “Project Management” contain the word “management,” they aren’t the same thing. Management implies a focus on people, while Project Management implies a focus on the project objective. You can be a manager and a Project Manager, or you can be a Manager without being a Project Manager. You can also be a Project Manager without being a Manager (in which case you don’t have people reporting to you- you just deal with overseeing the project- specific tasks). “ This is practiced in mining firms where division of work can be applied for instance; mining operations can be headed by a project manager who oversees all the specific tasks rather activities of the operations such as drilling, blasting, load and haul of ore (production), maintenance of equipment, survey and planning (engineering), training and material logistics departmental activities. This skill is widely applied at Kansanshi Mine.

3.0 APPLICATION OF EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT SKILLS IN MANAGING TELECOMMUNICATIONS COMPANY Managing of Telecommunications Company requires an effective manager with open mindedness to the needs of your organization, your telecommunication users and technological advances. With this, you are sure you will not lag behind as new advancements continually emerge. For a manager to manage a telecommunication company like Zambia Telecommunications Company, ZAMTEL, needs to have a broad of skills set to address issues arising from different personalities. These skills include; understanding of information/telecommunications technology department functions such as service desk, operations, development, quality, infrastructure support and maintenance, and client/customer relations and strong communication skills. Apart from technology and project management knowledge, leadership, motivation, conflict resolution, and exceptional writing skills are required. Leadership/Motivation

As an effective manager, you need to lead your company workforce through persuading them to follow your direction you want to move the company in terms of telecommunications improvement in terms of technology to meet the customer expectations which will give you competitive advantage. When taking a leading role, a manager should also motivate the rest of employees as they soldier on by encouraging them to fight the battle of operations challenges so as to emerge the leaders in information/telecommunications services in Zambia. Conflict resolution

Whenever there are conflicts perhaps within the company, the manager should stand firmly to find the best strategic ways of harmonizing the situation more especially through employee engagement and development in conflicts. A situation where conflicts arise from outside environment, like the customers because of unsatisfactory service delivery, again the manager has to strategize ways of controlling the situation and instill confidence to avoid losing such customers. Conversely, a manager will need to have effective project management skills to be able to research in the area of information/telecommunications technology. For example, researches on new technology on fibre/wireless application and use of satellite dishes unlike the overhead wires to transmit signals and information. These researches can result into greater performance of the company because it will be able to serve a wider coverage where wire transmission cannot reach. Effective management skills in general can be used in managing the telecommunications company, for instance, coordinating different divisions of the company such as information technology division in ensuring the development, enhancement and processing of an integrated information system, establishing and implementing the systems, technical strategy and direction for the company, ensuring optimum use of technology in the provision of information technology services to the company’s customers and staff, establishing maintenance and administrative systems and procedures and overseeing systems management control processes. The skills can also be used to for enhancing the building of solid relationships/partnerships with business and strategic partners.

4.0 CONCLUSION

Developing effective management skills to deal with specific challenges and problems of each organization is the urgent needs of many businesses and organizations in the global competitive environment, rapid changing of technology and environment. The new tendency of training and development of successful organizations over the world today is developing effective skills in dealing with specific challenge of their own organization to reach their own mission and objectives in the new organization that characterized by networked, flat, flexible, diverse, global organization. “Effective Management Skills” to help people and organization improving their own effectiveness and efficiency. Globalization and rapidly developing technology shows we are in a period of intense competition. Proper management is vital in these complex environments.

The quality of manager and effective management styles can determine the culture of the organization, the productivity of its staff, and, ultimately, success or failure. A manager should have the ability to direct, supervise, encourage, inspire, and co-ordinate, and in doing so facilitate action and guide change. Managers develop their own leadership qualities and those of others. Management utilizes planning, organizational and communications skills. To be an effective manager you must know yourself, your strengths and your weaknesses, and those of the people around you. You must know your objectives and have a plan of how to achieve them. You must build a team of people that share your commitment to achieve those objectives, and you must help each team member to achieve their best which will be able to attain a common goal.” (Margaret, 2007) It is also important that the manager takes time to develop all these skills.