Management Skills, Knowledge and Performance

Management Skills, Knowledge and Performance

Management Knowledge: Managers need a knowledge base. This knowledge base provides a context for the manager’s activities, include information about an industry and its technology, company policies / procedures, and practices and actions, company goals and plans, company culture, the personalities of organization members, and important suppliers and customers.

Management Skills: Managers need three types of key skills to perform the duties and activities in the organization. These skills are:

A)    Technical skills are skills that reflect both an understanding of and a proficiency in a specialized field. Technical skills include knowledge of and proficiency in a certain specialized field, such as engineering, computers, accounting, or manufacturing. These skills are more important at lower levels of management since these managers are dealing directly with employees doing the organization’s work.

B)     Human skills are associated with a manager’s ability to work well with others both as a member of a group and as a leader who gets things done through others. Because managers deal directly with people, this skill is crucial. Managers with good human skills are able to get the best out of their people. They know how to communicate, motivate, lead, and inspire enthusiasm and trust. These skills are equally important at all levels of management.

C)    Conceptual skills are skills related to the ability to visualize the organization as a whole, discern interrelationships among organizational parts, and understand how the organization fit into the wider context of the industry, community, and world. Conceptual skills are the skills managers must have to think and to conceptualize about abstract and complex situations. Using these skills, managers must be able to see the organization as a whole, understand the relationships among various submits, and visualize how the organization fits into its broader environment.

Organizational Performance: The concept of organizational performance was analyzed by Peter Drucker into two terms Effectiveness and Efficiency.

1. Effectiveness is the ability to choose appropriate goals and to achieve those goals.

2. Efficiency is the ability to make the best use of available resources in the process of achieving goals. Efficiency is the ratio of inputs used to achieve level of outputs.