It is a management skills that understand the relationships among subunits

“To be, or not to be” is not just a famous Shakespeare quote but a pivotal career question many young adults face when it comes to the choice of management path.

The job title of manager, director, VP or CEO can mean very different responsibilities and compensation rewards, depending on the company and industry.

Yet, there are 3 truths that can apply to the profession called “management”

1. The majority of management skills are soft skills. They are applicable and needed by many types of work that aren’t classified as management jobs
2. After you work for 10–15 years, you will likely be in some form of management role as long as your job involves working with people
3. The ultimate destination of management is the General Manager role, the focus of which will be vision, strategy and people (instead of hands on work)

Recent research continue to emphasize the importance of soft skills in employment. Therefore, it’s not a question of whether you should acquire soft skills, it’s how much effort you are prepared to put towards them.

The real question is therefore whether you want to reach a General Manager role as your ultimate career target. If the answer is yes, you should put more focus on developing the specific soft skills and navigate your career opportunities towards permanent jobs in large companies.

It should be noted that if you want to start your own business, you are indeed playing a General Manager role in your own company. The difference is because (often) your own business is usually smaller in size (3–20 staff), you will spend a lot more time on hands-on work using the related technical (hard) knowledge.

The sections below provide a comprehensive coverage of the types of manager roles, the functions managers perform and the skills required.

Knowledge in these areas will help you understand what it’s like to be a manager and what it takes to advance your career in the management path.

Types of Managers

Titles for management can differ greatly between companies and can be misleading. In a generic sense, managers can be classified into 3 types.

1. Strategic Manager. Senior executives with overall general management responsibilities. They develop company goals and plans, focus on long-term issues and are accountable for survival, growth and overall effectiveness of the company.
2. Tactical Manager. They translate general goals and plans developed by strategic managers into objectives that are more specific, together with the required actions. They focus on a shorter time horizon. Their main responsibilities are the mobilization and coordination of resources and through them execute the plan (or project) to achieve set targets. They are the middle managers with hands-on knowledge and make day-to-day decisions.
3. Operational Manager. They are the lower-level managers who supervise the operations of the company. They implement plans with specific scope and guidelines by working with the resources in their team. Their focus is to follow the guidelines to execute the plan in order to meet targets while staying within budget with acceptable quality.

In practice, there are roles in between these 3 types. Project managers mostly fall under Tactical Manager but for small projects with well established internal guidelines, it require skills closer to that of Operational Manager.

Senior managers, directors and VPs are usually more senior than Tactical Managers and assist the Strategic Manager to develop goals and strategies.

All level of managers share a similar set of skills but the emphasis and proficiency required in specific skills will differ as the weighting of their job functions changes.

Job Functions of Managers

A comprehensive set of manager functions is provided by Henry Mintzberg in his books “Simply Managing” and “Managers Not MBAs”.

1. Figurehead Role. Set direction and goals at organization level. Adds credibility to processes and decisions; performing ceremonial duties.
2. Leadership Role. Give meaning to events and people through context setting; create a sense of common purpose; link individual goals with corporate goals. Includes motivation and development of people within the company.
3. Liaison Role. Manage internal and external relationships to deliver specific objectives, including project execution, sales and vendor management.
4. Monitor Role. Identify problems and opportunities; detect changes and new pressures, build up knowledge from internal teams and external partners.
5. Disseminator Role. Communicate information and data with context, both internally and externally.
6. Spokesperson Role. Mostly responsible for external communication with media and stakeholders, but also ensure the message is consistent internally.
7. Entrepreneur Role. Design the changes required by the company to survive and grow through exploiting opportunities and addressing threats (external and internal).
8. Disturbance Handler Role. Usually an informal role for the selected manager who “firefights” specific, highly urgent and highly sensitive problems.
9. Resource Allocator Role. Allocate budget, people and infrastructural resources for work, project or initiatives required by the company.
10. Negotiator Role. An informal, implicit role to negotiate with superior and/or peers for scope, timeline and resources made available for their responsible work.

Taken individually, many of these manager functions is a job on its own (i.e. non-management job). For examples

• Coordinator, sometimes also named as project manager; just that a coordinator role would not include supervising and developing team members
• Spokesperson in the Public Relationship department of a company
• Resource allocator can be a role performed by a member of the department that owns the budget
• Negotiator, as in police, is a very specialized job

A manager may still perform only one role as above but the difference is he would have some colleagues reporting to him for the job. In that case, the manager will be responsible for the performance of his team and be accountable for the success or failure of his team’s work.

Skills required by Managers

A manager’s responsibilities are dependent on his functional role, formally assigned or informally undertaken. Therefore, skills of managers are best described against their functional roles.

This section outlines the skills and competencies required by each manager role. They inevitably overlap as some roles are closely linked and typically assumed by the same person (assigned responsibilities of the manager).

For example a figurehead is by nature a leadership role; project manager by definition is responsible for liaison and monitoring. Departments heads, other than leadership will need to undertake the disseminator and spokesperson role.

Figurehead — Vision. Big Picture Mindset. Ability to inspire. Moral integrity. Ability to conceptualize about abstract and complex situations. Ability to visualize how the organization fits into its broader environment (e.g. industry wide, geopolitics)

Leadership — Strategic mindset. Ability to see the organization as a whole, and to understand the relationships among the various subunits. Analytical ability, logical thinking, concept formation, inductive reasoning. Inspirational communication skills. Soft skills including creativity, motivation and influencing.

Liaison — Ability to work well with other people both individually and in a group. Ability to understand the feelings, attitudes and motives of others. Ability to communicate clearly and persuasively. Some technical knowledge of the business.

Monitor — Proficient technical knowledge of the business. Hard skills in planning, organization, control and risk identification/management.

Disseminator — Proficient communication skill, in particular “story-telling”, in order to correlate strategy, events, initiatives, value, risks, opportunities and facts into stories, conveying coherent and concise messages to different types of audience.

Spokesperson — Proficient language and public-speaking skills to deliver the stories and messages created by the “Disseminator”

Entrepreneur — Broad and deep understanding of technical, business and political aspects of the field to identify risks and opportunities. Strong risk and change management skills. Competencies requirement includes business acumen, big picture mindset, creativity and design.

Disturbance Handler — Proficient technical knowledge of the responsible area. Stress management, concise communication, logical thinking, prioritization and strong sense of urgency. Soft skills will focus on mobilizing people (as opposed to developing people) in this role.

Resource Allocator — Proficient technical knowledge, organization skills and business acumen. Logical thinking and communication skills are important to explain the allocation rationale, as is the ability to anticipate feelings and responses of the recipients (of the allocated resources).

Negotiator — Good technical knowledge supported by strong social, interpersonal, persuasion and communication skills. Most difficult negotiations are settled not because of logical argument but relationship management.

Even you work as freelance web coder or digital designer, you’d still need liaison, resource management (of your own), communication, monitoring and negotiation skills.

That’s why when you accumulate some years of experience and you have become proficient in these soft skills, it is quite possible for you to switch into middle management roles.

Management Path — The Choice

Since the soft skills you need to develop overlap with that required by junior/middle management, you are by default on a management path in your early career years.

You have no need to force yourself to decide whether you want to be a manager or not. You are better off trying out a variety of roles as opportunities open up.

When you have worked for 10–15 years, meaning you are likely at the age of making important life-event decisions (e.g. buying a property, getting married, having children) and you have approximately two-third of your career life remaining, it would be a good time for you to determine if you want to pursue a General Manager role as your ultimate career goal.

The reason is, after 10–15 years, you would know better what types of job you enjoy (or start getting bored), and that if you choose to go for a General Manager role, you need to change your gear and make specific choices to improve your chance of success.

If you do choose to target the General Manager role, you will need to increasingly focus your energy on developing your people skills and your visionary and strategic mindset. You should also start moving towards permanent jobs in large companies (or start your own business) when opportunities arise.

Once you land on a middle management role, you need to devote specific effort to earn your promotions and start climbing the management ladder.

The book “The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers” suggests a very insightful 80/20 principle. In career development, 80% of your effort on your assigned responsibility rarely differentiates you from others, it’s the last 20% of what you accomplish beyond your predefined objectives that matters.

As closing advice, not reaching a General Manager position when you have elected to pursue that path does not necessarily mean failure.

Many people with such ambition can reach senior management positions (e.g. Director, VP). The appeal of senior management position is that the job can have a much wider variety of challenges and satisfaction — you can help and grow people, make great impact to your company, lead the introduction of innovative technologies or business models, or even transform the company to survive industrial crises.

The choice of management path is highly dependent on whether permanent jobs are suitable for you. Please see my article “Contractor vs Permanent Job: Which is right for you?” for discussions in that area.

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