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The Importance of Interpersonal Skills

Managers need a whole cadre of skills to create a productive workplace,
including technical and quantitative skills.
Leadership and communication skills are critical to organizational success.
When managers have solid interpersonal skills, there are positive work
outcomes for the organization.
These outcomes include:
Lower turnover of strong quality employees,
Improved recruitment pools for filling employment positions, and
A better financial performance.
2. What Do Manager Do
The job of managers is not to just accomplish the task, but to accomplish
the task through other people.
In order to facilitate that process, managers must make decisions; allocate
resources, and direct activities toward the desired outcomes.
Managers do this in the context of an organization, a consciously
coordinated social unit composed of two or more people that functions on
a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals.

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Management Functions
Henri Fayol, a French businessman, first proposed in the early part of the twentieth
century that all managers perform five functions:
1. Planning
2. Organizing
3. Commanding
4. Coordinating
5. Controlling.
Today, these functions have been condensed to four:
1. Planning
2. Organizing
3. Leading
4. Controlling
1. Planning
Planning involves defining goals, establishing strategies for achieving those goals,
and developing plans to integrate and coordinate activities.
Because organizations exist to achieve some particular purpose, Managers must
define that purpose and the means for its achievement.
2. Organizing
Organizing involves arranging and structuring work to accomplish the
organizations goals.
Organizing as a process involves:

Identification of activities.
Classification of grouping of activities.
Assignment of duties.
Delegation of authority and creation of responsibility.
Coordinating authority and responsibility relationships.

All the above mentioned activities performed by Managers.

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3. Leading
Leading involves working with and through people to accomplish organizational
goals.
When managers motivate subordinates, help resolve work group conflicts,
influence individuals or teams as they work, select the most effective
communication channel, or deal in any way with employee behavior issues, theyre
leading.
4. Controlling
Controlling involves monitoring, comparing, and correcting work performance.
After goals and plans are set (planning), tasks and structural arrangements put in
place (organizing), and people hired, trained, and motivated (leading), there has to
be some evaluation of whether things are going as planned. To ensure that goals
are being met and that work is being done as it should be, managers must monitor
and evaluate performance. Actual performance must be compared with the set
goals. If those goals arent being achieved, its the managers job to get work back
on track. This process of monitoring, comparing, and correcting is the controlling
function.
Since these four management functions are integrated into the activities of
managers throughout the workday, they should be viewed as an ongoing process
and they need not the done in the above sequence.

Mintzbergs Managerial Roles and a Contemporary Model of Managing

In the late 1960s, Henry Mintzberg conducted a precise study of managers at work.
He concluded that managers perform 10 different roles, which are highly
interrelated.
Management roles refer to specific categories of managerial actions or behaviors.
Overall there are ten specific roles performed by managers which are included in
the following three categories.
1. Interpersonal roles include figurehead, leadership, and liaison activities.
2. Informational roles include monitoring, disseminating, and spokesperson
activities.
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3. Decisional roles include entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource

allocator, and negotiator.
1. Interpersonal Roles
The ones that, like the name suggests, involve people and other ceremonial duties.
It can be further classified as follows
Leader Responsible for staffing, training, and associated duties.
Figurehead The symbolic head of the organization.
Liaison Maintains the communication between all contacts and informers
that compose the organizational network.

2. Informational Roles
These roles related to collecting, receiving, and disseminating information.
Monitor Personally seek and receive information, to be able to
understand the organization.
Disseminator Transmits all import information received from outsiders to
the members of the organization.
Spokesperson On the contrary to the above role, here the manager
transmits the organizations plans, policies and actions to outsiders.
3. Decisional Roles
These roles entail making decisions or choices.
Entrepreneur Seeks opportunities. Basically they search for change,
respond to it, and exploit it.
Negotiator Represents the organization at major negotiations.
Resource Allocator Makes or approves all significant decisions related to
the allocation of resources.
Disturbance Handler Responsible for corrective action when the
organization faces disturbances.
As managers perform these roles, Mintzberg proposed that their activities included
both reflection (thinking) and action (doing).
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Our manager in the chapter opener would do both as she manages. For instance,
reflection would occur when Lisa listens to employees or customers problems,
while action would occur when she resolves those problems.
Although the functions approach represents the most useful way to describe the
managers job, Mintzbergs roles give additional insight into managers work.
Some of the ten roles do not fall clearly into one of the four functions, since all
managers do some work that is not purely managerial.

Recently, Mintzberg completed another hands-on and up-close study of managers

at work and concluded that:
Basically, managing is about influencing action. Its about helping organizations
and units to get things done, which means action.
Based on his observations, Mintzberg went on to explain that a manager does this
in three ways:
(1) by managing actions directly (for instance, negotiating contracts, managing
projects, etc.),
(2) by managing people who take action (for example, motivating them, building
teams, enhance the organizations culture, etc.), or
(3) by managing information that propels people to take action (using budgets,
goals, task delegation, etc.).
The manager at the center of the model has two rolesframing, which defines
how a manager approaches his or her job; and scheduling, which brings the frame
to life through the distinct tasks the manager does.
A manager enacts these roles while managing action in the three planes: with
information, through people, and sometimes by taking action directly. Its an
interesting perspective on the managers job and one that adds to our
understanding of what it is that managers do.

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3. Management Skills
Managers need certain skills to perform the challenging duties and activities
associated with being a manager. Robert L. Katz found through his research in the
early 1970s that managers need three essential skills
1. Technical skills
2. Human skills
3. Conceptual skills
1. Technical Skills
Technical skills are job-specific knowledge and techniques needed to proficiently
perform specific tasks.
These skills tend to be more important for first-line managers because they
typically are managing employees who use tools and techniques to produce the
organizations products or service the organizations customers.
2. Human skills
Human skills are the ability to work well with other people individually and in a
group.
Because all managers deal with people, these skills are equally important to all
levels of management. Managers with good human skills get the best out of their
people. They know how to communicate, motivate, lead, and inspire enthusiasm
and trust.
3. Conceptual skills
Conceptual skills are the ability to think and to conceptualize about abstract and
complex situations.
Using these skills managers see the organization as a whole, understand the
relationships among various subunits, and visualize how the organization fits into
its broader environment. These skills are most important to top managers.

These skills reflect a broad cross-section of the important managerial activities that
are elements of the four management functions
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Effective versus Successful Managerial Activities

Fred Luthans and associates found that all managers engage in following
four managerial activities.
1.
2.
3.
4.

Traditional management.
Communication.
Human resource management.
Networking.

1. Traditional management.
Traditional management involves decision making, planning, and
controlling.
The average manager spent 32 percent of his or her time performing this
activity.
2. Communication.
Communication is exchanging in routine information and processing
paperwork. The average manager spent 29 percent of his or her time
performing this activity.
3. Human resource management.
Human resource management includes motivating, disciplining, managing
conflict, staffing, and training.
The average manager spent 20 percent of his or her time performing this
activity.
4. Networking.
Networking is socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders.
The average manager spent 19 percent of his or her time performing this
activity.

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Effective versus Successful Managerial Activities

With successful (defined as speed of promotion) managers, it was
determined that networking was the most important activity.
The successful managers spent 48% percent of his or her time performing
networking activity.
Effective managers (defined as quality and quantity of performance and
satisfaction of their employees) relied more on communication as the
largest contributor to their effectiveness.
The effective managers spent 44% percent of his or her time performing
communication activity as shown in the following figure.

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