14 Management Skills Every Good Manager Should Know

There is no perfect recipe of management skills to make a good manager. However, we can get pretty close.

A good manager—or rather, a GREAT manager—is obsessed with potential. They feel they have great potential to change the world AND want to activate that potential in others.

Strong Leadership Skills: You don’t have to be a natural-born leader to be an inspirational manager. Leadership can and should be learned. As a leader you need to have strong influence and a desire to make an impact.

Strong Interpersonal Skills: Managers constantly communicate with others—whether hiring, solving conflict, or bringing together a team. Exceptional interpersonal skills are essential.

Strong Body Language Skills: Nonverbal intelligence is an essential skill for every manager. You need to know how to decode other people’s cues and control your own.

As a manager you will lead lots of meetings. It’s crucial that you set up yourself and your team for success.

Meeting goals. What are your meeting goals? Is this a creative meeting or a strategic meeting? Do you want people to bond or be productive?

Meeting warm-ups. Athletes warm up before a game. Musicians warm up before a performance. Why don’t professionals warm up before meetings?

Agenda. Set your agenda and send it out to attendees. This helps people mentally prepare AND ensures efficient use of time.

Post-mortem. What needs to happen after? This could be assigning to-dos or thanking an attendee for a great idea.

Being an effective manager means understanding and relating to your employees. The most important management skill you can hone is your ability to decode personality.

A team can have many different personalities in the mix. How do you balance them? How do you leverage them?

To be a great manager you have to hone your own influence. Your moods, ideas and feelings are contagious and can affect your team—in both good and bad ways.

Need to get yourself psyched up before a meeting? Need to make sure you are positively contagious? Try incorporating pre-performance rituals into your prep routine.

Do you have a difficult employee? This might be one of the hardest management skills to master. Depending on what type of difficult employee you have, here are resources to manage them effectively.

Deal With Narcissists

Handle narcissistic co-workers or bosses

4 Types of Difficult People

Identify and manage difficult personalities

Get People to Be Less Rude

Encourage kindness on your team

Get Someone to Confess

Uncover hidden resentments or issues

Being an effective manager is one skill. Learning how to build and run a team is another. There is a science to effective team-building that you need to know to encourage a cohesive and productive team.

The best managers are both bosses and coaches. They know how to inspire their team members to be great individual contributors as well as integrated team members.

Step 1: Learn our research-backed coaching strategies to turn your team into all-stars.

Step 2: Use the Expectancy Effect to improve performance.

Step 3: Get motivated with self-motivation tips—and show up as an inspiration to your employees.

Coaching Strategies

Turn your team into all-stars

Expectancy Effect

Improve performance with this behavior quirk

Self-Motivation Tips

Stay motivated and inspire others

This is my absolute favorite management skill on this entire guide! Right now, put a team building meeting on your calendar to do this exercise. It will help you identify your team’s strengths, weaknesses and skill gaps. It’s also a great way to bond!

You might be lucky enough to be your own boss—but likely you have someone to answer to above you. Great managers know how to manage up. Having a strong relationship with your boss is essential to being a good manager for your team.

Decode Your Boss

Understand your boss's behavior and personality

Boss in a Bad Mood?

Learn how to snap your boss out of it

As a manager you likely will be building your own team. This might mean hiring candidates through screening interviews, phone interviews and intake interviews.

10 Best Interview Questions

Behavioral questions that reveal true character

5 Basic Interview Questions

Essential questions for any interview

Have a virtual team or any remote workers? You might need special management skills. If you have a semi-remote team, you need to work extra hard to build team cohesion and emphasize easy distant communication.

Managers have an interesting line to walk. They must be able to pitch ideas to their own team AND sell their ideas to their superiors on their team’s behalf. Whether you are in a sales role or not, you should understand the science of sales.

You never know what kind of interpersonal situation you will be put into as a manager. Will an employee need a shoulder to cry on? Will you need to let someone go? Are you having office drama between two employees?

This is why it is essential that you have high interpersonal intelligence or PQ.