"8 Essential Skills for a People Manager: Nurturing Strong Teams and Inspiring Success"

Let's keep it simple! This won't be a long list of skills; instead, we'll focus on a specific situation. We'll look at the skills a manager needs when sitting down with an employee to discuss their concerns or problems.

If you're having a conversation to solve a serious and emotionally charged issue, remember to use the following skills. However, if the problem is not severe and doesn't involve strong emotions, you may not need all of these skills.

Anyone who supervises and guides a team is called a people manager. Your job title might be project manager, program manager, delivery manager, director, or vice president. If you work with people or have others reporting to you, you'll need some soft skills to manage them effectively. There's a long list of skills that every people manager should have, but in this blog, I will focus on the skills needed when you interact with an individual who is looking for a solution to their problem, which is critical in depth and emotional and sees you as their reporting manager.

Here's the situation: An employee contacted you, saying they want to have a meeting with you to discuss something that's affecting their ability to perform their job well. The problem could come from different sources. It might be a colleague who isn't treating them kindly, a difficult customer who doesn't appreciate the staff, the nature of the work they find challenging to cope with, or even a personal issue at home or with their family that they are struggling with.

8 Key Skills for in depth conversations.

There are 8 essential skills that any manager needs when dealing with a deeply emotional issue. Depending on the intensity of emotions involved, these skills can be used whenever you need to assist someone seeking a solution. Most of these skills are already familiar to you and everyone possesses them to some extent. Therefore, I won't explain them from scratch. Instead, I'll highlight one or two key points that may not be familiar to everyone but are crucial to know.

Throughout my experience as a manager, project manager, and senior project manager, I've found that the points I'm bringing up in this blog require attention if you want to understand the problem and provide a reasonable solution.

Skill No 1: Genuineness

Again, as said i am not going to explain what is genuineness because i am sure everyone is aware of it. But what essentially i want to put forward is a simple one.

- Avoid putting a Holy covering over your shadow. Don't pretend to be perfect in front of your team. It's okay to show your imperfections and vulnerabilities.

-Being genuine means being honest with yourself and accepting who you truly are.

Skill No 2: Respect

Everyone is aware of respect and there are no debate on how important is respect when you have conversation with next person.

- Respect means valuing others simply because they are fellow human beings.

- It involves having an unconditional positive regard for others.

Skill No 3: Basic Empathy.

Empathy is the way we gather information about someone's feelings and thoughts by putting ourselves in their shoes.

- Basic empathy is the ability to understand another person's world and effectively communicate that understanding to them in a way that satisfies them. I plan to dedicate a blog post to discuss the different components of empathy.

Skill No: 4 Advance Empathy

Empathy cant be limited with its basic form and it goes beyond its basic form.. if you need to demonstrate a skills through out the conversation then that is advance empathy. Basic empathy is reflection of surface feeling of the resource, where in advance empathy is

- Basic empathy involves reflecting the surface feelings of the other person. Advanced empathy, on the other hand, goes deeper, reflecting emotions that may be hidden or not readily shared by the person.

Skill No 5: Concreteness

You cant deal with generalities if you want to solve an issue for a resource in genuine way. If you wish the problem to be sorted out completely and some time forever you need to employ concreteness.

- To genuinely solve an issue for someone, avoid dealing with general ideas. Instead, be concrete in your approach.

- Ask for specific, direct, and complete information about the problem, their experiences, feelings, and behaviors.

- Avoid settling for vague or high-level explanations. Being specific is key to resolving the issue thoroughly and potentially for the long term.

Skill No 6: Challenging (Caring confrontations).

Challenging is the best way to bring the best out of your conversations. Its a dangerous skill if you have-not studied it properly and practice on how to use them in critical conversations.

- It involves responsibly and delicately addressing discrepancies, distortions, games, or excuses used by the person you're talking to.

- Challenging helps the person see things from a different perspective they might not have considered before.

In a future blog post, I will focus on responsible ways for managers to challenge their team members to achieve positive results.

Skill No 7: Self disclosure.

If there is one skill that you need to be extremely careful , then that is self disclosure. Like any other skills i use this skill often, but i think multiple time when i have to do a self disclosure because the results cant be predicated. There are times, this will backfire the manager if its not being used sensibly.

- Self-disclosure is a skill that requires extreme caution because its outcomes are unpredictable.

- It involves the manager intentionally and appropriately sharing their own experiences related to the client's problem.

Remember, only use self-disclosure if you have successfully overcome the same problem and believe that sharing your experience will help the person you're talking to do the same.

Skill No 8: Immediacy.

If you employ all those skills in a conversation and miss this, you would find the results. As the name indicate it determine when the fixes or solutions to be implemented.

- Among all the skills you employ in a conversation, this one is crucial for determining when to implement fixes or solutions.

- It involves being aware, assertive, and providing detailed communication.

- "Here and now immediacy" means addressing issues directly and not accepting vague or indirect answers from the person you're talking to. This is important to find effective solutions.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while I couldn't cover all the skills in detail within this blog post, I hope the key points highlighted about each skill will be beneficial for managers facing deep and emotional conversations. Remember that employing these skills, such as empathy, respect, and concreteness, can greatly improve your ability to address and resolve issues effectively with your team members.

For those seeking further practical insights, I plan to write more blog posts in the future. These upcoming articles will include real-life examples to illustrate how to apply these skills in various scenarios. By learning from these examples, you can enhance your managerial abilities and foster more positive and productive interactions with your team.

So stay tuned for more valuable insights and practical tips in the upcoming blogs!