Managing Skils. Research Methods

Management skills are required of everybody

You will notice that the above-mentioned skills sound rather general. You may even think to yourself: wait, I do this every day at work and I am not a manager! You are correct – management skills are fundamental skills that refer to the way you organize tasks, processes, people, outcomes. Essentially, a manager is nothing else than an administrator who is responsible for overseeing and ensuring that certain things happen.

What is striking is that you do not have to be a manager, a CEO or an executive to need management skills. On the contrary, most employees possess management skills, use them on a daily basis, and are even required to possess them in order to get a job in the first place! Regardless of industry, type or size of organization, management skills and being “fluent” in them determines success or is at least a large component. Being able to think strategically, adapt to new situations, take on leadership in situations that require it, come up with new ideas – all these sound familiar when considering typical job listings. They are all management skills.

Classical organizations are hierarchical

Why is it that case then, that only managers “manage” and the rest of employees are not considered “managers”? This is an excellent question. When we look at the body of scientific research on management, there is a clear trend to what we now call a “conventional” organization. In fact, it was sociology’s founding father Max Weber who provided a typology of an organization which is, arguably, what many organizations look like today: bureaucratic organizations, characterised by a system defined by rules, led by a leader who operates on logic and rationale to yield maximum efficiency. Does this sound familiar?

One of the underlying tenants of Weber’s conceptualisation is the idea of authority. Authority is a concept familiar to anyone working in an organization: someone has authority over someone else and this is simply how it works. In classical management, the system is hierarchical: the workers are at the bottom. They are administered by managers. These managers again have managers, who have managers, who are… CEOs, executives, the big bosses. In most organizations there is someone on top of the hierarchical pyramid who, compared to the smallest worker, has an entirely different experience of work.