Essential Management Skills (And How To Improve Them in 5 Minutes a Day)

Published in Leadership on 12/07/2018, last updated 02/06/2023.

Managers are made, not born; and even great leaders still have plenty of room for improvement. Being a manager covers such a wide area of responsibilities and functions that you should be in a constant cycle of growing your management skills.

But how do you find the time to do this when the project is running at full steam and stakeholders are barking at your heels? For most working project managers, it’s very difficult to find time to attend classes and workshops—much less a full PMP training course. Does that mean you’ll be stuck at that level until the organization decides to invest in you?

Absolutely not!

It’s possible to exercise and grow your management skills over the course of performing your duties, investing as little as five minutes a day doing growth-related exercises and activities, and incorporating it into your daily routine. But first, what management skills should you even pursue?

3 types of management skills

What is a management skill? Broadly speaking, anything that makes you a better manager. That includes more general skills like active listening and more role-specific ones, such as building and managing a sales process. Whether they’re specific or general, management skills can be broadly organized along these three categories:

Technical skills: These skills will vary depending on which department your team is in, but they’re generally directly related to the roles represented in your team. A marketing manager, for instance, might find value in knowing the intricacies of web development or paid advertising.
People skills: One of a manager’s core responsibilities is making sure their team has what they need to fulfill their responsibilities. That goes beyond managing their workload and keeping track of their projects. It means being able to listen to them, communicate accurately, and manage expectations throughout the company. These are just a few examples of the people skills managers can benefit from.
Conceptual skills: Being technically adept and good with people get you most of the way towards being a great manager. But to be a really great manager, you need specific skills geared towards solving problems. These conceptual skills cover everything you need to understand the root cause of a problem, come up with creative ideas, and put them into action.

Now that you know these three categories, let’s cover a few examples of these essential management skills.

5 essential management skills

Leadership

Seems obvious, right? Leadership means something different to everyone, which is why there are so many different kinds of leaders and managers. As a management skill, leadership means cultivating a style that gives you the ability to get great performance from your team without making them feel like you’re just sitting back and throwing orders around. It’s a tricky balance to get right, and something that requires lifelong development.

You can get a breakdown of some of the most important leadership skills in this post.

Communication

Being able to get your ideas across clearly — and understanding someone else’s — is important for every role. But for managers, who can spend the majority of their days acting as a go-between for their team and stakeholders throughout the organization, it’s an essential skill. There are multiple elements to communication that managers can work on, including active listening, empathy, and clarity.

Time management

Knowing where your time is going is an important management skill when you’re in and out of meetings and juggling multiple responsibilities. As a manager, time management also extends to the people in your team. You’re expected to help them figure out what they should be prioritizing and how much time they should spend on their tasks. That’s tougher to do if you struggle to manage your own time.

Conflict resolution

Few people truly like conflict. It can shake up your day, leave people emotional, and get in the way of getting your work done. As a manager, you’ll often be called upon to help resolve conflicts within your team, as well as any conflicts they have with other teams. Since you’re not only responsible to your people, but to upper management as well, you need the ability to resolve a conflict in a way that’s acceptable to both sides.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the most essential conflict resolution skills.

Critical thinking

Being able to carefully consider an issue and going beyond the surface is one of the most important conceptual management skills you can build. Managers get ideas, feedback, and messages from people all over the organization, each with their own interests and needs. Without the ability to think critically, you’ll find yourself at a disadvantage when trying to understand what’s truly motivating the people you work with every day.

Critical thinking is a broad, complex skill, and we cover it in depth here.

4 ways to improve your management skills

Now that you know which skills you should be shooting for, how is it done? Here are just a few ways you can improve your management skills in just a few minutes every day.

Create To-do Lists

What is a project plan without a detailed to-do list?

Planning is one of the management skills that needs practice, and building a list of upcoming tasks is one of the best exercises for it. By planning out a list—even a short one—you get used to thinking ahead and prioritizing your day. For example, here at Unito we all make a habit of writing and posting daily scrums (daily to-do lists) in a slack channel visible to the whole team. This not only maintains accountability throughout the team, but helps everyone prioritize their tasks and create a solid plan of how to maximize their time. To-do lists can also be created and tracked in project management tools like Asana, Wrike, or Trello.

Connect with Your Team

Here are some short but powerful phrases that will develop both your management skills, your team’s performance, and your reputation as a leader:

What do you think? This simple question does many things at once, all of them beneficial.
- It tells employee that you value their opinion, which is very motivating.
- It helps earn their respect and loyalty.
- It exposes their thought process, which enables you to identify the people with the most potential.
- Lastly, in order to make informed decisions, managers need opinions other than their own. Managers who welcome perspectives from a variety of employees cultivate a culture of feedback and transparency. Not bad for just four words!
Good job doing [x] today! Reinforcing jobs well done or hard work with positive feedback is essential to maintaining your team’s motivation and performance. No need to make a production out of giving positive feedback. Small and regular encouragements go a long way towards making an employee feel valuable. They key is to do it consistently, and emphasize the positive. Avoid saying things like “not bad” or “better than last time”. Instead, say “I like the way you did that”.
Do you need anything? Ask your team members how YOU can help them achieve their objectives and improve on aspects of their performance that aren’t going well. Ask them what they need from you to achieve their goals. Do they need more resources? More training? More management support to power through red tape? To remove that blocker that keeps making them miss their deadlines? Take time to meet with your team members one by one, and brainstorm together ways to help them succeed.

Work on Your Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking is an essential management skill that allows you to make better decisions, save time by finding solutions efficiently, and communicate more openly with your teams (among other things). It involves 5 key skills:

Analysis: Examine information and understand what it means.
Communication: The ability to effectively share your thoughts with others, and understand theirs.
Creativity: Recognizing patterns and finding unique solutions.
Open Mindedness: The ability to set aside preconceived notions and biases.
Problem Solving: Assess a problem, come up with a solution, and follow through to get results.

One effective exercise you can do in under five minutes is to reflect on and write down one major task or accomplishment from that day. Start with the basic details of what you did, then think about why you did it. Now ask yourself if you could have done anything differently to improve the results. This simple exercise lets you put multiple critical thinking skills to work. If you do it often enough, it’ll become a habit.

You can learn more about critical thinking in this post.

Practice Mindfulness

Now, this might seem a little new-wavey on a blog that focuses on providing concrete and actionable advice, but rest assured that the concepts here are real and effective.

Many people confuse mindfulness with meditation. And though the two concepts are linked, they’re entirely separate. Mindfulness is simply being aware of what is going on at that very moment, especially your own actions/thoughts. Mindful athletes pay attention to how their bodies move and react, and in so doing remove bad habits and promote good ones. You should develop that habit and self-assess as you go through your work day. This will enable you to be more aware of your strengths and weaknesses, and to mediate the two effectively.

There are lots of ways to become more mindful at work, but one of the simplest to implement is focusing only on one thing at a time. Resist the temptation to multitask and you’ll soon cultivate a habit of being focused exclusively on the task at hand.

Level up your management skills

It’s possible to improve your management skills with small time commitments of five to fifteen minutes, provided you do it consistently on a daily basis—so make improvement one of your daily habits and build it into your schedule. Pick activities that do multiple things at once or things you can accomplish as you do your regular work. This both maximizes your time and sets your self-improvement activities in the right context. Before you know it you’ll be the top-performing manager in the organization, with the most motivated team.