9 Organizational Skills Every Manager Must Know
Try to picture the perfect manager. What do they do, and how do they act? Different companies call for different management styles, but some things are universal. You probably imagine a manager that has a clear and consistent vision for the project they’re overseeing, who knows how to pinpoint specific problems, while still keeping their eyes on the big picture. They communicate well, they’re organized, they keep their team happy and motivated, and they know how to keep the work flowing smoothly. Are you that kind of manager? Maybe the perfect manager doesn’t exist, but there are organizational skills you can adopt to get as close as you can. Here are the nine you should know about.
Knowing project management methodology
Having a consistent methodology to fall back on can keep your team on track and guide your decision-making process when the unexpected happens and you’re flying without instruments. That means you should have a strong knowledge of the various project management methodologies that are out there, as well as which one’s best suited for your team.
There are a variety of different frameworks to follow, and choosing the best one for your team and project can depend on many factors. Some of the most widely used methodologies include:
- Agile, which is based on an incremental approach that seeks out constant feedback and emphasizes changing what needs changing as you go, rather than relying solely on planning before the project starts. Accountability, face-to-face communication, and teamwork are key elements of the Agile method.
- Scrum, a methodology derived from Agile, focuses on using iterative processes to develop complex projects. Scrum’s iterations are called “sprints,” which consist of four regular activities (sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint demo, and sprint retrospective) to move your project forward on a fixed schedule.
- Kanban, a visual framework that emphasizes incremental changes and uses a physical board as an organizing principle, to keep your team working at the appropriate capacity and encourage flexibility and transparency.
A crucial organizational skill: time management
Time management is an important skill for just about anyone, but it’s especially crucial for managers. When you’re managing a team, you can’t just be a master of your own time; you need to help your team manage theirs. After all, if they’re coming up short because there’s not enough time in a day, who do you think they’ll come to for help?
There are plenty of strategies you can use to manage your time better, like the 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of your team’s results will come from 20% of the effort they put in. So, with that rule in mind, you can look through everything your team is working on and try to isolate the things that’ll create the best results.
Overall, time management is about finding the most efficient ways to use every minute of your work day. To do that, you need to know where that time’s going, where it should be going instead, and how you can keep distractions at bay.
Prioritizing goals and managing resources
Prioritizing relevant goals requires envisioning the end of a successful project. When there are a million things that need to be done, assess the most important efforts to focus on. One of the most important organizational skills for managers is to prioritize the team’s work, and help individuals understand which weekly and daily tasks are most important to do first. Regular check-in meetings can help you identify the areas of your project that most require your attention.
One popular way to prioritize workload is the RICE method. You give each project a score based on four criteria, then tackle the projects with the highest scores first. Here’s how it works:
- Reach
- How many people will be affected by this project in a given period of time? That could mean a number of customers per quarter, for example. Be realistic, and try to use existing metrics to backup your estimate.
- The number of people affected in your set time frame will be used as your Reach score.
- Impact
- How much of a difference will it make? Ask yourself how you think your audience will react to the change, and just how much it will improve their experience.
- Score your Impact as 3 for “maximum,” 2 for “high,” 1 for “medium,” 0.5 for “low,” and “0.25” for “minimal.”
- Confidence
- How confident are you about your estimates? Evaluate Confidence based on how much evidence you have to back up your projections.
- Confidence is scored as a percentage.
- Effort
- How hard is it going to be to accomplish your goal? Effort measures the total amount of time the project will require from all members of your team.
- Effort is measured in “person-months,” the amount of work one team member can do in one month. After calculating this, determine the overall Effort score for the project.
Determining the RICE score
Once you’ve scored the project on the four RICE criteria, you just need to do a simple calculation to get your final number. Here’s how you do it:
(Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort
This will give you the total impact per time spent on a project. The higher the score, the more important it is for your team to do!
Delegation: the organizational skill for overloaded managers
No one can do it all, even if they work 12-hour days and never take a vacation. That’s especially true of managers. There’s just too much to do in a day to keep it all on your plate. One of the most important skills you can cultivate — and one that will help you stay organized — is dispatching some of your work to the rest of your team.
Why? Being organized isn’t just about managing the tasks that you’re responsible for, it’s also about managing which tasks you’re responsible for — as in making sure you’re not giving yourself more work than you can actually do.
One of the easiest ways you can start delegating some of that work is by setting up areas of responsibility (or AoRs) for your team. All you need to do is make a list of what your team is responsible for and delegate each responsibility to someone specific. People can have multiple responsibilities, but each area of responsibility should only have a single assigned person. So how does this look in practice? Here’s how a marketing team might outline their AoRs:
- Email marketing
- Campaign management
- Social media management
- Public relations
- Content marketing
- And so on…
AoRs can be as broad or as specific as you need them to be. In a team of five people, you might keep each category pretty broad (e.g. “Content Marketing”) while a department of 50 people will need some specifics (e.g. “Blog SEO” and “Remarketing emails”).
Strategic planning
As a manager, you might not be directly involved in all projects your team works on, but you very well might plan some of them. That’s where strategic planning comes in. When you learn this skill, you’ll be able to make plans that keep your team aligned, accurately assess your resources, and boost overall productivity. So how does it work? With these three steps:
- Collect as much information as you can. Talk to your team, look at what competitors are doing, and get data that’ll help guide your strategy.
- Map out your strategy. Start with a vision statement, cover the objectives you want to accomplish, and create an action plan that’ll take you there.
- Review your strategy. This is an ongoing process, through which you make sure that your strategy still reflects the reality of the situation.
This is something that takes time to build, so you might as well start learning how to do it right now.
Communicating clearly
There are a number of different ways to communicate with your team. A manager should not only have excellent communication skills of their own, but knowing which method is best suited for their team is an essential organizational skill. The three main types of communication are:
- Verbal
- Written
- Visual
For group communications, you might find Slack a better fit than a group email. Some companies find that project management platforms, like Asana or Trello, work better for their culture. Don’t get stuck on a single platform. Try different things, listen to your team, and embrace what works.
Finding the perfect communications style for your team is a matter of trial and error, so always seek feedback from your team while looking for a solution. A good communications platform should feel effortless, and should make it easy to reference past conversations when needed.
If you’re on the hunt for an effective communications strategy, we highly recommend reading this article right now!
Celebrating wins
When your team delivers, it shouldn’t be just another day at the office. Celebrating wins is one of the most vital organizational skills to reinforcing performance and keeping the team’s morale up.
Find fun ways to recognize accomplishments, whether it’s honoring individual achievements with a “wall of fame,” or coming up with traditions or celebratory activities for the whole team to enjoy together. Inc.com has some great ideas on how to do that. Here are a few:
- If the budget allows, take the team out for a lunch
- End a Friday early, provide snacks and beers, gather the team and give shout-outs for individuals’ accomplishments.
- During team-wide meetings, make a point of publicly giving regular kudos to recognize effort and wins. When you see somebody doing something right, reinforce it!
Critical thinking: the organizational skill for those who trust their gut
One of the best ways to make sure you stay completely disorganized is to take everything at face value. A brief comes in but your gut says there’s something wrong with it? Just accept it and pass it on to someone else. Someone on your team is saying a project needs to double its budget if it’s going to succeed? All good, just approve the request. See how a lack of critical thinking can cause some serious problems down the line?
Critical thinking is a broad term that encompasses skills you use to take in data, process it, and turn it into something useful. It’s useful in every role, but especially so for managers.
As a manager, a big part of your job is taking in information. It’ll come from stakeholders, leaders, your team, and even contractors you work with from time to time. If you just take everything you’re told at face value, you’ll struggle to properly prioritize requests, make decisions, and lead your team effectively.
Building team cadence
If your team goes through periods where they’re working overtime to rush a task to completion, followed by periods where nobody seems to have enough work to do, you probably need to establish a better cadence for their workflows.
Cadence is an important organizational skill and a crucial concept in Agile and other project management methodologies. Put simply, it’s the rhythm your team follows, a predictable pattern that keeps them on track. There’s a lot you can do to get your team into a cadence that works for them, such as:
- Scheduling regular meetings to go over the successes and failures of the past week and review goals for the current week.
- Working in sprints based on a set time frame which fits your team’s collective and individual work styles.
- Planning rituals, like weekly stand ups or daily check-ins, will establish a routine for your team, keep them informed, and help them plan their own schedules accordingly.
Improvement Never Stops
Applying great organizational skills as a manager, but aiming for greatness is the least your team deserves. Remember, all of these skills take regular practice and effort to develop and maintain. You may be doing some of them right already – and others may be a perpetual challenge for you – but as long as you’re trying your best to hone your leadership skills, you’re on the right path.