The Core Management Skills Every Leader Needs (and How to Build Them)

Many managers are promoted for being good at work they will now mostly hand to other people. The management skills that take its place fall into three groups Robert Katz named in a 1955 Harvard Business Review article: technical skill with the work, human skill with people, and conceptual skill with the whole picture.¹ Day to day, the job breaks into nine skills: planning and prioritizing, delegating, running one-on-ones, giving feedback, coaching, making decisions, hiring, handling conflict and managing up. You build them the way you built your first job, by practicing one at a time and asking the people affected how you are doing.

Leadership itself, and how researchers define it, has its own guide in the research-based definition of leadership; the rest of this page stays with the nine skills and how to practice them.

What are the 3 basic management skills?

The three basic management skills are technical, human and conceptual, in the model Robert Katz set out in 1955 and revisited in a 1974 reprint. A 2020 review in the Journal of the Medical Library Association summarizes them as expertise in concrete work, skill with yourself and other people, and the ability to think holistically and in context.²

Katz’s first version said the mix shifts as you rise. Supervisors lean on technical skill, while human and conceptual skill grow more important higher up. In his later commentary he softened that: leaders at every level need some competence in all three, and the way an organization is built can keep technical skill important even near the top.²

The model explains a familiar stumble. A strong engineer is promoted to lead the team and keeps solving the hardest tickets personally, because that is where their skill and confidence sit. The team’s work slows while it waits on them, and the human and conceptual parts of the job (who should take which ticket, what the team should stop doing) go undone.

So when you assess yourself, ask which of the three you are spending your week on. If it is nearly all technical, that is the gap to close first.

Further reading

• 

  The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You

  by Julie Zhuo

  A first-time manager's account of the people skills the article puts first: feedback, one-on-ones and growing a team.

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What Google’s research and the World Management Survey add

Two large bodies of evidence fill in Katz’s outline. Google’s Project Oxygen, built from over 10,000 data points in the company’s own performance reviews and feedback surveys, produced a list of 10 good-manager behaviors, led by being a good coach and including empowering the team without micromanaging, communicating well and making strong decisions.³ Google examined only its own staff and published the findings in company guides rather than a peer-reviewed journal, so treat the list as one firm’s well-informed checklist.

The World Management Survey, run by economists Nicholas Bloom, John Van Reenen and colleagues, looks at the basics rather than behaviors. Interviewers score organizations on monitoring, target setting and incentives, and by 2012 the team had gathered data on more than 10,000 organizations across 20 countries. They found wide variation in basic management practices within every country and sector, alongside differences between countries.⁴ The link to firm performance, and why it matters for the leadership versus management debate, is covered in the difference between leadership and management.

People skills show up in harder data too. Using personnel records from one large high-tech firm, Mitchell Hoffman and Steven Tadelis found in 2021 that managers whose teams rated their people management skills highly saw lower employee turnover, with several research designs pointing to a causal link, though those skills did not consistently improve most other outcomes they measured.⁵

Myth

The basics of management are common sense, so most organizations already do them well.

Fact

The World Management Survey found wide variation in basic practices such as monitoring and target setting within every country and sector it studied.

The survey’s data say the basics are patchy in every country it covered. A new manager who sets clear targets and checks progress each week is already doing what the survey found many organizations handle unevenly.

The 9 most important management skills, with a way to practice each

Each skill below has a description of what it looks like done well, the mistake new managers most often make, and one way to practice it this month. They are ordered roughly as a new manager meets them, not by evidence, because no study ranks them against each other.

Technical: knowing the work

• Delegating
• Hiring

Human: working with people

• Running one-on-ones
• Giving feedback
• Coaching
• Handling conflict
• Managing up

Conceptual: seeing the whole

• Planning and prioritizing
• Making decisions

1. Planning and prioritizing

Done well, everyone on the team can name the few goals that matter this quarter and see weekly how close they are. Those are the target-setting and monitoring practices the World Management Survey scores.⁴ The common mistake is a long list of equal priorities, which leaves each person to guess. This month, cut your team’s goals to three, and spend 15 minutes each week looking at one number for each with the people who own them.

2. Delegating

Delegating well means handing over the outcome and the authority to decide, along with the task. Project Oxygen lists empowering the team without micromanaging as a core behavior.³ The mistake is handing over the work but keeping every decision, so the person returns to you at each step. This month, pick one recurring task you still do, give it away with a clear description of what done looks like, and agree on one check-in date instead of daily updates.

3. Running one-on-ones

A one-on-one is a regular, protected conversation where your report sets most of the agenda. The common mistake is letting it become a status update you could have read. This month, ask each report for their list the day before and work through theirs first, using the agenda in running one-on-one meetings employees find useful.

4. Giving feedback

Useful feedback names a specific piece of work, says what landed and what to change next time, and leaves the person’s character out of it. Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi, pooling feedback research in a 1996 meta-analysis, found it lifted performance on average, though more than one effect in three went the wrong way, and feedback that drew attention toward the person tended to do worse than feedback about the task.⁶ The mistake is saving it for a review, when it is stale. This month, give one specific comment about a piece of work within a day of seeing it, and frame it with the SBI feedback model.

5. Coaching

Coaching means helping someone solve a problem themselves through questions, and it tops Google’s list of manager behaviors.³ The mistake is answering every question, which is faster today and leaves you answering it again next month. This month, when someone brings you a problem, ask two questions before giving your view; the GROW coaching model gives a simple order for them.

6. Making decisions

Strong decision-making means deciding at the right speed, saying who decides, and explaining why. The mistake runs both ways: waiting for certainty that never arrives, or deciding alone what the team knows more about. One cheap tool is the premortem, described by the decision researcher Gary Klein in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article: before a plan starts, the team imagines it has already failed and lists the reasons.⁷ This month, run a 20-minute premortem before your next decision of any size.

7. Hiring

Hiring well means deciding in advance what the job needs, then asking every candidate the same questions and scoring the answers against that. When Paul Sackett’s team revisited the standard meta-analytic estimates for hiring methods in 2022, structured interviews came out as the top-ranked procedure for predicting job performance.⁸ The mistake is the friendly chat that rewards whoever seems most like you. Before your next opening, write five questions tied to the job and a scoring guide; how structured interviews work shows how.

8. Handling conflict

Handling conflict means separating disagreement about the work from friction between people, and dealing with each early. Pooling 116 studies in 2012, a team led by Frank de Wit found relationship conflict consistently tied to worse group outcomes, while disagreement about the task showed no strong negative link to performance overall.⁹ The meta-analysis pools associations, so the result describes what tends to travel together and leaves cause open. The mistake is to smooth over every disagreement, including the useful ones. This month, when two people disagree, ask each to state the other’s view of the work before discussing who is right.

9. Managing up

Managing up means working with your own manager so that you both get what the work needs. John Gabarro and John Kotter described it in a 1980 Harvard Business Review article as consciously working with your boss to get the best results for you, your boss and the company.¹⁰ The mistake is waiting to be told what matters, then being surprised in your review. This month, ask your manager what the top two goals are for them this quarter and how they prefer to hear bad news.

The support behind the nine is uneven, and it helps to know which advice rests on what.

Each practice step below takes minutes a week, so you can try several this month even where the evidence is thin.

Practice for this month

• Cut the team goals to three and review one number each week
• Give away one recurring task with a clear finish line
• Ask each report for their one-on-one list first
• Give one piece of specific feedback within a day
• Ask two questions before you answer a problem
• Run one short premortem
• Ask your manager for their top two goals

How can I improve my management skills?

Management skills improve with practice and feedback, and the best evidence on how comes from training research and from studies of upward feedback. In their 2017 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary covering 335 samples, Christina Lacerenza and colleagues linked better leadership training results to practice, feedback and sessions spread out over time.¹¹ You can set up all three at work without enrolling anywhere.

The second ingredient is the feedback, and here what you do with it counts.

The study

Limited evidence

Managers who talked their ratings through with their teams

In a 1999 study of 252 managers rated by their direct reports over five yearly rounds, Alan Walker and James Smither report that those who began with poor or moderate ratings improved significantly. Managers who sat down with their reports to talk the results through improved more than the rest, and gained more in the years they had that conversation than in the years they skipped it.¹²

Nobody assigned the discussions at random, so the managers who held them may also have differed from the others in ways the study did not capture. Still, it points to something you control: asking for feedback, then talking about it openly with the people who gave it.

The ratings themselves are only a start. When Smither, Manuel London and Richard Reilly combined 24 longitudinal studieslongitudinal study: A study that measures the same people more than once over a period of time, so it can see how they change and which thing came first. Following people over time still does not show that the earlier thing caused the later one.Full entry in the glossary in 2005, improvement after multisource feedback was generally small, and their review of other evidence suggested it was more likely for managers who accepted they needed to change, set goals and acted on them.¹³

That gives a plan you can run four times a year. Pick one of the nine skills each quarter, practice it weekly, and ask your team for feedback on that skill alone at the start and the end. A narrow question (“When I give you feedback, can you tell what to do differently?”) gets a more useful answer than “How am I doing?”.

Why human skills come first for new managers

A first-time manager needs the human skills soonest, because they are the ones the old job did not train: one-on-ones, feedback and delegating, which shape every week from the first. Katz’s model predicts this, since technical skill carries over from the previous role while human and conceptual skill have to be built.²

Technical skill still counts. Google’s Project Oxygen list keeps key technical skills as a manager behavior, and it helps you judge work and hire.³ Planning, decisions and managing up come next, as the scope of the role grows past your own team.

Start with that one, and tell your team it is the skill you are working on.

The bottom line

Management skills are learnable, and the upward-feedback research points to one habit worth copying: talk the feedback through with the people who gave it. Choose one of the nine skills for this quarter, practice it every week, and ask your team at the start and the end whether they noticed a difference.