Top Five Management Skills for 2023 and beyond

We all know that the work landscape is changing fast. 50% of the occupations that exist today will not exist in 10 years, largely due to IT and technological advances. Automation is replacing many roles. Teams are becoming more disparate. Globalisation has added new collaboration challenges. At the same time, more millennials are taking on management roles. Even our work spaces are changing. Hybrid and home-working are fast becoming the norm.
One thing is guaranteed. Change. It will be the only constant. Amid all of this flux, managers are going to need new skills, too.
Hierarchical structures are simply not going to work. Managers need to challenge and re-frame the way they think and act as a manager and leader over the next 5+ years, which for many will involve learning and developing new skills to survive – let alone thrive.

Our advice is simple – get ahead of the game. Do it now. Take off the blinkers. Scan the Horizon. Seize opportunities. Become the manager of tomorrow TODAY. Most importantly of all, embrace and enjoy the journey!
Based on our experience, minsights and research, we have summarised the top five skills that we believe ALL managers need to future-proof their management career and stay one step ahead.

1. Collaboration

Effective managers and leaders are going to need to be less egocentric. “I’m the leader and you will listen to me,” approaches are outdated. This is the age of knowledge workers, and managers need to recognise that many people they manage are more highly skilled and often more experienced in their particular field/job role.
Leaders will be operating in tighter labour markets, and the newest employees to enter the job field, millennials specifically, will not not be satisfied with a manager that simply wants to tell them what to do. They want to feel like they are a part of a team so they can be truly invested in the success of their company. As such, they want to know that they have the decision making power to make true changes in their teams. See our blog: 3 things every manager should know about managing millennials and gen-z.

Managers will therefore need to be more “outcentric,” focusing on collaborating with and developing the people and teams around them to be active and valued contributors. The best managers will look at the overarching need, and then build and develop a team to meet that need—with input from the team—instead of dictating what the team needs.

Managers should not confuse collaboration with consensus and harmony, which can slow teams’ progress and make them less effective, especially as change—technological, demographic, and other types of change—hit workplaces and markets. Managers need to be able to lead collaborative teams with an appropriate level of tension and constructive debate that will lead to innovative ideas and timely results. Being able to challenge the status quo will be the difference between mediocre and exceptional managers.

To become successful collaborators, managers will need to not only develop their emotional intelligence and communication skills, they will also need to be up-to-date on collaboration software and tools so that employees, regardless of job role and location, can work on projects and initiatives together.

2. Emotional Intelligence (EI)

Emotional intelligence has been around for some time, but it is getting a lot of attention recently, and is set to become even more important as the workplace changes over the next few years. Highly emotionally intelligent leaders are sought after to lead teams into the future. Indeed, by 2025 it will be vital for leaders to demonstrate a high level of emotional intelligence.

Employees feel a range of negative emotions – particularly after divisive events – including fear, anger, frustration and anxiety. While many employees will turn to their managers for support, many managers are ill-equipped to handle these conversations, which may occur in a face-to-face or virtual environment.

Managers need to model appropriate behaviours and set the right tone through demonstrating high emotional intelligence. If IQ is a measure of your intelligence quotient, EQ is a measure of your emotional intelligence. A high EQ is synonymous with being self-aware, of knowing your own strengths and weaknesses, or seeking the assistance of colleagues and mentors to help you find them, which in turn allows you to identify areas to improve. Managers with high EQ have greater empathy, allowing them to gain greater perspective and evaluate what is and isn’t working within their teams, because they can see the situation from others’ point of view.

Emotional intelligence goes hand-in-hand with collaboration. Emotionally intelligent managers demonstrate the ability to read and adapt to other’s emotions through effective verbal and non-verbal communication skills. Emotionally intelligent managers can manage and diffuse tension and succeed through their ability to develop collaborative and trust-based relationships.

As more and more millennials enter the workplace, this is the sort of workplace they seek, and adapting now to meet that demand in 10 years’ time will not only create a better environment today, but it will also mean the management culture is ready to embrace the needs of the new generation workers.

3. Transparency and Authenticity

Future managers must be able and willing to be transparent with their colleagues. This may require them to recognise and share their own vulnerabilities with their colleagues/teams. Millenials and gen Z’ers will not be okay with managers who keep them in the dark and/or do not reveal their true selves in the workplace.
Employees are now being recruited for their soft skills and values as much as their hard skills and experience. The manager must be prepared to role model the values and behaviours they seek from prospective employees. The mirror must always be held up – managers must learn to operate according to how they wish others to see them. This means operating according to organisational values, being the change they seek in others, yet being prepared to show their own vulnerabilities as well as their strengths. It also means that a new level of honesty may be required.
Also, feedback needs to become a routine part of daily conversations until it is entrenched in team and corporate culture.

4. Diversity and Inclusivity

Whenever a group of like-minded people are put together, they will generate similar ideas. This is because their thinking patterns are very much alike. However, if you change things up by mixing diverse individuals together, you’ll have a workforce that’s more prone to creativity and innovation — two vital ingredients for success as organisations move forward over the next 5-10 years.

You only have to consider how recent protests in 2020 demanding diversity, equity and inclusion erupted around the world, requiring organisations to engage authentically with employees on a range of complex and often emotional cultural issues. The common theme in these disruptions is that they relate to deeply held and potentially divisive personal beliefs. But managers can’t afford to be timid when issues might be contentious. In fact, when the potential for tension among co-workers is high, it’s even more important to be proactive, candid and authentic.
The UK is a already a rich cultural melting pot. As gen Z’ers enter the workforce, baby boomers work until well past traditional retirement age. Globalisation will continue to create more cross-border teams. Technical advances have made it possible to work diversely.

Compared to previous generations, millennials are the most diverse when it comes to the workforce, with around 44% of millennial workers categorised as belonging to a minority. While it’s not just millennials who support the argument for more diverse workplaces, they are the most prevalent generation of workers set to dominate the global workforce by almost 75% by 2025. Unsurprisingly this generation of employees not only wants more diversity in the workplace but expects it.

Managers have to be sensitive to cultural differences. They need to embrace diversity with authenticity and promote inclusivity through ‘cultural code-switching’, which means being able to blend with a culture as needed, and this may mean engaging in behaviours that may conflict with the culture they grew up with. As such, managers need to overcome unconscious bias, develop a good understanding of different cultures, and become skilled in helping employees overcome cultural differences to collaborate effectively.

5. Output-based Performance Management

Performance-management will need to become more focused on autonomy and accountability, and manager’s need to create and foster working environments that focus less on where and how people work, but which measure success based on results and output.

Partnership-working and the use of contractors/suppliers will continue to rise, and managers will need to think differently about how they assemble the skills necessary to meet their objectives. Focus will need to shift away from process, except in terms of how to optimise it for better results.

The fundamental paradigm shift for managers is moving away from traditional performance management processes towards creating a workforce that is 100% autonomous and 100% accountable. Performance is based on the results they create, not the hours they work. Processes are less important than outputs. Where needed, processes need to be fluid and flexible to allow for flux and change. They should facilitate – not hamper – progress and results. Managers are really going to have to focus more on the communication aspects and relationship management. The formal annual performance review will add less value than routine communication and development, with coaching skills are being recognised as the most critical skill to driving up accountability and performance in workforces comprising more specialist knowledge-workers.

Technology will also continue to grow, which will create new challenges, conflicts, and opportunities related to skill building, workplace roles, data management, privacy, and others. Managers will need to understand technology enough to keep pace with the development, growth and communication opportunities this presents and integrate this knowledge into performance conversations to optimise performance outputs.

Whether you are an employer looking to future-proof your managers and leaders or a manager looking to develop your skills, get in touch to discuss options via [email protected] or call us on  0345 021 2356.