15 Important Staff Management Skills and Qualities to Stay Top of Your Job

This post reveals important staff management skills and qualities you need to develop to be able to effectively manage the staff under your supervision to achieve departmental or organizational goals.

Please, read on:

The staff members of an organization are a pillar of every organization or business venture.

They are directly responsible for carrying out instructions from the various managers of the departments set over them.

Particularly is the revenue consumption channel of the organization. A manager set over them is the staff manager.

Who is a Staff Manager?

A staff manager is someone hired within an organization to oversee the affairs of the income consuming department of an organization.

He/she is appointed to monitor and control the activities in the department.

15 Important Staff Management Skills and Qualities to Stay Top of Your Job

Here are vital staff management skills and qualities you need to have to get the best from your team:

Conflict resolution skill
Purpose driven
Communication
Motivation
Creativity
Empathy
Prioritization
Open mindedness
Planning
Strong work ethics
Delegation
Organization
Team work
Problem solving skills
Patience.

Conflict resolution skill

Staff members are human beings that have different interest regarding work. This clash of interest results to constant clashes or conflict.

This may not be totally avoidable from the onset but what you do when this conflict arises is the most important to consider.

To be a good staff manager, you have to learn the prospect of conflict resolution and what effective measures that can be taken to resolve conflicts in the workplace.

You have to explore all legal and moral ways of reconciling your subordinates in the workplace.

The team gets stronger if you are able to help them get over their differences.

The fact remains that a team grows through their diversity in views about work if only the staff manager is able to reconcile the differences and turn them to something good.

Purpose driven

Becoming a good staff manager must be accompanied with the ability to enlighten the staff about what they are meant to achieve in their work beyond what is originally stated in their job description.

This will help them make more effort to be effective and clinical in their job.

A purpose driven staff manager must be goal oriented with his/her job.

You will find it difficult to handle or organize the activities of your staff under you if you have nothing that drives you.

It will undermine your effort in the organization.

It is good for you to understand that your purpose of being chosen to occupy the position of a staff manager should be in your mind all day.

This will help you evaluate your effort from time to time and know how far or close you are to achieving your goals.

Communication

Which better can you organize and control the staff under your supervision if not through effective communication?

As a staff manager, you cannot be an effective supervisor to your subordinates if they are unaware of what you do and why you do them.

Communication unifies your team of workers and gives them a sense of direction when executing their individual jobs.

If you want to carry your staff along, you have to learn to be a good communicator.

You don’t have to leave them in dilemma at all times in regards to what you want or what the organization demands from them.

Also, communication is a good way to establish a working and a stable relationship with the staff under you.

Trying to establish a relationship without employing the efficacy of proper communication is definitely a joke of the highest order.

Motivation

You may be able to keep your staff on their toes always through giving them tasks to accomplish knowing fully well that their salary is at stake, but to get them to go beyond their normal daily job description is not going to be possible if they are not motivated.

Staff motivation is non-negotiable. Motivating the staff under you can eventually make your job far easier than you can imagine.

But working with a demotivated staff under you will make your job more difficult than you bargain for.

A motivated staff will do things that cannot be measured by how much he/she receives.

In motivating your staff, you have to try as much as you can to help them feel relaxed and at home in their jobs.

You may not know how far that can go to making them more productive than before.

Creativity

Working with your staff will demand a lot of creativity from you to motivate them in the first place.

One thing you should know is that as much as you are the boss by reason of your position, it is impossible to make utmost impact if you are not creative enough.

Your creativity with your staff is exhibited when issues arise that demand that you make use of unconventional methods to solve the problem on ground, especially if the conventional methods are no longer attainable.

Also, where you need to employ creativity is when handling conflicts within your group of staff.

Sometimes, approaching conflicts from a different perspective can be a masterstroke on your part and shows how much you have evolved as a manager over time. You have to think beyond an average person.

Empathy

The people or staff members under you in the workplace are humans and you have to look at them and treat them like humans.

It is safe to assume that before you attain the position of a staff manager, you were once a low level staff under the influence and control of another manager.

This should help you know better what a low level staff in an organization experiences every day at work.

With this in place, you should be able to treat the staff better. Treating them better won’t be possible if empathy is not your thing.

One thing you should understand is that though it is easy to lay off workers in the workplace and replacing them with other people out their searching for jobs.

But the love, expertise, and experience lost may not be easily replaced.

Prioritization

One thing that makes plans effective is prioritization of jobs. Knowing the details of every job accrued to you as a staff manager should make you sit down, plan, and prioritize the different jobs laid out for you.

This will help you executive your job without much stress.

Prioritization of jobs helps you equally organize the staff under you to make them know where to channel their energy and expertise. This will be determined by you as they practically have no say in whatever you tell them to do.

Also, prioritization is a good way to manage time. Saving or managing time is the priority of every business.

When you plan without prioritization, you end up using up more strength and time and yet achieving little compared to when you plan well and prioritizing your job.

Open mindedness

That you are occupying the office of a staff manager does not necessary connote the fact that you are infallible or cannot make mistakes.

Mistakes are part of our growth in different job descriptions. We only learn from the mistakes and improve on that front.

However, sometimes you may not know that you are making some mistakes except you are told.

Yes, that is true and this is where open mindedness becomes vital.

For you to be open to correction or suggestion, you need to show yourself teachable and friendly. This will help your course as a staff manager.

Planning

If you must succeed in your role as a staff manager, planning should be something you see as a must and not an option.

You must plan your way to success in your job and not allow events pan out without following your due planning.

There is the place of personal planning and group planning. Personal planning is the plan you make by yourself which results in the instructions you give the staff you are managing.

In this case, all you need to do is to communicate with the staff and relay the instructions to them.

Second is group planning: In this case, you will gather your team of staff and engage them in evaluative and pro-evaluative planning.

That is, analyzing situations on ground and also planning for what is to happen in the future.

So, either of the planning methods need to be employed by you to help get the best input and output from your staff.

Strong work ethics

One of the things you can do to raise the bar high in the organization is showcasing strong work ethics.

Strong work ethics show discipline, responsibility, and professionalism. A good staff manager that wants to succeed in his/her role must believe and imbibe the spirit of strong work ethics.

This has the ability to rub off on the staff in the workplace. One aspect it can affect the workers positively in the organization is giving them the impression that the company means business and taking actions carried out by employees seriously.

One good part of strong work ethics is professionalism. It is good to act professionally at all times particularly when you find yourself in the workplace.

In the workplace, you curtail your speech, actions, and habits. You don’t get involved in anything that will indict your office.

Delegation

A delegate will help you get the needed relief sometimes in your job. You can delegate simple jobs in the company to people under you.

This helps give you rest and also help explore the abilities of the people under you in the workplace.

Delegation is a practical way of exposing your staff to better job experiences.

This may not seem like it but in the long run you will understand the benefits of delegation.

Through delegation, you make your staff better.

Also, through delegation, you help motivate the staff under you because when you delegate, you avail them the opportunity to explore their abilities, as well as providing them the platform to exhibit what they can do in and outside the workplace.

Organization

Practically speaking, organization is your basic job as a staff manager. As a staff manager in any organization or department, your basic job is to organize work in that department through proper organization of the staff.

To organize the staff members in your department demands that you develop supervisory skills to make sure employees under you do what they are expected to do at the right time.

By effectively organizing your staff members is a sign that you will be effective achieving the demands of your position as a staff manager.

People management is one skill that is helpful for staff organization.

Learning people management will not only help you know what it means to organize your staff but also help you know the most potent ways by which you can organize staff in the organization.

Team work

As much as you are the boss to your workers, it is advisable to see the staff in the organization as members of your team rather than just subordinates.

This will help you work more closely with them through friendly discussions.

Failure to do this puts you in a position where you may not get the best out of them.

Imbibing team spirit as a staff manager will help you not only to bring out the best out of the employees but also get the best out of yourself.

When there are jobs to be executed, you should work together with the employees as a team to do them, as well as solve the problems facing the organization.
Though you want your job to be safe, however, it is advisable you look out for the welfare of the staff members in the organization and make sure you don’t show favoritism in handling staff issues.

Treat all with equity and do your best to be more of a coach to them than a manager barking out orders every day.

Problem solving skills

The more people you have under your control is directly proportional to the amount of problems you have to tackle every day.

Remember that you are a staff manager and that is because the staff members are very important to the success of the organization.

You are made a staff manager to coordinate and supervise the affairs of the staff under you.

This implies that you look out for those things that may make the staff not to function at full capacity and help them to the best of your ability to overcome those challenges.

That is where the problem solving skills come into play.

Some staff might be finding it difficult to cope with the latest changes in the organization; it is your duty to help them get through those challenges.

This can be done through orientation, reorientation, and workshops in the organization to help them adapt to their new challenges.

Patience

You need patience to manage every staff under your supervision. This is one quality most staff managers do not seem to be aware of yet.

Your staff members may not be easy to handle, but not impossible to manage.

As a staff manager, understanding the problems facing your staff will help you solve their problems.

However, understand that adaptation is not a day job. It is out of place for you to expect your staff to be perfect overnight. You have to be patient with them.

Being patient with your staff members implies that sometimes you overlook some minor errors, especially if it has to do with their adaptation process.

This is one way to help them grow. Mistakes are normal so you have to help them get over the mistakes rather than demeaning and undermining their efforts because of mistakes.

Conclusion

The success or failure of any organization is down to the work of the staff members.

But the staff if not properly organized and controlled may not be able to do what is expected of them to do.

This brings us to the need to have a staff manager whose duty is to organize and oversee the affairs of the staff in the workplace.

He/she needs the skills and qualities discussed on this page to be able to execute his/her job well.