New Management Competencies

For all managers human skills are becoming increasingly important.    In a survey of managers on their views of how the Internet has affected management, for example, the majority considered communicating effectively, retaining talented employees, and motivating workers to be essential management skills for the Internet world.  Although these abilities have always been important to managers, they take on added significance today, particularly when employees are dispersed and working in a virtual environment.

Today's best managers give up their command-and-control mindset to embrace ambiguity and create organizations that are fast, flexible, adaptable, and relationship-oriented.  Leadership is dispersed throughout the organization, and managers empower others to gain the benefit of their ideas and creativity.  The model of managers controlling workers no longer applies in a workplace where employee brainpower is more important than physical assets.  Moreover, managers often supervise employees who are scattered in various locations, requiring a new approach to leadership that focuses more on mentoring and providing direction and support than on giving orders and ensuring that they are followed.

Rather than a single-minded focus on profits, today's managers must recognise the critical importance of staying connected to employees and customers.  The Internet has given increased knowledge and power to customers, so organizations have to remain flexible and adaptable to respond quickly to changing demands or competition.  In some e-commerce organizations, managers have almost totally ignored profits in favor of building customer relationships.  Although all organizations have to be concerned with profits sooner or later, as managers of numerous failed dot-coms learned, the emphasis these companies put on developing customers and relationships is a reflection of trends affecting all organizations.

Team-building skills are crucial for today's managers.  Teams of front-line employees who work directly with customers have become the basic building block of organizations.  Instead of managing a department of employees, many managers act as team leaders of ever-shifting, temporary projects. 

Success in the new workplace depends on the strength and quality of collaborative relationships.  Partnerships, both within the organization and with outside customers, suppliers, and even competitors, are recognized as the key to a winning organization.  New ways of working emphasize collaboration across functions and hierarchical levels as well as with other companies.  E-business models that digitally link customers, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders require managers to assess and manage relationships far beyond the confines of the traditional organization.

An important management challenge in the new workplace is to build a learning organization by creating an organizational climate that values experimentation and risk taking, applies current technology, tolerates mistakes and failure, and rewards nontraditional thinking and the sharing of knowledge.  Everyone in the organization participates in identifying and solving problems, enabling the organization to continuously experiment, improve, and increase its capability.  The role of managers is not to make decisions, but to create learning capability, where everyone is free to experiment and learn what works best.