# The Best Managerial Skills, and Why Expertise Ranks Last Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/best-managerial-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/best-managerial-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The best managerial skills are mostly people skills: coaching, clear communication and sound decisions. Here's what sets great managers apart, and how to start. ## Key facts - Title: The Best Managerial Skills, and Why Expertise Ranks Last - Category: Skills Standards and Frameworks - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Influence, Decision-Making - Primary keyword: best managerial skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/best-managerial-skills/ ## What this page covers - The best managerial skills are mostly people skills: coaching, clear communication and sound decisions. Here's what sets great managers apart, and how to start. - Practical guidance for best managerial skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The best managerial skills are mostly people skills. Coaching, communicating clearly, giving people room to do their work and making sound decisions are what separate strong managers from merely experienced ones. Technical expertise matters less than you might expect: in Google's study of its own managers, it ranked last of eight. That is useful to know whether you are aiming for your first team-lead role, getting ready to talk about leadership in an interview, or already leading a few people and wondering why being good at the work no longer feels like enough. It also means you can start now. The skills that matter most are the ones you use with other people every day, and the reason they outrank expertise says a lot about what a manager's job really is. ## Why the best managerial skills are mostly about people A manager gets work done through other people. Management is usually described as four functions: planning what needs to happen, organizing people and resources to do it, leading the people doing it, and controlling, which means checking that results match the plan. Every one of those runs through someone else's hands. Once that is true, your own output stops being the measure, and how well you equip others becomes the job. The most widely used way to sort the skills behind that work comes from Robert Katz, who described three of them in the Harvard Business Review in 1955: technical, human and conceptual skills. In his model, every manager needs all three, but not in the same proportions. Frontline managers, who stay close to the work, lean most on technical skill. Senior leaders, who coordinate many moving parts, lean most on conceptual skill. Human skills matter at every level, which makes them the one category that never shrinks as a career grows. Google put the question to its own data decades later. Starting in 2008, its People Analytics team ran a research effort called Project Oxygen to find out what its best managers did differently, and landed on eight behaviors, later expanded to ten. Being a good coach came first. Having the technical skills to advise the team came last of the original eight. The reason is simple once you see it: a manager's output is the team's output, so coaching, communicating and supporting people move results more than the manager's own expertise does. That is the key correction for anyone who expects to be promoted for being the best at the work. Expertise earns you a seat at the table. How you guide, support and develop the people around you decides how well you manage from it. Put Katz's model and Google's findings together, and the best managerial skills fall into four groups. ### Human skills: the heart of the job Human skills are the ability to work with people, understand them and motivate them, and they account for most of what made Google's best managers stand out. Coaching tops the list: helping someone get better at their work by asking how they approached it and what they would try next, instead of fixing it for them. Close behind come empowering the team rather than micromanaging, which means handing over real tasks and real decisions and checking in rather than taking them back; communicating well, which in Project Oxygen means listening as much as sharing information; [building an inclusive team](/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-create-psychological-safety/) where people can see that you care about their success and well-being; and supporting people's career development, including honest conversations about performance. For the person on the receiving end, the difference between a manager who simply assigns work and one who coaches is easy to feel. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described meeting the second kind: > I'm very deferential to authority, and I had expected leaders who hand out tasks, almost military-style. Instead there were people who actually wanted to talk with me about why I did what I did. That is one workplace, not a rule about managers. But wanting to understand why someone did what they did is coaching in its plainest form, and it is a behavior, not a personality trait. Because human skills are used with colleagues in any role, they are also the group you can practice long before you hold a management title: walking a classmate or a newer colleague through a task, asking a quiet team member what they think, giving [feedback that someone can actually use](/knowledge/self-awareness/constructive-critique/). ### Conceptual skills: seeing the whole picture Conceptual skill is the ability to see the big picture and understand how a change in one part affects the rest of the organization. In Katz's model it matters most at the top, where a leader's work is coordinating many parts at once. Project Oxygen's version of it is having a clear vision and strategy for the team, and when Google expanded its list to ten behaviors, it added collaborating across the organization, because a manager's work reaches well beyond their own team. In a first leadership role, this skill is less grand than it sounds. It looks like being able to tell your team in two sentences what the next quarter is for and why a given task matters to it. It looks like noticing that the deadline you are about to set lands in another team's busiest week, and talking to them first. The habit of asking "who else does this touch?" is where conceptual skill starts. ### Decisions and results: turning people work into delivery Coaching and vision only count if the work gets done. Project Oxygen lists being productive and results-oriented among its core behaviors, and the expanded list added being a strong decision maker. Together with the human skills, they describe a manager who combines results with people. Neither alone is enough: a manager who only pushes for output loses the team, and one who only looks after the team delivers little. This is where planning, organizing and controlling live day to day: deciding what the team does first and what waits, saying clearly what "done" looks like, and following up so results match the plan. That is what prioritizing for others really involves. It is less about your own to-do list and more about making sure everyone's effort goes to the work that matters most. Making decisions on the team's behalf also means owning them: gathering views before you decide, explaining your reasoning afterward, and standing behind the call when it is questioned. ### Technical skills: necessary, but last Technical skill is the ability to use the tools, procedures and techniques of your team's field. It is real, and at the first rung of management it still counts. Katz placed it highest for frontline managers, who need enough of it to judge the quality of work and to advise people who know their craft. Without it, earning credibility with a team of specialists is hard. What changes is its job. As you move up, its weight shrinks, which is why it sits at the bottom of Project Oxygen's list rather than the top. Treat it as your ticket in, not the role itself: the shift is from doing the work to advising on it, so the people doing it can grow. ## How to show managerial skills before you have the title You do not need anyone reporting to you to build or show most of these skills. Group projects, student jobs, volunteer roles and your first months at work are full of small management moments: a decision nobody has made, a newer colleague who is stuck, a meeting with no clear outcome. Each one is a chance to practice, and each one becomes evidence. When you describe that evidence on a résumé or in an interview, name the behavior rather than the label. "Strong leadership skills" tells an employer very little. "Showed two new colleagues how our booking system worked, then checked in a week later to see where they were stuck" shows coaching. "Got our project group to agree on who did what, and followed up when a deadline slipped" shows decisions and results. The situation, what you did and what changed: that is what makes a managerial skill believable. [Earning respect without a title](/knowledge/influence/leading-without-authority/) works the same way. People follow someone who delivers, takes responsibility beyond their own task and makes things easier for everyone else, long before an organization makes it official. If you are not sure which of these behaviors you can genuinely point to, it is worth taking a moment to [see which are already strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you claim them in an application. Every one of them can be developed, so a gap today is simply the next thing to practice. ## The skills that make people want to work for you Look back at what put the best managers ahead: coaching instead of commanding, handing over real decisions, explaining where the team is going, standing behind a call. None of it depends on a title, and very little of it depends on being the most expert person in the room. It depends on a handful of things you do with people, again and again. **Communication** is where most of a manager's day actually happens, and the parts that matter are everyday ones. State the main point first and be clear and direct, so people know what you need from them. Listen fully before answering, especially when someone disagrees with you. Handle the tricky moments early, such as giving feedback, expressing disagreement or settling a conflict, because they are the ones most easily put off. Each is a set of behaviors you can practice in any meeting, long before you run one. **Influence** is how people come to follow someone before any job title says they should. It rests on a reputation earned by delivering results consistently, on taking responsibility for the bigger picture beyond your own task, and on taking the initiative, whether that means volunteering to organize the next step or simply asking. When you want people to back an idea, prepare by understanding what is in it for them, keep the pitch simple, be honest about the drawbacks, and follow up. That is ethical persuasion, not office politics, and it works from a junior position. **Decision-Making** is what lets you make calls for a team without making them alone. Start by knowing which decisions are actually yours. Then get another opinion, gather input from people independently before discussing it, ask the quiet members what they think, and let someone play devil's advocate. Watch for overconfidence and the sunk-cost trap of sticking with a choice because you have already invested in it, and accept good enough over perfect so the team keeps moving. It is a process you learn, not an instinct you either have or lack. The free Job Skills Test shows how communication, influence and decision-making are working in your own day-to-day right now, so you can [choose your next practice target](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) instead of guessing. It reads them within **a wider set of twelve work skills**, and every one of them can be trained. ## Growing into management on your own terms Some of this may already show up in how you work, even if nobody calls it management. If a newer colleague has ever come to you rather than to the manager to ask how something works, and your explanation stuck, you were coaching. That is the raw material these skills are built from. None of them is fixed, and building them does not mean becoming louder, tougher or someone you are not. You decide which one to work on first: the one that matters most for where you want to go next. The closer you move to leading people, the more these skills shape how your days go, which is exactly why it pays to know your starting point while the stakes are still modest. What helps most now is a clear picture of where you stand. ## Find out which managerial skill to build first The next move is yours, and it is a small one. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve, including the communication, influence and decision-making that leading people runs on, and points to the ones that will make the biggest difference for you. Take it today, then pick one skill to try out in your next team meeting or group project. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? The best managerial skills are mostly people skills: coaching, clear communication and sound decisions. Here's what sets great managers apart, and how to start. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Influence, Decision-Making. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/best-managerial-skills/ Preferred summary: "The best managerial skills are mostly people skills: coaching, clear communication and sound decisions. Here's what sets great managers apart, and how to start." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.