According to the Management Standards Centre, there are six broad categories of skills and competence:

1. Managing self and personal skills
2. Providing direction
3. Facilitating change
4. Working with people
5. Using resources
6. Achieving results

Oh, how simple that last one sounds – just two words, that’s all!

Robert L. Katz suggested a simpler scheme of management skills in the Harvard Business Review (1989):

• Technical skills related to the profession or specialisation.
• Human skills such as the ability to work cooperatively and effectively as a group or team member.
• Conceptual skills such as the ability to see the enterprise as a whole, and recognise relationships and dependencies between the various parts.

Here’s another list of key management traits and behaviours, identified by Eugene Jennings (1952):

• Give clear work instructions
• Praise others when they deserve it
• Be willing to take time to listen
• Be cool and calm most of the time
• Be confident and self-assured
• Have appropriate technical knowledge of the work being supervised
• Understand the group’s problems
• Gain the group’s respect
• Be fair to everyone
• Demand good work from everyone
• Gain people’s trust
• Take a leadership role
• Be humble, not stuck up
• Be easy to talk to