What are the skills required to be a manager, and how do they relate to each other? What is leadership and how is it different from management? The Egan management Skills Model provides answers to these fundamental questions through a conceptual model that relates the core skills (motivation, negotiation, delegation, communication, and problem-solving) of management to each other and to the art of leadership.
For the purposes of this discussion, management refers to people management: the efficient use of staff members, as opposed to assets or equipment, in a business setting. Thus, managers are people coordinators.
People management is the art of working through others. We manage people because we are unable to do all of the work ourselves. Managers must get their work done by others - they must work through others. Good managers are able to optimize the output of the staff they manage.
Someone who possesses management skills, therefore, has the ability to assign tasks and supervise the actions and efforts of staff members.
The broadest definition of management includes all aspects of business and commerce. Management studies refers to how best to work through others - how to assign tasks and supervise the actions of others. For the purposes of this paper, we will limit the discussion of overall management practices to those aspects of commerce that relate to people management.
Management studies comprise a huge field. Virtually every large university has a commerce or business management department dedicated to the study and teaching of how best to run businesses. Like all other fields of study, new research is constantly being done and opinions revised about what are considered to be best practices.
The problem for the new manager, and the public at large, is that the constant stream of research and opinions complicates the recognition of the fundamentals. This is where the Egan Management Skills Model comes into play.
The model graphically illustrates the linkages among the core skills of management. It reduces the complexity of management studies by distilling all the possible terminology down to a few fundamental elements. People management boils down to the application of the knowledge areas listed in the model.
On the periphery is a yellow circle with two skills sets, communications and problem-solving, superimposed on the line. Communications and problem-solving are considered overarching skills. These skills, as will be explained later, are not specific to management but play an important overarching role in how managers can and do behave.
Within the circle is a triangle, the three sides of which are referred to as integrated skills. These are: negotiation, delegation, and motivation. The integrated skills create the iron triangle of management.
Just like the triple constraints of project management (scope, time, and cost), the iron triangle of management represents management activities that are inextricably tied together. Negotiation, delegation, and motivation cannot be performed in isolation. Actions in one area always affect the other two.
Although the term leadership appears in the center of the triangle, leadership is not a skill set or a distinct knowledge area. Instead, leadership is the effect that a manager creates as a result of how he or she employs the five management skill sets (motivation, negotiation, delegation, communication, and problem-solving). The way a manager applies these skills sets becomes his or her leadership style.
The management skills model implies that there are only five core skills that managers need to employ in the execution of their jobs as managers. Every manager uses all five every day.
These five skills are inextricably interconnected. While they represent separate knowledge areas and potential areas of study , they cannot actually be applied in isolation. Management is the art of managing the interplay among the five skills .
Communications refers to any and all aspects of how people interact with one another. Every message we send, whether conscious or not, is a communication. Everyone is able to communicate. Not everyone is good at it. A good communicator ensures that the message they sent is the one that was received.
The communication method a manager chooses to use in a given situation is determined by an array of potential influences. These influences are built up over a lifetime of experience and training, and include everything from culture, to age, to education.
From a management perspective, good managers know what information must be included in a communication and how best to transmit the information so that a target audience will interpret the message correctly. In order to be good communicators, we need to manage the technology of communications (e.g., grammar and fax machines) as well as the impact of tone and body language.
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