Skills of an Effective Administrator by Robert L.

Katz

Summary:

Robert Katz talks about three skills that are essential for a leader to be successful. He talks about the
technical, conceptual and interpersonal(human) skills in detail and describes how managers are assisted
by these skills to optimize their performance.

The first one of the 3 skills is the Technical. These are a broad category and can be easily defined. We
could say that technical skills are the capacities that you are able to learn, and they could be in any field,
work, education or sports. For example, a football goalkeeper needs to be vigilant in positioning himself
and using his arms and legs accurately (both would be technical skills). Similarly, a lab technician needs
to understand the correct use of apparatus in order to efficiently do his job.

Additionally, leaders require a wide breadth of technical expertise. Management is a necessity across all
businesses, and it must be present at different organizational levels. A functioning knowledge of a piece
of machinery and the capacity to instruct a team member on how to use it as well as explain the
machinery's fundamental operations to others are examples of technical skills for a leader. Important
technical abilities are needed by leaders in other company roles and at higher levels. Office-based skills
like typing, programming, website upkeep, writing, giving presentations, and using programs like
Microsoft Office or Adobe are examples of this. To maximize managerial success in office settings, a
complex set of communication, technology, and data-organization skills are needed.

Successful organizational leaders must learn to make advantage of the technical resources at their
disposal, gathering crucial data and information to communicate higher up for strategic planning. A mid-
level manager who is in charge of identifying potential for worldwide marketing in the automotive
sector is an illustration of information management. The manager will use efficient research and
delegation skills as well as combine the information into a useful presentation using technological and
communicative skills. This person must be capable of understanding the legal, demographic, social,
technological, and economic considerations of entering a market.

According to Katz, a person needs more conceptual talents (and less technical skills) as they advance in
the organization. Strategic decision-making is intrinsically more conceptual, thus senior managers need
less technical skills; mid- and lower-level abilities, like data collection, assessment, and discussion, are all
more technical. However, for efficient business processes to take place, a wide range of skill sets are
needed across all managerial disciplines.

The second of the 3 skills are conceptual skills. Conceptual skills revolve arounds ideas generation and
having intuitions that are creative. While all the 3 skills are useful, conceptual skills mostly come into
play when there are strategic decisions involved. They unlock high-level thinking and are considered
critical in a leader’s success.

While conceptual thinking is advantageous to leaders at all levels, upper leadership spends the most
time in this mindset (as opposed to thinking more technically—examining and interacting with the
specific components of a given operation or business process). The duty of developing a strategy for an
organization's overall operational and competitive approach primarily falls on leaders. The creation of
corporate principles, policies, mission statements, ethics, processes, and goals is a component of this
strategic planning. It takes a lot of conceptual skills to formulate concepts and foresee their implications
in an organizational environment in order to create this complicated combination of concepts to serve
as an organizational foundation.

While upper-level leaders might be the ones who use conceptual skills the most, all leaders need to
comprehend and take part in the development of the company's goals and values. The capacity to
impart these crucial ideas to subordinates and the capacity to acquire pertinent data to provide to
senior management in order for the ideas to evolve are of particular importance. The process of
gathering conceptual thinking's output is a feedback loop. Conceptual abilities are crucial for enabling
leaders at all organizational levels to observe an organization's operations and conceptualize them as a
component of its strategy, objectives, and policies. Conceptual thinking promotes quick and accurate
feedback as well as organizational flexibility.

Interpersonal skills are the last category, and are a broad category. With time, the management styles of
companies have changed as roles have been merged into operations such as staffing, benefits and
reporting etc. with such changes, companies now involve fewer level of management and
responsibilities are delegated to lower levels and this helps in achieving goals in a proficient manner.
This is where the interpersonal skills come into play, as there is a huge difference between managing
people and leading them. A manager’s job is to utilizer resources to achieve some objective, while a
leader creates motivation and creativity amongst employees so they can make their own efforts towards
the goal. To put this into perspectives, a team leader would be a person whose own agenda is being
place superior to the needs of the team while a leader will create loyal followers by putting the team
above all else and catering to their needs.

In real world situations, organizations need leaders who are able to assess their teams in analytic and
quantitative terms, evaluating the shortcomings and making choices that other people tend not to
make. However, it is wrong to believe or think that a manager has to be the bad person in order to do
their job effectively.