Management skills assessment and development

Management Skills Assessment

Completing this assessment was very eye opening experience. Oftentimes people do a job everyday but never really stop to think about how they do their job on a daily basis. I looked at each of the questions and really thought about how I see myself doing things and then tried to rate by self fairly. I then asked a college of mine to rate me on the same questions. What I found is that I see fault in myself that others do not see. And even though this might seem like a good thing, I still feel that I have room to make improvements.

There were a couple of areas in which I felt as though I had a good handle on. These areas included the areas of planning, prioritizing and organizing along with communication, and motivation. These are all important qualities that are needed in order to be a successful manager. Another area in which I feel that I am strong in is that of customer care and customer service management. In order to be successful in customer service it is important to have good listening skills along with the ability to be empathetic. The key to a satisfied customer is to always listen to what they have to say and then be able to give them options for the situation that they are in. The last thing that a customer wants to hear is that there is nothing that you can do for them. If you present them with options then they feel empowered. They may not always agree with all the options that they are giving but they will be a lot more satisfied than if you didn't give them any at all.

An area that emerged from the assessment that I feel that I need to improve on is that of quality awareness and managing, according to quality standards and procedures. I have always found this area to be challenging. It is not necessarily that I feel that I do a bad job in this area, but I often feel that I don't completely have a grasp on the entire concept as a whole. The standards and procedures that are set down often change and can sometimes contain a lot of gray area. This makes this area very hard to manage. What appears to be the right way today is often not going to be the right way tomorrow. Because of this it is hard to manage with any consistency to the idea of quality.

Another area in which I feel that I am weak is that of effective use of IT and equipment. This is an area in which I sometimes feel overwhelmed. How all the different systems work and relate to each other is sometimes overwhelming. I often know that there is a specific way to do something but can never seem to figure out how to make it work.

The one thing that surprised be about this assessment is that other people see me as better in many of the areas than I see myself. It's not that I feel that I am a really bad in any of the categories, but I do feel that there are a few areas in which I need to improve. I guess this goes back to how people are always harder on themselves than others are on them. Being hard on myself though is how I get better at things. My goal is to always do the best job that I can, which means that I have to always be trying to improve.

The steps that I would like to take in order to strengthen my overall managerial competence include getting a better understanding of the quality standards and procedures that have been set down so that I can better manage to them. I also would like to attend some computer system training so that I can get a better understanding of how all the systems work and how I can better use them to do my job.