As noted above, interpersonal skills are essential in modern-day management approaches. The definition goes beyond communicating well with others. It also entails the personal traits that a person has to be a leader, which include such traits as ethical orientation, ability to accept and manage change, desire to enhance diversity, problem solving, global perspective, ability to motivate, and resiliency.

Interpersonal skills, however, are not the only abilities that a manager needs. Because he or she is overseeing people who are designing and making a product or service, the manager has to be able to understand that product or service, its role in the marketplace, the customer needs and a forecast of what changes will occur. They have to be involved with today's nitty gritty, but also act as visionaries for tomorrow. This takes a special type of individual.

A survey done of it CIOs this past May, (Robert Half, 2007) demonstrated this mix of business and technical expertise requirements. Twenty-five percent of the CIOs ranked technical skills as the area in which their it staff could most use improvement.

Project management abilities were a close second with 23%. However, most of the CIOs placed soft skills, such as communication, teamwork, and ability to take direction, with project management skills. The results included responses from more than 1,400 CIOs from a random sample of American companies with 100 or more employees.

A number of different research studies have found similar results. Katz and Shepherd's (2004) research on managerial competencies identifies three skill sets that are essential for success: technical, human, and conceptual, or performing the organization's work, focusing on interpersonal skills and being able to see the total picture. Although these three skills are important at all management levels, the technical becomes less so when moving up the organizational chart as the conceptual skills become more so. Human skills, says Katz, are...

An individual may be a team member on one project, but a leader on another. He or she will need different skill sets depending on what the specific responsibilities entail. Similarly, a person may be working on a number of different projects at one time where a variety of skills are needed from technical to more "soft skill."
The manager of the future will have to be even more of this mix of technical and knowledge guru as well as inspirational leader, a type of Renaissance person. Traditional barriers between responsibilities will continue to fall, so a person will wear different hats depending on the particular situation. As McGill and Slocum state: New models of leadership are emerging that are "non-positional," team based, or empowering and call for new leader behaviors who act as coaches, stewards, servants, or partners. They are "dramatically different from the leaders of old who used the power of their position and/or their persona to exert their influence." (McGill and Slocum, 1998)