Top 8 Soft Skills For New Managers In 2019

Starting With the Timeless Five

New managers have a lot to learn, and soft skills should be at the top of that list. We won’t be including ‘leadership’ in this list as leadership in and of itself should already be at the core of any manager.

These first five skills are truly timeless and for good reason. However, they are often repeated a lot and you will see them in almost every list of soft skills online.

The Timeless Five soft skills are:

1. Listening

2. Communicating

3. Time Management

4. Goal Setting

5. Teamwork

These are the five skills that no manager can live without. Even take one out and the rest will easily collapse. As an example, how can you communicate effectively if you’re not listening? Or set goals effectively if you’re not applying good time management?

For a more complete breakdown of these top five soft skills and how to utilize them in your teams, check out our guide here.

Top Soft Skills for the Coming Year

With an understanding of these Timeless Five, it is time to dive into the top skills that new managers are going to need moving into 2019.

So, why are these skills becoming more prominent? Well, there has been a lot of new research on what really drives teams and results. Turns out that the landscape of management is changing radically, and fast.

The skills selected for this guide are specifically geared towards the new methods of managing, so look it over and see what specific skills could help your team the most.

Here is a look at the top 8 soft skills making waves in 2019, and how they can be applied to your teams.

Emotional Intelligence Started It All

Years ago, the soft skill now known as Emotional Intelligence (EQ) made its grand debut. And since then, the landscape of employee, customer, and business management has all been changing.

Even science and various research are backing up the benefits of emotional intelligence, both as an individual professional and as a manager.

The truth is, most employees actually WANT to be invested and engaged in the business and their goals. And by engaging with them on an emotionally intelligent level, the more your team members will feel included by the culture. And the more included they feel, the more invested they are in the business.

Here are a few of our tips for managing more emotional intelligently:

Learn how to utilize employee strengths and weaknesses effectively.

• While one employee may have certain areas that they struggle with, it could be another employee’s area of strength.

• By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of team members, your managers will be more successful in delegating those skillsets wisely.

Sparking passion in your teams with EQ.

• When there is passion there is personal investment. Luckily, emotional intelligence is a fantastic tool for generating passion for the workplace.

• Make the working environment positive and even fun, even if the tasks themselves are boring or repetitive.

Develop creative ways to manage stress.

• Stress is going to happen, but how your managers handle stress in their teams will make a huge difference. There are a number of creative ways to handle stress in the workplace.

• A few things that you can try are micro-breaks, free fruit or snacks, mediation, and even on-site coaching or mentorship. There are a lot of creative ideas out there, so experiment to see what works best for your teams.

Let your team members use their voice.

• Employees spend a majority of their time at their jobs. This means that they are likely to have insights and opinions on things going on in the company. Let them use it!

• Get your team involved with giving feedback on things like decisions being made in the company, leadership, and even upper management.

• You extend your effort into building a team that is educated, trained, and capable, so let them bring that expertise into the business that they are investing in too.

Encourage play in and out of your employee’s work environment.

• Avoid the thinking that an employee’s life should be all work and no play. While that sounds like an elementary concept, in reality, by bringing a little play into the mix you are actually encouraging a number of positive side effects.

• A few of these benefits include better team relationships, healthy competition, boosted creativity, and improved stress management.

• Even the little things can make a big impact, so get your managers in the habit of paying attention to the conditions and environment that your employees are spending their time.

Empowerment Builds Stronger Teams

So, let’s take a moment to look at what empowerment is. On one end, it is a form of motivation. When someone is empowered they are often energized, and in a workplace that energy gets turned to the tasks at hand.

Empowerment can also appear in a workplace setting as training, coaching, and other programs designed to build up employees for their own careers and goals. Like building morale, empowerment also builds up an employee’s natural energy and involvement.

But taking it a step further, it’s also about an employee being able to do their work on their own. Empowered teams are oftentimes more personally invested in their goals and need less direct supervision.

The Golden Rule of managing teams in the new era: Invest in your employees if you want them to invest in you.

Here are a few of our top tips for your new managers to empower their teams:

Let your team in on the decision-making process, and actually, ask for their insights and ideas.

• While the final decision rests with the managers, by involving your teams on the making of those decisions it can be a huge tool in empowering your teams.

• You want your employees to feel valued enough to bother bringing their ideas forward. Especially since their insights can often provide pieces to the puzzle that your managers might be trying to solve.

• By offering a way and time for employees to bring up their input towards decisions you are both gaining valuable feedback as a business, but empowering them in the process.

Use positive feedback to encourage open communication between management and staff.

• As mentioned before, communication is key to having a successful team. Get your managers in the habit of giving positive feedback in order to open the communication between them and their teams.

• Frequent negative feedback from leadership often deflates employees and shuts down the lines of communication that the rest of the team will rely on.

• Open communication often plays a huge roll in eliminating problems down the road and build trust along the way.

Demonstrate that you trust your team members.

• It’s important to let your employees know that you trust them. Being trusted also imparts the feeling of being valued, which also helps in boosting team morale.

• Give your team chances to earn more trust as well. These are the kinds of things that make employees feel like they are progressing in their careers.

Community Makes the Rest Worth It

A business’s ability to thrive depends largely on the employees and team dynamics running underneath the surface. Each segment of the business is handled by individual teams, and these teams are comprised of highly skilled professionals.

So when you encourage community in your organization you are taking those teams of individuals and turning them into a single unit.

Community also means a culture of caring between the members, and in the workplace that can be very important. It can be the difference between employees helping each other and drawing invisible lines of exclusion between themselves.

If you want to break down barriers in the workplace, create a sense of community across your whole organization. You’ll see a boost in energy, positive engagement, and overall involvement.

Here are a few suggestions for encouraging your team to be more of a community:

Get your team involved in defining your organization’s values.

• When defining the values for your company, it is important to keep in mind that these aren’t going to just be YOUR values, but that of an entire team. Are these their values too?

• Bring your employees into the conversation and find out what values are important to them. They might even surprise you!

• It is important that your company’s values are in-line with those of the employees that will be charged with upholding them. The more aligned your values are to your staff, the easier it is for them to create good work consistently.

Make expectations clear and easy to fulfill.

• Expectations help paint a picture for employees of how things should function. It gives your team a structure to follow.

• They also help your employees with personal goal setting. Use expectations to motivate your employees and avoid turning them into consequences.

• Use rewards and recognition to empower your employees to meet your expectations.

Turn the 1:1 into a powerful tool by transforming managers into coaches.

• For your employees, their managers are not only in their lives a predominant amount of time but are also over them for it all. This can make the dynamic between employee and manager very strained. One way to counter this issue is by training your managers on the dual role of coach.

• Turn managing teams into more than just delegation. Get your managers to take a proactive role in their employee’s personal advancement.

• Use the 1:1 meeting as an opportunity to connect with your team. This is a powerful tool for coaches and it can be used similarly in the workplace environment. Set time aside for checking in with your staff one-on-one for a few minutes a week, no more than 10-15.

• Let these sessions give them an opportunity to go over achievements and challenges, ask questions, and give their own feedback. While you want to keep it brief, you don’t want to waste it on superficial conversations.

Getting Your Team Connected

The goal here is authenticity. When getting your team connected, you want to make sure that it’s real. The kinds of relationships that are only surface deep won’t get your teams through tough times.

You need to build your team in a way that they can effectively work together, solve problems together, handle difficulties, as well as pressure.

As a rule of thumb, connecting is in its nature more genuine. When your employees have a connection to each other, they tend to actually care and have concern for each other’s well-being.

These tips can help your team get better connected:

Use your organization’s values to get your teams connected.

• When you involve your team in the defining of the values, it is MUCH easier for your team to keep them front and center. When your values aren’t just empty words, they’ll have a deeper meaning to employees personally.

• When it is an organization-wide effort to live by these values, it creates an environment where people are encouraged to connect with others.

Create a culture based on the sense of belonging for all.

• Companies benefit greatly when they put effort into creating a culture that gives all employees a sense of belonging. There are a lot of people that benefit from feeling like they belong in their workplace.

• This means getting rid of any exclusion that might be going on in the organization. Exclusion can show up as barriers between things like titles, departments, education levels, and pay differences. Don’t let the common differences between your employees become excuses to exclude others.

• When everyone is included, they are more likely to extend themselves, feel safe enough to let their guards down, and work more as a team with others.

Find reasons to celebrate, then make it a regular practice!

• In truth, there are plenty of reasons for you, and your employees to celebrate. But have you given them that permission? Sure, an occasional Birthday party gets the thumbs up, but how far does your company go to give recognition to your staff?

• The point here is to make it clear to your staff that their efforts are noticed and that their accomplishments will be recognized.

• There are a number of ways to reward your employees. Check out this article here for an extensive list of creative ways to reward and recognize your employees.

Get your team members to connect as a community.

• So we mentioned this earlier in this article, but when you have a sense of community your staff works more like a family unit.

• There are ways to bring your team together, like hosting regular events that give employees an opportunity to mingle in fun settings, after hour get-togethers, and a number of others.

• Another way to connect your teams is to share positive stories, funny experiences, and pictures of life in the company.

• Overall, a community is where people feel that they are safe, respected, supported, and cared about. In this kind of environment, employees are most likely to give their best.

Hire and train leaders that can be authentic.

• Your leadership needs to care as much about their people as they do about the profits. Yes, in business, money makes things move, but it’s PEOPLE who are making that money for your company, so their well-being is just as much your concern.

• Also, high turnover rates get expensive. You are more likely to get employee loyalty when you, and your leaders, genuinely care about them.

• Employees are real people that respond to real people. Train your leaders on how to be personable and to build authentic connections with their teams.

Giving and Receiving Criticism

Criticism can be hard to give and to take, but it is a soft skill that your managers will need to have. For the new era of management to work, your managers need to communicate in a way that promotes progress, even when it’s something negative.

There comes a time when everyone faces criticism in the workplace, even managers. But for new managers, criticism can be a little tough to take. They might put up some natural resistance that will take time, and effort, to control.

Even managers need to open and honest with their own margins for improvement.

Here are a few tips for new managers to both give and receive criticism:

Steps to Giving Criticism:

• Avoid unpleasant surprises. Dropping a meeting on your employees without notice can catch them off-guard, make them anxious, and leave them unprepared for handling what you have to say. Give team members a heads up beforehand, and with as much notice as possible.

• Privacy is key. Don’t let your discussion with the individual become office news. You can avoid problems by having your talk in a private setting and by not mentioning it to anyone outside of that room unless absolutely necessary. Keeping to this standard will also build trust among your managers and their whole team.

• Be straightforward when giving criticism. When there is a problem that you need to give feedback to someone, don’t beat around the bush. Make sure your managers feel comfortable with being specific and straightforward. It makes communication much easier between all parties and helps in avoiding painful misunderstandings.

• Come to the table with ideas for improvements. Don’t just come to the table with a bucket of bad. Make sure that your managers are also bringing in plenty of ideas as well. While it’s up to the employee to fix the problem, it is up to the managers to help them identify what to improve and with suggestions of how.

• Turn criticism into a conversation. Train your managers to handle talks with criticism as more conversations. It helps employees receive messages when they do not feel talked down too, berated, attacked, or dictated too. Most of the time employees want to improve too, they just need some insights on how to make the changes.

Tips for Receiving Criticism:

• Don’t give in to your first reaction. It’s important to ingrain in your managers to avoid their first reaction when faced with criticism. Have them take a step back from their emotions and listen to what the other person, or people, have to say.

• Remind new managers of the benefits of receiving criticism. How can your managers improve without knowing about problems first? It’s important to remind your new managers that there ARE benefits to being open to the criticism of their teams. They will have a genuine opportunity to grow and it fosters a positive working relationship between them and their teams.

• Listen to understand. If someone is bringing forward criticism it is most of the time for good reason. Also, a lot of employees don’t necessarily come forward as soon as something is a problem, but rather after the problem has been there for some time. So train your new managers on how to listen to understand, as it will help them be more open to receiving criticism in the future.

• Use questions to make sure you understand and solve the problem. Train your new managers on how to use questions to break down a problem. Criticism isn’t the end of the world when received with an open mind, so don’t be afraid to use questions to build a better understanding of what is going on and how to fix it.

• Take time to consider the problem and then follow-up. After receiving criticism, have your managers take some time to consider what was discussed before giving their follow-up. This gives your managers time to consider options, get feedback from others, and come back to the other person with a more prepared answer.

These are the top skills projected for 2019. All of these skills work intricately together to build up your managers in the most effective ways possible for the managing of today’s teams. And don’t forget the Timeless Five! They, too, help bring the whole picture together.

There are dozens of other soft skills out there, and while it will take time to develop them in your teams, it is worth it for the benefits on both your company and your employee’s lives.

A goal for the long term is to have an effective workforce that sticks around and is loyal to your company. Your goals need to be their goals and to do that you need to treat your employees like the investments they are.

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