I have been a first-level manager for a few years now and I have identified a handful of skills that employees need to develop. The interesting thing is that employees are aware of their shortcomings in these skills but leadership has never made it a priority to develop these skills.
Communicating project status.
It seems that many people think they should be able to just put their heads down and do their jobs but communicating project status is part of the job. It feels like this is not value-added and takes away from doing the work. It is important to comfort management on progress and employees need to communicate the work they are doing for promotions.
Planning and Forecasting
Skilled planning and forecasting comes with experience and there is risk in determining a forecast because an employee will be held responsible if the forecast is not met. For an employee to grow in their career they need to take on more responsibility and stating a completion date for a task or project and striving to achieve is part of that responsibility. When they start making forecasts they will get them wrong but over time they will improve. It is okay if they get them wrong as long as they are aware they will miss the forecast and let the stakeholders know ahead of time. Also, remember, Elon Musk is known for missing forecasts.
Staying On Top of All Tasks
We all have a ton on our plate and more tasks are added all of the time. Employees need to be good at staying on top of things. First, employees must document everything they must do in a trusted system. Email is not that system and tracking tasks in multiple systems risks losing track of tasks. They also need to make time to review and plan the work. This seems like these activities will take away from the time available to do the value-added work but this ensures that the important things will get done. We will always have more work to do than time to do it not every task should get done. I like to say “The more you feel like you don’t have time to review and plan your work the more you need to review and plan your work”.
If you are an employee consider how you can improve in these skills and if you are a manager I recommend you help your employees develop in these areas.
I always loved this clip of Parcour in The Office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kvw2BPKjz0