Supervision: Concepts and Skill Building 10th Edition by Samuel Certo Solution manual
Decision-Making Skills: Decision-making skills involve the ability to analyze information and reach good decisions. Someone with strong decision-making skills can think objectively and creatively.
- Teaching Notes:
For many years, experts have considered managers’ success dependent on three basic categories of skills: technical, human relations, and conceptual. In addition, the application of those skills requires a fourth skill: decision making.
The relative importance of each type of skill depends on the level of management. Supervisors rely more on technical skills than do higher-level managers because employees who have a problem doing their jobs go to the supervisor and expect help. Also, top managers tend to rely more on decision-making skills simply because they tend to make more complex decisions.
Expanding on the classic view of management skills, current thinkers have concluded that the typical manager’s activities fall into three groups: task-related activities carry out critical management-related duties; people-related activities manage people such as recognizing contributions; and change-related activities are efforts to modify components of the organization.
These activities frequently come together in today’s fast-moving business environment. Contemporary business demands such as sustainability (operating with a minimal impact on the environment) and social media (online tools for sharing information) call for new ways of working.
To carry out these activities, supervisors and other managers rely on a diverse set of skills, including those listed in Table 1.1 on page 1-8 of the Instructor’s Manual.
Supervisors who continually develop their skills in each area are the ones most likely to be promoted to higher levels of management.
- Teaching example to describe the basic types of supervisory skills:
The purpose of this teaching example is to illustrate how two skills—technical and conceptual—are required to be a successful supervisor. Use Table 1.1 to show the relative importance of types of skills for different levels of managers.
Table 1.1 lists some of the skills managers and supervisors rely on to carry out these activities.
Table 1.1
Skills of Successful Managers
| Clarifying roles | Assigning tasks; explaining job responsibilities, task objectives, and performance expectations |
| Monitoring operations | Checking on the progress and quality of the work; evaluating individual and unit performance |
| Short-term planning | Determining how to use personnel and other resources to accomplish a task efficiently; determining how to schedule and coordinate activities efficiently |
| Consulting | Checking with people before making decisions that affect them; encouraging participation in decision-making; using the ideas and suggestions of others |
| Supporting | Being considerate; showing sympathy and support when someone is upset or anxious; providing encouragement and support when a task is difficult or stressful |
| Recognizing | Providing praise and recognition for effective performance, significant achievements, special contributions, and performance improvements |
| Developing | Providing coaching and advice; providing opportunities for skill development; helping people learn how to improve their skills |
| Empowering | Allowing substantial responsibility and discretion in work activities; trusting people to solve problems and make decisions without getting approval first |
| Envisioning change | Presenting an appealing description of desirable outcomes that the unit can achieve; describing a proposed change with enthusiasm and conviction |
| Taking risks for change | Taking personal risks and making sacrifices to encourage and promote desirable change in the organization |
| Encouraging innovative thinking | Challenging people to question their assumptions about the work and consider better ways of doing it |
| External monitoring | Analyzing information about events, trends, and changes in the external environment to identify threats and opportunities for the work unit |