Management Skills

1.1 - Current Management Skills

Before talking about the management skills that I possess, I feel it would be good if I give back ground of I happened to learn some management skill. Before I joined this college, I spent over a year in a small recruiting agency as a part-time administrative officer. The company being very small, as an administrative officer, I had to undertake various functions such as telephone operator, cashier, administrative officer as well as a secretary. I had two colleagues and the practice within our company is for us to share the load among ourselves rather than one being specialized to a certain task although. However for the purpose of ease of management, the three of us decided that each of us would take the responsibility of looking after certain tasks as long as she was not extremely busy. For example, I was the person responsible for opening and closing the office everyday, updating the customer database, making monthly reports etc and another colleague took the responsibilities of receiving and making payments, procuring small office items such as stationery, cleaning items etc.

The management skills that I learnt while working there are

1. Time management

2. Communication via various methods - face to face, telephone, mail etc

3. Gathering information from different sources such as internet, books, reports etc

4. Interviewing

5. Compiling small reports

6. Maintaining log of daily activities

Time management: Time management skill is something that I have been trained to possess from the days of my schooling. I make it a habit not to leave a work that I could do today for tomorrow. Often some people feel lazy and decide to keep a work for the next day, not thinking about what additional work he may be assigned the following day. Such a habit could lead to work piling up to an extent that is difficult to manage.

I always jot down a list work that I have to attend. Then I order them with the most important first and least important last. Before finalising the list, I always consult my superior to make sure that his order of priority match mine and make changes if necessary. Works are then distributed among colleagues and me. Whenever a work is finished I mark it as finished on the list.

Although I did not want to skip a work in the middle and attend to another, there had been occasions when a high priority work pops in. In such cases I make a note near the half finished work and attend to the high priority work. Once it is finished I resume the work I was doing.

Attending telephone calls are at times very disturbing and I always make sure that the time spent on phone calls is kept to a minimum. In fact I arrange a colleague to answer for me when the pile of work goes above a certain limit.

Communication: I was not familiar with MS Mail at the time I started a part time job. But seeking help from my colleagues in my first job, I managed to learn it soon. A lot of internal communication such as assigning tasks and making follow up of works were done via MS Mail. Once I got used to it, I realized how much the application made the work easier.

I also had to make telephone calls to many of our clients and government agencies. I had to communicate with people of varying characters. Some people are easier to communicate and I could accomplish what I called for without much hassle. Some others had the habit to make mountains out mole hill and make me feel that the sky would fall over my head in no time. With such people I had the temptation to lose my temper. In fact after the first two or three such occasions I complained to my superior about such cases and he explained to me that it is characteristic of communication and that I must learn to accept the diversity of the characteristics of people.

Since then gradually I learned to get accustomed to the issue.

We were visited on a daily basis by several customers and staff from affiliated companies. During such visits, I had come across people who were feeling unhappy about some issue either due to some misunderstanding or due to a fault of ours. I learned that even if there is no fault of ours, it is better not to respond in a defensive manner. What I would do is, let his anger calm down by letting him say whatever he wants and then try to explain the situation. Almost in all such cases by the time such customers left, they were feeling calm.

Gathering information: At times I had to gather information of different types such as information of customers from customer databases, some financial information of the previous month from financial reports or even from internet about the arrival times of recruits to be handed to some companies. It is also my duty to go through the classified of daily newspapers about advertisements seeking recruits such as housemaids, so that we could contact them and offer them our service.

Interviewing: The recruits were to report to our office within 24hours of their arrival. It was my duty to arrange to conduct a short interview with each of them. I was not the only one who did the interviewing but I was one of the interviewers.

Compiling small reports: At the end of the each month, I was responsible to compile a small report of statistics of recruits. Some of the information included in the report were the number of recruits brought in, sent back, the amount spent on fees for recruits etc. It also includes the number of pending requests for recruits, the categories of jobs for which recruits were requested for and the number of request for each category.

Maintaining daily activity log: All activities carried out each day were to be entered in to a log. This was some sort of a web based application. Every person were to be logged in to his or her account and each one was to enter his/her activity such as making arranging necessary fee payments of recruits, making phone calls to a certain customer, arrival of recruits etc. The application enters the date and time and the ID of the person who made the entry automatically and it also indicates. It also indicates if a case is open or closed. This is very useful when compiling monthly report. I was made responsible to ensure that the activities were properly logged.

1.2 - Required Criteria in the Self-assessment Inventory

Assessing one by himself may not sound very difficult at first since everyone knows his own feelings. Although one can feel a sense of pride about his strong areas, understanding one's own weak points normally is difficult