Job rotation, special interdepartmental assignments, and working with case problems certainly provide opportunities for a person to enhance previously developed conceptual abilities. Technical skill is responsible for many of the great advances of modern industry. Having this sensitivity, he is able and willing to act in a way which takes these perceptions by others into account. Without strong foreman leadership, the traditional job-shop operations proved costly and inefficient. First thing I know, he has told me how to solve the problem himself.”14. But he will encounter severe antagonism from other departments with conflicting values. This approach suggests that effective administration rests on three basic developable skills which obviate the need for identifying specific traits and which may provide a useful way of looking at and understanding the administrative process. We are all familiar with those “professional managers” who are becoming the prototypes of our modern executive world. Notice, first, that he made the engineer who designed the unit serve as foreman, apparently hoping to force the engineer to justify his design by producing the maximum output. 7. Because the manager was inconsistent and unpredictable in his behavior, the supervisors were insecure and continually engaged in interdepartmental squabbles which they tried to keep hidden from the manager. However, the production manager was oblivious to (a) the way the engineer perceived this appointment, as a demotion, and (b) the need for the engineer to be able to control the variables if he was to be held responsible for maximum output. As a practical matter, however, the executive must develop his own human skill, rather than lean on the advice of others. Harvard Business Review first published Robert Katz’s “Skills of an Effective Administrator” in 1955. Skills are easier to identify than are traits and are less likely to be misinterpreted. In these the individual being tested is asked to set forth a course of action which responds to the underlying forces operating in each situation and which considers the implications of this action on the various functions and parts of the organization and its total environment. As used here, conceptual skill involves the ability to see the enterprise as a whole; it includes recognizing how the various functions of the organization depend on one another, and how changes in any one part affect all the others; and it extends to visualizing the relationship of the individual business to the industry, the community, and the political, social, and economic forces of the nation as a whole. On the job, there should be frequent opportunities for a superior to observe an individual’s ability to work effectively with others. Real skill in working with others must become a natural, continuous activity, since it involves sensitivity not only at times of decision making but also in the day-by-day behavior of the individual. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. These procedures, which indicate what a man can do in specific situations, are the same for selection and for measuring development. Because a company’s over-all success is dependent on its executives’ conceptual skill in establishing and carrying out policy decisions, this skill is the unifying, coordinating ingredient of the administrative process, and of undeniable over-all importance. Yet any executive presumably knows that a company needs all kinds of managers for different levels of jobs. Development of technical skill has received great attention for many years by industry and educational institutions alike, and much progress has been made. Conceptual skill, like human skill, has not been very widely understood. The skill conception of administration suggests that we may hope to improve our administrative effectiveness and to develop better administrators for the future. 4. It implies that one of the key responsibilities of the executive is to help his subordinates to develop their administrative potentials. So the principal criterion of skillfulness must be effective action under varying conditions. William H. Whyte, Jr., “The Fallacies of ‘Personality’ Testing,” Fortune, September 1954, p. 117. These three men make up an executive committee which has been outstandingly successful, the skills of each member making up for deficiencies of the others. And should this subjectivity be berated, or should we make a greater effort to develop people within our organizations with the human skill to make such judgments effectively? Perrin Stryker, “The Growing Pains of Executive Development,” Advanced Management, August 1954, p. 15. I now know that every important executive action must strike a balance among so many conflicting values, objectives, and criteria that it will always be suboptimal from any single viewpoint. The executive development programs of some of the nation’s leading corporations and colleges reflect a tremendous variation in objectives. These may appear to be highly subjective evaluations and to depend for validity on the human skill of the rater. He would then resist any external pressures that place a higher priority on criteria other than delivering the required output on time. But I question how easily this way of thinking can be inculcated after a person passes adolescence. Other examples are evident all around us. The chief executive must try to perceive the conflicts and trace accurately their likely impact throughout the organization. Executive Leadership (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1953); see also “Leadership Pattern in the Plant,” HBR January–February 1954, p. 63. This three-skill approach emphasizes that good administrators are not necessarily born; they may be developed. One recent research study has shown that human skill is of paramount importance at the foreman level, pointing out that the chief function of the foreman as an administrator is to attain collaboration of people in the work group.4 Another study reinforces this finding and extends it to the middle-management group, adding that the administrator should be primarily concerned with facilitating communication in the organization.5 And still another study, concerned primarily with top management, underscores the need for self-awareness and sensitivity to human relationships by executives at that level.6 These findings would tend to indicate that human skill is of great importance at every level, but notice the difference in emphasis. Within this definition, successful administration appears to rest on three basic skills, which we will call technical, human, and conceptual. At lower levels, the major need is for technical and human skills. The qualities most needed by a shop superintendent are likely to be quite opposed to those needed by a coordinating vice president of manufacturing.

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