What Are The 9 Critical Youth Work Management Skills?

 What Are The 9 Critical Youth Work Management Skills?

What are the 9 critical Youth Work management skills

The Most Critical Youth Work Management Skills 

As youth workers, whether we know it or not, we all manage constantly – even if it is just our own lives or those of family members.  So learning the youth work management skills can improve the quality of our private lives as well as our professional ones.

The following nine youth work management skills have been identified as those most critical to successful  management (Whetten and Cameron, 1984, p. 6):

 

Skill 1: Developing self-awareness 

Developing self-awareness means knowing yourself – being aware of your typical responses to people and situations and managing these skillfully. You need this skill simply because of the manager’s need to interact continually with other people in challenging situations. Productive personal and interpersonal functioning, which is the basis of professional ability in a manager, requires knowledge of the self, including:

  • Self-awareness
  • Self-understanding.

Self-awareness is important because it forms the basis of how you behave. It also forms the building block for personal adjustment, interpersonal relationships and life success. It could be regarded as the starting point of professional insight.

 

Skill 2: Managing personal stress 

To manage stress, you have to understand it.

The interactive environment of your work and the broader social context will result in personal stress. As we said earlier, people experience the same things differently. In the dynamic of the work situation, no other person is likely to understand what you are feeling and why you feel it, so it’s important that you learn how to take action to manage your stress yourself.

Personal stress management is related to time management and its key processes. These are aspects that we will discuss later, but it’s important to realise that if you use your time more productively, you will do your job more effectively. You will be less stressed as a result of not having heaps of work and no time to do it in.

It is also crucial to recognize the main stressors that you experience in your life. Human beings are not machines. Our workday is filled with our own personal challenges that affect how we handle our job. 

 

Skill 3: Solving problems creatively  

The role of a manager entails lots of problem-solving. In fact, if there were no problems, we would not need managers. Solving problems creatively is not always easy. In brief, it involves:

  • Taking time to reflect on the problem
  • Defining the problem clearly
  • Generating a number of possible solutions
  • Evaluating these solutions
  • Selecting the best one
  • Implementing the chosen solution
  • Following up on its success.

 

If you can do this, you should be able to solve problems occurring in every aspect of your life.

 

Skill 4: Establishing supportive communication  

Establishing supportive communication means that you should become an active listener, develop empathy and use the appropriate responses. This has even been developed in UK prisons as a way of relieving the intense stress that prisoners feel. Fellow prisoners with insight and education and of an appropriate temperament are trained to be ‘listeners’.

 

Skill 5: Gaining power and influence  

This involves three things:

  • Establishing a strong power base
  • Converting power into influence and (most importantly)
  • Avoiding abuses of power.

Managing your own work is primarily linked to the way in which you ‘rule’. In the first place, you should rule your own work conduct very firmly, to ensure that you are an example to others.

Personal qualities can also foster power. Here are some examples:

Expertise – received both from formal training and education and on- the-job experience – indicates that the manager is skillful and knowledgeable.

Personal attraction (charismatic power) – the way in which other people view you – can be another source of power. The two main qualities here are agreeable behavior and attractive physical appearance. We often hear expressions such as ‘dynamic speaker’, ‘magnetic personality’ and ‘the look of a strong leader’.

Effort – should also be part of power. If you commit yourself to focused effort, you can rely more on the efforts of others.

 

Skill 6: Improving employee performance through motivation  

Motivating your team is a key management skill because it improves the members’ performance. It helps if you can distinguish clearly between problems of ability and of motivation. For example, if a member of the team is not performing well, you need to know whether they can do the job and just lack motivation, or whether they are not capable of doing it.

Techniques for motivating staff include:

  • Know your staff
  • Give frequent constructive feedback to them – individually as well as in meetings
  • Be even more ready to praise good work than you are to criticize
  • Make your staff feel they are an important part of the organization.

You also need to be self-motivated in order to be able to continue energetically and enthusiastically with your job. Motivation represents desire and commitment to achieve goals and is usually shown by the quality of the effort you put in. If you motivate yourself properly, you can complete tasks without being distracted and discouraged.

 

Skill 7: Delegating responsibility and making decisions  

This is an important aspect of managing your personal work. By delegating aspects of your managerial role to others in your team, you improve your own performance by freeing yourself up for tasks that only you can do. You also build the competence of others by assigning tasks to them that develop their skills and experience.

For example, if you are working with a youth group and you are discussing reading skills, you could assign members of the group the task of finding a suitable textbook to use. This will enable them to participate in the decision-making process and make them feel that they are doing something worthwhile. Meanwhile you have more time to manage your own work more effectively. If the group selects a suitable book, you will have fostered the skill of completing this task in others.

Part of managing your own work is also determining when to involve others in decision-making. If you don’t do it enough, your staff might feel neglected and ignored. If you do it too often, the people you work with might feel that you are not doing your job and you could be made to feel redundant.

 

Skill 8: Managing conflict

In terms of managing conflict you should balance assertiveness and sensitivity. Personal criticisms, when they occur, should be handled and dealt with in a professional and mature manner. Complaints should be dealt with promptly and effectively. To save a lot of further problems, you should make sure that all complaints are handled according to the agreed procedures. Sometimes you need to mediate conflicts among members of a youth group or among your staff. This is a vital part of management because neither you nor your subordinates or clients can work effectively if there is unresolved conflict. This aspect also impacts on the management of your own work because conflict resolution takes a lot of time and energy.

 

Skill 9: Conducting effective group meetings

Conducting effective meetings involves good preparation. This takes time. Sometimes, you will need to make presentations, which will again involve proper work management beforehand. You also need to be in control of both the task and process aspects of meetings.

 

Author: Anso Kellerman

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