In learning about the three-skill approach I began to reflect on my own career. Over the last twenty years I have gone from managing a team of student staff to now managing over 40 full time professional employees working in a variety of functionalities. The three-skill approach has been directly reflected in my own career growth as I transition to new phases.
Per Northouse (2015), the three-skill approach “includes technical, human, and conceptual skills.” The idea that as your role evolves and grows the mix of the skills necessary change particularly in the areas of technical and conceptual. “It is important for leaders to have all three skills; dpeending on where they are in the management structure, however, some skills are more important than others are.” (Northouse, 2015, p. 46)
To be clear, technical skill can be equated to functional expertise in a given field or task, human skill is the ability to relate to others, and conceptual skills is working with ideas and loosely formed concepts. (Northouse, 2015, pp. 44-45)
For myself, I see this evolution mirrored in my last 3 roles.
First, at the University of Michigan I was a functional expert with a very specialized skill set. I managed a large number of students and two professional staff. My work was based on a yearly calendar and it involved very little program creation or vision work. In this role, as a functional expert my skills were very high in the technical realm and as I managed more than 200 student employees I exercised my skills in the human realm regularly. Due to the annual focus of the work I practiced very little my conceptual skills.
Next, at my role in Penn State I was once again a functional expert. This time I worked with a team of 20 professional staff all of whom were working from the same knowledge perspective as was my expertise. Part of my role was to mentor this staff and grow their knowledge based on my own experiences. Additionally, as part of this role I was tasked with creating system-wide changes in my area of expertise. My skills were high in the technical area of the work, high in the human skill of interaction and, finally, I was beginning to conceptualize new ideas and exercise that skill set.
Lastly, in my current role at UC Santa Cruz, I am no longer the functional expert in any of the areas my team works. I lead a team of 40 professional staff who all have a higher level of functional expertise than I do in their work. My technical skill set is low in comparison to both where it has been in my past roles and compared to my current staff. Once again, because I am managing a significant sized staff my human skill set is well utilized. Where I have seen the most personal growth and stretching of skills is the realm of conceptual tasks. In this current role it is my duty to develop the vision for the future in partnership with my staff that we all agree to. It is my duty to work with them to develop and secure the resources and discover whats next.
Over time I have experienced the loss of the technical strength of my earlier roles but have seen a dramatic growth in my conceptual skills as my role has grown and evolved. In exploring this three-skill approach it has helped me to reflect on how I moved through these different phases of my career and to see that I have mirrored the dynamic established by this framework.