Characteristics & Skills of an Effective Administrator
What personal characteristics define an excellent administrator?
An excellent school administrator will be able to exhibit characteristics that include planning ahead, having responsibility for the students and teachers and being involved in the daily activities of the school or school district. A successful administrator will be able to effectively be involved in everything that is related to the school.
The biggest characteristic that is seen in administrators is the ability to naturally lead. They must be able to come up with ideas that people will accept and be willing to follow on a daily basis. Administrators should also be able to connect with people and must have a likable personality that works well with a variety of other personalities.
Administrators of schools have demanding jobs that involve a large time commitment. They must be able to provide their students as well as faculty with constant new ideas and engagement opportunities. They are required to come up with curriculum plans as well as daily operation opportunities. A good school administrator will not only be involved with the logistics of a school district but will also be present for the daily functions of the school. These administrators will be able to communicate comfortably with students as well as teachers.
Skills of an Effective Administrator
Although the selection and training of good administrators is widely recognized as one of American industry’s most pressing problems, there is surprisingly little agreement among executives or educators on what makes a good administrator. The executive development programs of some of the nation’s leading corporations and colleges reflect a tremendous variation in objectives.
At the root of this difference is industry’s search for the traits or attributes which will objectively identify the “ideal executive” who is equipped to cope effectively with any problem in any organization. As one observer of U.S. industry recently noted:
“The assumption that there is an executive type is widely accepted, either openly or implicitly. Yet any executive presumably knows that a company needs all kinds of managers for different levels of jobs. The qualities most needed by a shop superintendent are likely to be quite opposed to those needed by a coordinating vice president of manufacturing. The literature of executive development is loaded with efforts to define the qualities needed by executives, and by themselves these sound quite rational. Few, for instance, would dispute the fact that a top manager needs good judgment, the ability to make decisions, the ability to win respect of others, and all the other well-worn phrases any management man could mention. But one has only to look at the successful managers in any company to see how enormously their particular qualities vary from any ideal list of executive virtues.”1
Yet this quest for the executive stereotype has become so intense that many companies, in concentrating on certain specific traits or qualities, stand in danger of losing sight of their real concern: what a man can accomplish.
It is the purpose of this article to suggest what may be a more useful approach to the selection and development of administrators. This approach is based not on what good executives are (their innate traits and characteristics), but rather on what they do (the kinds of skills which they exhibit in carrying out their jobs effectively). As used here, a skill implies an ability which can be developed, not necessarily inborn, and which is manifested in performance, not merely in potential. So the principal criterion of skillfulness must be effective action under varying conditions.
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. This approach is the outgrowth of firsthand observation of executives at work coupled with study of current field research in administration.
In the sections which follow, an attempt will be made to define and demonstrate what these three skills are; to suggest that the relative importance of the three skills varies with the level of administrative responsibility; to present some of the implications of this variation for selection, training, and promotion of executives; and to propose ways of developing these skills.
