8 Skills Every Maintenance Manager Should Have

As a maintenance manager or facility management professional, you possess technical skills to perform and oversee the job.

You know asset management; you’re familiar with the equipment and hopefully, possess a wealth of technical expertise in your chosen field. However, when you’re in a management position, you need additional soft skills and people skills to manage your team effectively in your role. These skills help you motivate your team to enable your staff to be efficient and productive. They also help you. Mastering these skills cuts daily stress and allows you to achieve more in your career.

Here Are the 8 Skills Every Maintenance Manager Needs to Master to be Successful

Follow these skills and you’re bound to create an efficient work environment.

1. Leadership

Maintenance managers need to exhibit leadership capability. Some of these qualities include optimism, self-motivation, compassion, organizational skills, and trustworthiness. An efficient leader must set a positive example to inspire subordinates to follow your example. Strong leaders have a clear vision of project goals and know how to delegate effectively. They must be able to prioritize tasks manage timelines and match employee skills to the appropriate project tasks.

Managers also need to demonstrate follow up abilities to see if any issues need to be addressed and projects reevaluated. A facility manager must also possess these important qualities that cannot be ignored.

• Know how to foster motivation
• Set clear, specific objectives
• Create a transparent work environment
• Be a strong communicator
• Establish clear timelines

Incorporate these qualities, value your employees for a job well done and have access to appropriate resources to complete projects will enable managers to prosper.

2. Good Interpersonal Skills

People with good interpersonal skills know how to deal with grace under pressure, remain calm during unanticipated problems and are respected in the workplace. They maintain good relationships with colleagues, vendors, subordinates, directors, and customers at all costs. An important quality needed to maintain good interpersonal skills is active listening. An active listener shows others respect. He doesn’t just wait for others to see his point of view or feel the need to always interject his opinion into the conversation.

3. Time Management

As Maintenance Managers, we’re always interrupted with workplace issues, phone calls, staff meetings and the like. It’s not a secret managing multiple tasks can be challenging. That’s why it’s important for a maintenance professional to excel in time management skills. A good time management professional knows how much time to spend on each task and how to prioritize projects duties in order to make deadlines. In a word, maintenance managers know how to work smarter. An adept manager possesses a good set of tools in their time management arsenal.

There are many software programs on the market that help manage time, including Microsoft products like Visio built right into your desktop application programs or more advanced management software. Using the right time management tools enables managers to multitask and do their jobs effectively while maintaining timelines and benefiting the organization.

4. Know How to Groom Individuals

Knowing how to develop your staff efficiently is a key skill to have as a maintenance managing expert. It helps motivate your team, boost productivity and helps you climb the ladder of success in your career. Any experienced manager knows grooming individuals is a challenging undertaking. You have to choose the right talent to achieve the maximum results in your role.

One of the first things you need to do is to identify the strengths of your subordinates. Knowing their abilities will help you choose the right individuals for training and development. You can also have your more experienced employees train people with potential with less experience.

When you identify budding leaders on your team, reward them with promotional opportunities when they become available.

5. Problem Solving Skills

Another key skill any facility or maintenance manager should possess is keen problem-solving abilities. This might sound easy at face value, but it actually takes strong analytical and critical thinking. A good problem solver needs to assess situations properly, make good judgment calls and act quickly. Problem solving also takes special brain skills that can be developed and improved with the right problem-solving exercises to train your brain.

These skills will help asset managers make economic decisions, supervise staff, prioritize project tasks, create timelines, interpret data and create financial budgets.

6. Flexibility

As business moves faster than it ever did, managers need to keep up with the pace. With complex equipment and technologies, growing safety standards and internet technology, organizations need to be able to adapt to change. They must often shift their modes of working, welcome new ideas and maintain composure during these abundant changes. This is where having grace under pressure needs to be practiced to maintain a competitive position in the marketplace.

Expect routines, even on a daily basis to change, keep a positive attitude when work routines change and you should do well. Being flexible makes you appear wiser in your employer’s eyes, increases trust and can only enhance your career and its future.

7. Team Work

Team building makes companies. Knowing how to promote teamwork enables the team to brainstorm ideas and come up with workable solutions together. It also helps identify misunderstandings that might not be communicated to individuals and could negatively affect the entire team.

Addressing issues in the making can nip them in the bud, and prevent having to redo work, which frustrates team members, adds to low team morale, and delays timelines.

8. Technical Expertise

It’s no secret technical managers need to master their areas of technical expertise in their specializations. They need the appropriate educational training so they can identify, address and resolve technical issues and problems. Technical managers also need to have more than textbook knowledge. A practical knowledge working in the field will enable them to apply the training they’ve learned to repair and fix problems. You need to be able to apply that knowledge to your systems and equipment.

Your technical expertise allows you to teach your team to make the right judgment calls and perform the correct technical solutions to equipment and systems involved. This expertise is what makes subordinates come to you for answers to questions until they possess the knowledge on their own.

The Final Word on Maintenance Manager Skills

Working on these eight management skills will enable you to become a better maintenance or facility manager and build and a successful career.

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