Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a maintenance manager and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A Maintenance Manager is accountable for overseeing all maintenance efforts across an organization like the upkeep of buildings, landscapes, vehicles and offices.
The duties of this post include coordinating maintenance workers efforts to ensure the employer property like buildings and grounds are kept up, identifying areas for improvement and assigning employees to take care of the issues, developing maintenance schedules and enforcing them among the support staff, delegating tasks to meet the maintenance schedule and satisfy employer needs, managing the set ups and take downs of different levels, contacting and scheduling repairmen and extra help as required, communicating plans for upper level improvements to maintenance workers, performing administrative tasks are required.
Core Skills Required to be a Maintenance Manager
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
A maintenance manager should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Interviewing:
Interviewing is an essential skill in making a sound hiring decision that seeks to find out the candidate's background, work experience, skill level, general overall intelligence, enthusiasm, attitudes, etc.
A Maintenance Manager ought to be equipped with the right techniques to handle interviews whether they are face to face or telephone as they can be grueling and intimidating to the candidate; clarity and calmness of tone and the atmosphere are ideal.
Critical Thinking:
Critical Thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally while understanding the logical connection between ideas in a reflective and independent thinking.
A Maintenance Manager will always seek to determine whether the ideas, arguments and findings do represent the entire picture while identifying, analyzing and solving problems by deducing consequences from what he knows and making use of the information gathered.
Managing Remote Teams:
Managing Remote Teams is working under no physical supervision from your manager or supervisor while staying on task and communication to report on the daily progress.
A Maintenance Manager ought to nurture, guide and support the employees to do their job right without compromising on the quality and wasting the allocated time to grow the team and the company as well.
Supervisory Skills:
Supervisory Skills is the ability to lead and manage people effectively in a difficult and challenging atmosphere in the day to day life.
A Maintenance Manager must cultivate, develop and refine management and supervisory skills to strengthen the present as well as build the future of the business by becoming competent in such roles like problem-solving, communication, managing people, time management, leadership, planning, etc.
Initiative:
An initiative is the ability to assess and initiate things independently often done without any managerial influence offered.
A Maintenance Manager must train his workers to take up tasks without being asked to and work on them without being supervised to a quality that is accepted by the company, therefore nurturing a skill that grows the individual and the group as well.
Orientation to Work:
Orientation to Work is the introduction that is given to a new worker whereby he is introduced to coworkers and given relevant information like schedules, performance standards, benefits and facilities, names of the supervisors, etc.
A Maintenance Manager must ensure that all new employees go through an orientation process to assimilate into the workplace and become familiar with what is expected of them.
People Reading:
People Reading is the ability to creatively and quietly read the important non-verbal intuitive cues that people give off without their knowledge.
A Maintenance Manager must be willing to surrender any preconceptions or emotional baggage like old resentments or ego clashes that may stop you from seeing someone clearly as they truly are to remain objective and receive information without distorting it.
Results Orientation:
Results Orientation is knowing and focusing on outstanding results and working hard to achieve them because they are significant.
A Maintenance Manager must understand and make it clear to the employees how important results are and the competitive and results driven market that the company is facing while encouraging them to remain focused on the results that every project bears without fail.
Cost Cutting:
Cost Cutting is the ability to reduce costs or workplace expenses that may be excess costs that can be limited.
A Maintenance Manager should come up with cost-cutting tactics that will earn the company a better revenue even if they aren't massive; it will teach employees also to be reserved with every dollar that simply goes into the enterprise.
Quality Management:
Quality Management is the management approach to the long-term success through customer satisfaction that directly involves the employees in the continual improvement of the daily tasks.
A Maintenance Manager should consider the quality management earnestly for the success of the business by improving the processes, products, services, the discipline and the culture in which they work under to warrant the improvement of profitability and productivity.
Hard Skills Required to be a Maintenance Manager
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
A maintenance manager should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.