Self-storage can be a time-intensive field to be a manager in. Yet every second needs to count. The skills a manager needs in this day and age span both hard and soft skills. According to Workable, hard skills mean talents related to the job, while soft skills deal with interpersonal interactions. Storage managers need both of these ranges of skills if they are to be successful in their chosen fields. Unfortunately, despite how valuable and necessary these skills are, many companies focus on one over the other. Putting all one’s eggs in the proverbial basket never ends well. To choose the best possible manager for a location, self-storage businesses need to independently look at the hard and soft skills and figure out which candidate demonstrates them best. You can learn about various types of management roles in a company, on this website: www.demandquestiontime.com
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Hard Skills
A company can measure hard skills through the person’s work. These skills are trainable. Businesses can implement training and mentorship programs to ingrain these abilities in their managers. Self-storage has a few of these that stand out as very important, including:
- Sales ability: closing a sale.
- Typing: Speed and accuracy are critical concerns in this particular field.
- Productivity Software: Office, or GSuite, both of these play their part in the self-storage business.
- Self-storage software: Different businesses use suites of software dedicated to running a self-storage business.
- Social Media: Marketing comes in the form of posts and ads on social media.
- Marketing campaign management: Managers can be tasked with tracking KPIs for marketing campaigns and suggesting ways to improve engagement.
- General site maintenance: Simple things like blog posting and managing the site inventory and online shopping experience.
Written communication and competence in mathematics underlies a few of these skills.
Soft Skills
Soft skills encompass the non-technical aspect of the job. They usually deal with interacting with customers or other members of staff. Team management, delegation, and other office-level tasks require a proper understanding of soft skills. Soft skills that can form the backbone of a manager’s repertoire in self-storage include:
- Integrity: Employees and customers alike should be able to trust the manager’s word.
- Dependability: When the manager says something gets done, it gets done.
- Communication: Getting the message out to staff and customers is as vital as ensuring that the company can deal with incoming communications.
- Problem-Solving: Problems can occur with anything, and using the tools and services present to solve those problems is one of the core functions of a manager.
- Critical Thinking: Seeing where solutions are that are less-than-obvious and thinking outside of the box.
- Organization: If a manager is organized, they can tell at a glance what’s happening in the business.
- Empathy: How does a particular situation impact the mental states of employees and customers? Learning this can make a difference in interactions with them.
Assessing hard and Soft Skills
Arguably, there’s no “perfect” employee that fits all the skills mentioned here. For businesses to know which they lack, employee assessments run by an HR department can be an invaluable utility. A manager may be a wizard with numbers but may have difficulty figuring out then to use Go Mini’s storage pods over on-site storage. Figuring out where these shortfalls are, allows a business to offer training that remedies it. Starting from management and working down, a company can significantly improve its employee function and (by extension) its customer experience.
