Not necessarily in order of importance but here is the blend you want Caring about people. By this I mean that they care about people more than other things and are willing to make trade-offs against other important things (e.g. immediate profitspleting a project on time their own advancement) in favor of people. Organizational skill. You have to be personally organized. Comfortable with chaos . Being organized and knowing when to impose organization are two different things. Often you will need to tolerate or deliberately maintain a certain amount of chaos in order to maximize the effectiveness of your team. Comfortable with not having control. A manager has less italic control over his surroundings not more they may have more absolute influence but the ratio of that to the sphere of things they must now be concerned with is proportionally much lesser (than for a typically non-manager in the same organization). Steady mental equanimity when confronted with a situation where they have little or no control is essential. Empathy. The ability to read minds is critical. You cannot effectively resolve people issues unless you actively apply your empathy to read minds and determine the sub of what people really need Most of the time people won't say what they really mean and a manager who tries to address only the words they literally hear won't get anywhere. Intelligence. Fairly high intelligence is necessary. There is a part in The Brothers Karamazov italic where they talk about how you can have a little bit of empathy if you're dumb but to truly understand the human condition (en masse and for individuals) you have to be pretty intelligent or there's just a bunch of stuff that you simply won't get. Excellentmunication - written and verbal. Keep practicing; you can never be good enough at this. Creativity . As a manager you will be faced with trade-offs. The real challenge is not picking which side to trade off - the real path to exceptional success is being creative enough toe up with a solution that allows your team to simultaneously achieve multiple aims without sacrifice. You need to be creative enough to break through perceived limitations in order to find new and novel solutions. High technical skill. By technical I mean doing the job of the people you're managing back when you used to do it - if you're managing engineers you should have been a great engineer; if you're managing writers you should have been a great writer.