It’s hard enough knowing what you want to do with the rest of your life when you’re fresh out of high school. And for many of us, it doesn’t get much easier if we put off college to enter the workforce. The best career path for you is one that aligns with your passions, personal style, and strengths.

Have you considered a career as an organizational manager?

What Is An Organizational Manager?

First, what is an organization? It’s a group of people working together for a common goal. That goal could be a sustainability cause, social justice, public health, or education access. That group could work together to make a profit in a for-profit organization, known as a business or company.

Regardless of the type of organization, people work best together when they can rally around the success of their organization, and each feels they’re doing their individual part to create collective success.

As an organizational manager, you promote this shared vision and collaboration by:

• Optimizing the use of human resources, technology, financial resources, etc.
• Giving the group a sense of direction and a roadmap for today leading into the future
• Ensuring that the group’s actions further its goals

What Is Your Role As an Organizational Manager?

In this role, you provide employees, members, volunteers, etc. with a sense of belonging. You generate faith in the group’s staying power and ability to meet its goals.

Some of the ways you do this include enhancing communication among the various teams, departments, and groups so they can effectively coordinate and work toward goals.

Your efforts will promote healthy morale among employees. You can create a work environment and employer brand where people want to come to work, care about delivering a quality product/service, and say good things about your organization.

Obviously, organizational management happens at different levels. A team manager is an organizational manager on a smaller scale, serving in this role for their team. And as you demonstrate that you can effectively manage a team, you have the potential for promotion where you’re responsible for managing more and more people.

Maybe even the whole company.

What Is the Career Landscape?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, management roles are expected to grow 5 percent over the next 10 years. That’s faster than average and amounts to 500,000 new jobs opening up in addition to those that become vacant as people retire or leave.

The typical person entering this role has only a bachelor’s degree. That may be in business, a specific industry, or they may have a management-specific focus like an organizational management degree, where they specifically learn how to manage for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.

The median starting salary is around $98,000-$140,000 and can vary greatly by industry. For example, food services, hospitality, and daycare management make among the lowest at approximately $56,000 starting. Marketing, technology, and engineering managers are among the highest-paid to start, at around $150,000.

Who Should Consider This Career Path

People who perform well in this career tend to have a particular set of qualities. If these describe you, then this may be a great career choice for you. But keep in mind, we all have strengths and weaknesses. We each define our success by what we do, so if one of these isn’t your strong suit, identify it and work on it.

Those essential qualities include:

• Decisiveness — You can make a logical decision and live with the consequences.
• Integrity — You treat others the way you want to be treated and genuinely value the contributions of others. You’re honest with yourself and accountable to others.
• Communication — You communicate clearly, concisely, and empathetically
• Good listener — You actively listen to others and engage with their ideas
• Lead by example — People want to follow you because they see that what you’re doing works
• Confidence — You’re confident in who you are, your abilities, and the capabilities of the people you’ve built up around you.
• Personal responsibility — You’ll be the first one to admit when you were wrong. But you don’t stop there. You immediately start developing solutions to make it right.
• Empathy — You can put yourself in the shoes of others and think about how your words and actions may influence the emotions of others.
• Focused — You can keep a clear vision of where you’re going and where you’re taking the organization. You have your eye on the prize and will take the steps necessary to get there.
• Analytical — You can analyze the data, facts, and input of your team to make data-driven decisions.

You can take what you know and make something new out of it to solve problems in unique and effective ways. You’re not afraid to try new things and can put systems in place to pilot these ideas to see what works best. You learn from your mistakes and continue to grow your organization.