Becoming a better manager of the service sector

In the last 10 years the business world is completely changed, and this obviously also applies to the service sector. New technologies, a new generation of employees and new competitors from emerging economies are all factors that contribute to what is often called an iper-competitive VUCAD (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous and digital) world. Service sectors' managers need to recognize this shift and reframe the skills needed to work successfully in such a new world. There is a lot of experimentation underway in terms of how the managers of the service sector have to adapt or change their skills. There is very little in the academic literature to support this change, either theoretically or empirically. The article aims to investigate what are today the most important skills for the managers of the service sector and what are the main gaps between what they think is fundamental (How important do you think it is?) and how good they are (How good are you?) and also some significant differences across companies' dimensions and industry sectors. We surveyed more than 1,000 managers of the service sector across multiple companies located in Italy with different dimensions, in an effort to learn about which are the skills they consider most important and if there are differences on the basis of company size and between the different sectors that make up the service sector. Our article advances the ongoing debates till the moment that, with very few exceptions, most of the previous studies remained to a theoretical level.