What skills do you need to be a Community Manager?

I'm catching up on old stuff I bookmarked to read later.  Today I was looking at a post that's a couple of weeks old from the Community Roundtable, about some early trends in their annual survey.  Specifically that these are the things that CMs consider to be the most important skills, and how they spend their time:

• Listening and Analyzing
• Promoting Productive Behaviors
• Empathy and Member Support
• Member Advocacy
• Community Strategy Development
• Measurement, Benchmarking and Reporting
• Evaluating Engagement Techniques
• Community Advocacy and Promotion
• Communication Planning
• Writing
• Data Collection and Analysis

I think that's interesting and pretty accurate.   Since I'm not doing front line community management any longer, some of these things don't apply to me as much, but some are bigger parts of my days (strategy development, data collection and analysis).  I think out of all of them, writing is the one you can't teach.  (By that, I mean as a manager, not as an educator.) A bad writer is never going to be a good community manager.  People may be more or less interested in doing the other stuff, which could make or break a decision to do this as a career, but writing is the basic skill that you need to start, and what I always look for first if I'm making a new hire.