What are the most important skills and abilities you need to see in a Marketing Manager before you know they are ready to advance their career to a Marketing Director level?

Your leader needs to trust they can rely on you to act in the organization's best interest while being an effective leader to your team. If you haven't already, read "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni and apply it to your own leadership as well as your working relationship with your leader. 

I believe there are 3 important skills:  delegating, critical thinking and political navigation.
Marketing Managers are typically very doer oriented and will base success on their set of ROIs or metrics determined by Marketing team in general.  Marketing Director level typically is more (or should be) involved in company level metrics and needs to understand impact of risk/return and/or opportunity cost vs. actual cost.  

Here are my 5 points for us to ponder. 

1. Is the candidate aligned with the business goals? Look at the number of instances and the quality of contribution from the candidate, where the candidate has gone above & beyond to make an initiative successful. Another example, instead of saying my job is to generate MQLs and sit quietly without worrying about the sales team; is the person thinking, is my campaign helping my sales colleagues meet their goals? 

2. Alignment with the leadership team and the peers across various functions & locations. It is important for the leadership team to have trust in this candidate and at the same time, this person should have good rapport with his peers too so that strategic initiatives can be translated to actions. 

3. Being calm most of the time is one of the most important qualities. As the person starts climbing the ladder, apart from execution, being calm - with everyone around - is the most important quality. An angry mind at senior levels will cause more problems only. 

4. Is the candidate a ‘why’ person or a ‘how’ person? Generally, a ‘why person’ will be high on reasoning & finding the root cause of an issue. The ‘how person’ will be more solution-oriented - after identifying the root cause. For marketing, I would suggest going with a ‘HOW’ person. Also, the ‘HOW’ person will accept constraints as they are and find ways to achieve the goal.  

5. Being confident and responsive to situations or requests: People who are responsive are confident and vice versa. These candidates don’t procrastinate much or are less lazy too. 

Basic traits needed in a marketing manager are ability to collaborate, learn and adapt, ability to read and analyse data and entrepreneurial mindset. Anyone with these traits can be groomed ro become a director in marketing. Obviously communication skills and ability to negotiate are added advantage. 

Team building, mentoring and management is key.   Knowing how to motivate resources, be a team player, leader and guide is important - as is being willing to roll up your sleeves and be tactical as needed.   
Being a story teller is also good - by that I mean communicating from start to finish.   I see too often early stage marketers wanting to 'pass go' too quickly, and jump right into a meeting or a presentation.  "Why are we here, what is the goal, how are we going to get there together?"  Understanding and collaborating with your audience is critical - having a good relationship with sales/field resources to understand and respond to needs, without taking the approach of just jumping at everything asked for.   
And of course, a strong overview of Marketing - one doesn't have to be an expert in all fields, but certainly exposed to them, ideally with a specialty or two.