Maintain Your Sanity as a Manager
There’s a lot of management advice out there. A lot of it is great, much of it is conflicting. But only a few pieces of advice can really resonate with who you are as a person.
We believe that genuinely being who you are can coexist with who you need to be at work to perform well. It sounds like a best case, but unrealistic scenario. We’d like to change that perspective. Being who you are is not only realistic, but necessary, to succeed.
Speaking of necessary, let’s talk about what’s necessary to be an effective manager, while also maintaining your sanity. We’ve found a lot of very valuable and applicable advice in “The Hands-Off Manager” by Steve Chandler and Duane Black relative to this topic. In our Elanden Blog series, we’ll review some of the loudest, “wow, that makes sense” advice from this book and others.
So, Chandler and Black call a successful “hands-off” manager one that is, at the end of the day, going to be able to live to a ripe old age and sleep soundly most nights because they don’t wear themselves out on the wrong things. They also more specifically define a “hands-off manager” as one who spends their time mentoring and coaching those they lead, rather than criticizing and judging.
