How to Be a Great Manager
While the first few years of your career tend to be defined by the constant struggle for more; more money, more ownership, more freedom and more responsibility. A moment suddenly comes around where you land a very serious responsibility. The responsibility to help shape someone else’s career.
While I’m sure many of us would love to consider that a privilege and relish the challenge, more often than not if becomes another a chore. Something we have to do and put time into alongside our full time jobs.
As you continue to climb the ladder, you get more and more of these responsibilities (also known as direct reports). It gradually becomes the case in a broad range of professions, that managing people is your primary job, above all of the “doing” bits that you originally signed up for.
Most of us, once we get to that stage, have had a range of different managers ourselves. Some good, some sufficient and some who we swore to be nothing like. Unfortunately though, not all of us get great ones to learn from and so, you can be left trying to figure out how to do the job properly from the bits you felt you were missing.
Worse than that, and the fear that motivates me to write this, is that, having never seen how powerful and wonderful it can be to be a great manager, many people end up doing the bare minimum. Focusing on who’s…
