10 Things Great Managers Do Every Day

Just between us, as a manager have you ever:

• doubted your management skills or practices?
• wondered if you were spending your time on the right things?
• feared that you had a management blindspot you couldn’t see?

You’re not alone.

As a management coach, I spend lots of hours on the phone or zoom with managers and executives who all basically have the same question, “what does good management look like in my situation? Am I doing the right things?”

Fortunately, there are practices great managers do every day and they don’t take an MBA or 20 years managing teams to get right:

1. Protect the time to manage well. Delegating well, designing growth opportunities for high performers, providing clear and actionable feedback, and getting close to the work all take hours out of your week. Protect at least 2 hours a week (beyond your check-ins) to think about management issues and to do the day-to-day tasks of managing well.
2. Master the art of clear delegation. Spend time thinking about what success looks like for every project you assign, clearly delineate what you want, and check for understanding to ensure what you said made sense to your team member.
3. Ask for input and feedback from your team. To manage well, you have to fundamentally believe you don’t always have the answers. If that’s true, then you should be making space to get input and feedback from people closer to the work, and especially people who think differently than you.
4. Check your own biases and assumptions. Implicit bias is real and to thwart it, you have to design structures to ensure you’re accurately assessing performance, hiring well, and giving feedback evenly across lines of difference. Don’t jump to conclusions or trust “gut instincts” (aka bias traps), but instead make yourself look for data (and counter-data) to validate or invalidate your assessments.
5. Hard-code moments to deeply invest in your people. If you don’t engineer opportunities to think about and grow the skills of your team, we won’t do it until their next performance review. Each month, dedicate 30–60 minutes to think about who on your team needs to grow and what opportunities might help them.
6. Seek advice. Build relationships with peers in your organization, seek the advice of a leader you trust, or build a community of fellow managers that you can reach out to for thought-partnership when you need it.
7. Script and role play tough conversations. Write out and practice tough conversations in advance — and get feedback from a peer if you can. Don’t just wing it; even if you’re good on your feet, these conversations will usually land better if you’ve prepared for them.
8. Help team members prioritize. Don’t assume your people know what’s most important — have the conversation explicitly about priorities, especially if your team member is juggling a heavy workload or your assigning new projects.
9. Help your team fight fair. Conflict will happen on your team; it’s inevitable. Set norms and build skills in your people today to help your team give tough feedback to each other (and receive it), disagree without destroying each other, and solve problems at their level vs. just escalating them to you by default. (Some problems should be mediated by you, but that should be the edge case, not the rule!)
10. Attend to issues of race and equity on your team. It’s easy to be silent about issues of race, power, and equity on your team — especially when those conversations are hard to broach, involve mistakes you made, or might make team members uncomfortable. If you’re serious about managing well, you’ve got to build daily practices that help you notice patterns in who speaks and who doesn’t, who gets growth opportunities and who doesn’t, who tends to get hired, fired, or leave, and who gets the toughest feedback. Most importantly, you’ve got to make the decision to do something about the patterns you see.

These are not an exhaustive list, but they’re a strong start. Implement these practices and you’ll be able to get better results from your team and be more confident in how you’re managing them day-to-day.