The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You

Leadership is the skill of being able to help guide and influence people.

A manager is a role.

For a manager to be effective, she should be a leader. But a leader doesn't have to be a manager. The job as a manager is to empower your team to find solutions, not to "save the day".

All the tasks that a manager has to do can be put into one of three categories:

1. Purpose - the outcome your team is trying to accomplish. It is also known as the why. Your job as a manager is to ensure your team knows what success looks like and care about achieving it.
2. People, or the who. Are the members of your team set up to succeed? Do they have the right skills, and are they motivated?
3. Process, or how your team works together. You may have a great team that understands the end goal, but tasks can get overly complicated if it's not clear how everyone is supposed to work together.

Feedback is a powerful tool to help your team grow.

• Ensure that feedback is specific and actionable.
• Clarify what success looks and feels like. 
• The next steps. Instead of suggesting the next steps, empower your team to learn on their own. Ask what they think the next steps should be? Then allow them to guide the discussion.

A great manager needs to get a deep knowledge of their strengths, values, comfort zones, blind spots, and biases. If you don't know how to manage yourself, you won't have a good handle on how to best support your team.

Questions to help you understand yourself:

• How would people close to me describe me in three words?
• What three qualities of myself am I the proudest of?
• The top three pieces of positive feedback I've received?
• What does my inner critic constantly tell me?
• Can I name three common feedbacks on how I could be more effective?

Good meetings have an ideal outcome, not just a purpose. 

• Decision-making meetings should get a decision made, include the stakeholders, present options or recommendations, and allow for dissenting opinions.
• Informal meetings should make participants feel like they learned something that they could engage in and communicate.
• Feedback meetings get everyone on the same page and end with the next steps.
• Idea-generating meetings should consider all ideas from individuals that first brainstorm alone.

Hiring is the opportunity to build the future of your organisation.

• Hiring managers should list what they consider ideal candidates.
• Interviews are first impressions, so try to create a great interview experience.
• Seek out trusted recommendations.
• Use multiple interviewers to reduce bias and notice any red flags easily missed by one person.