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

If you are wondering whether you can be a great manager, ask yourself these three questions.

This is the crux of management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone. It is the realization that you don’t have to do everything yourself, be the best at everything yourself, or even know how to do everything yourself. Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people wor

If you can pinpoint a problem and motivate others to work with you to solve it, then you’re leading.

The next important bucket that managers think about is people, otherwise known as the who. Are the members of your team set up to succeed? Do they have the right skills? Are they motivated to do great work?

he looked at was my team’s results—did we achieve our aspirations in creating valuable, easy-to-use, and well-crafted design work? The other half was based on the strength and satisfaction of my team—did I do a good job hiring and developing individuals, and was my team happy and working well together?

Do I Find It More Motivating to Achieve a Particular Outcome or to Play a Specific Role?

the best outcomes come from inspiring people to action, not telling them what to do.

Traditionally, most advice you hear about management assumes a longer time frame where if you spend a little today, you’ll reap bountiful rewards in time. But that’s only true if your organization isn’t on fire. If it is, then all bets are off. At that point, you need to do whatever you can to extinguish the flames.

Purpose, people, process. The why, the who, and the how.