Management | Leadership
Management Advice I Never Hear Anyone Talking About
The inside scoop on tips that usually have to be lived to be learned
If I had a dollar for every time a new manager asked me for the hacks and shortcuts to make them a better manager, I’d have enough dollars to finally invest in the bounce house side-hustle I’ve been plotting for the past few years.
The truth of management is it’s a skill like anything else. You need to work at it to get better at it. And yes, some people are ‘naturals’ — they have a self-developed cornucopia of overlapping, complementary skills that give them an edge.
But a little hard work and focus can make a manager out of anyone.
The issue with management is it’s also a position as well as a skill. And this homonym can sometimes give people a false idea of what they’re doing.
We know kicking a football is a skill. And so we don’t make anyone in the team the kicker; we choose people who are good at kicking.
Management though, as discovered and explored in detail in the book The Peter Principle, is a position that’s often given to people not because of how well they’ve demonstrated they can manage, but by how well they did their previous job as a…
