The single most powerful habit for becoming a better manager:
Show up for your team everyday.
At 25, with no business experience, I was running a 50-person company. I wasn’t delusional about my management experience, I had no clue how to be a manager, but like any habit, I figured the best way to get better was to practically manage the people who worked for me everyday.
Along the way, this meant that each day I would try to do one of these things:
- Give honest feedback for their sake at the risk of not being 'liked'
- Study our financial performance transparently with the team
- Get to know the people who worked for me deeper than what they did for me
- Track the promises I'd made to the leaders and the company
- Prepare for my meetings so they weren't time wasters
- Ask my team, "I'm new to leading meetings, how can I improve them?
- Ask my partner or my team, "What am I missing?"
- Solicit feedback from my team on my management methods
- Solicit feedback on the tools (tech stack) we used as a company
- Study the data behind the business with the teams who tracked it
- Show up in an unexpected place on behalf of my team
- Ask an employee to teach me what they did regardless of their level
- Take a customer service call
- Take ownership of something that wasn’t working
- Get in the trenches with a team member to solve problems
- Take a team member to lunch or schedule a virtual coffee
- Spend 30 minutes one day a week writing emails saying 'I've noticed' or 'Thanks'
Even on the days when I failed as a manager or wanted to hide away in my office, I would show up. Because I knew effective management compounds into big wins, and even if I suck as a manager, improving as one only takes effort.
With purpose,
KC
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