How to be a great manager?

What makes a great manager?

Someone who is able to motivate and inspire others, and able to get stuff done through working with others. They’re able to manage projects successfully achieving goals. How good you are as a manager can be measured by what your team is able to accomplish or achieve.

I’m writing this to share with my team so they can grow and develop as managers. If I can develop them as managers our company can grow substantially faster.

The first step in someones professional career is to be able to execute some task. If you are a writer then you write articles, if you are a developer then you develop programs. etc., You do the work yourself. The second stage is to manage other people who do that job. Its quite a big change to go from doing the work to managing people who do the work, but the impact you can have is substantially greater. If you are one person you can only work 40-50 hours per week. If you manage 8 people then you can create 400-500 hours worth of work in a week. For anyone looking to advance their career they need to master the skill of managing people.

I think that the best managers are people who are also executing or able to execute things themselves, they are not just telling other people what to do.

So how do you become a great manager?

I’m not a perfect manager, but I’m continually improving. What do I think are the most important management principles?

I think management is quite simple.

• Managing yourself – you can’t manage others until you can manage yourself
• Understanding how businesses work and their functions: Marketing, Sales, Operations, Technology, Finance, HR, Legal
• Managing and dealing with people – understanding people and helping them achieve what they want to achieve
• Being clear on setting a compelling vision to lead a team
• Setting clear expectations about what is expected
• Being consistent and fair
• Being able to hire excellent people and motivate them
• Making difficult decisions and having a good framework for making decisions
• Goal setting

What are the stages to become a great manager?

1. Read & Find Mentors
2. Manage
3. Continually Improve

I think it’s really important to get access to the principles that successful managers use. There are lots of successful companies and managers. You can learn from books or by speaking to them directly to see how they think. What are your priorities? How do you solve problems? What are the common problems? You need to have this knowledge.

Then you need to be able to put this into practice. The only way to get good at managing is by actually managing. You need to go through these management problems yourself, then look for resources to try to solve them through asking peoples help or by learning through reading resources (such as below) and finding your own framework and style of being a manager. So to become a great manager I think it’s really important to try to just look for opportunities to start managing. Such as try to find a way to hire someone from upwork.com to do some task that saves your time, and get good at managing them.

Here are some resources that I used to learn how to be a better manager.

Most important

• Company metrics and managing a company – Traction
• Managing a company remotely: EOD reports
• How to hire people? Hire and Get Hired
• How do you manage time? Paul Graham

Other resources:

• Blitzscaling
• Measure what matters
• Lean Startup

There are lots of great resources, podcasts and videos online about how to be a great manager. There are loads of business stories, business books, biographies to learn from. And then whenever you have a problem, you can use google to search for it, or ask someone who has already solved that problem before for help.