5 Key Things I Wish I Knew Before I Became a Manager

当我刚开始管理没有看到m like a career choice; it seemed like an inevitable. Something that would just sort of happen once I got old enough -- like wrinkles, or gray hair, or distinctly unfashionable pants. I figured: You work long enough, you'll manage someone.

I liked the idea of managing because it felt like progress.我想要那个模糊的成就奖杯。我想要不好。但是随后发生了一些重要的事情...

I startedactually实现。我以与管理无关的具体和可衡量的方式进步。我看到我的同龄人也这样做。他们正在攀登新的，更具挑战性的角色 - 有些涉及管理层，但另一些人则将其作为高技能和受人尊敬的个人贡献者提升。

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Seeing the diversity of paths that careers can take, I stopped thinking about management as some sort of suit-sporting end-goal. And then I became a manager, and discovered that that realization was only the beginning of what I had to learn.

For starters, the skill set is totally different. In fact, the skills you mastered to become a top performer on your team might challenge you most as a manager. It's like spending your whole life developing skills as a tuba player, then being handed a baton. You could be a brilliant conductor eventually, but in the beginning you'll pretty much look like you're shooing flies longing for the days when you played music more directly.

Management is tricky like that. Unlike some roles, which can be studied in advance, most management skills are best learned on the job. You're going to make mistakes. Embrace them and learn from them. And if you need a little guidance, check out some of the lessons I learned below.

5 Key Things I Wish I Knew Before I Became a Manager

1）不要打算被爱。旨在变革。

The first inclination of many managers is to make sure their team likes them. It makes sense -- you catch more bees with honey than vinegar, and you must be doingsomethingright if people like you. But managers who focus too much on being liked miss the bigger picture. You do more for your team and for your company if you focus on being instrumental -- even when doing so requires an unpopular decision or a bit of激进的坦率。

I learned this directly from HubSpot's CEO Brian Halligan. Brian iswidely regarded as likable guy，但如果他认为他认为对公司及其客户至关重要的决定，他将在一秒钟内以这种知名度进行交易。bob全站app他最近在个人帖子中解释了这一想法:

"I think the leadership hierarchy of needs is that经理需要首先解决企业价值，然后为其团队求解，然后解决自己。通常，当我团队的管理者偶然发现时，这是因为他们弄错了该方程式。具有讽刺意味的是，在几乎所有发生这种情况的情况下，经理为他的团队而不是首先为自己解决。没有经验的管理者倾向于抚养他们的团队，超越他们的团队，并在不正确的指导下将团队的兴趣放在公司的兴趣上。bob全站app这种杂物工作了一段时间，但最终总是会破裂。”

When you solve for your team, you earn popularity and your team stays comfortable. When you solve for the company, you earn respect and your team grows professionally. That's the difference between a decent manager and a transformational one.

2) Don't worry if your team doesn't always need you.

I wrote this ina similar posta few几年前，但它重复了：t当我开始管理时，他最恐怖的意识到，没有我，我的团队会很好。

Do you have any idea how terrifying that is?

I remember thinking, "My one job is tomanagethese people, but they're管理just fine." And I felt useless. As it turns out, I was an idiot for feeling useless.

我应该感到兴高采烈。我有一个强大的团队。如果您正确招聘，则应该带给那些完全有能力管理自己的人。实际上，您应该带来比您更聪明的人。事实证明，管理层与管理无关，几乎与开发有关。发展中的人。发展机会。并为原始人才开发新用途。

Left alone, your team will manage just fine. But here again, just managing shouldn't be the end goal. The end goal should be excelling.

Managers who are too worried about being needed will spend all their time and energy on the wrong things. They willmicromanage。They will put up hoops. They will inadvertently limit the potential of their team just to justify their own role in it. And the honest-to-God truth is: If you have to tell people you’re the authority, you’re likely not.

3) Coaches don't couch.

I'm nice. I can't shake it. As a teen, I listened to Rancid and Social Distortion in an effort to toughen up. I learned to curse like a sailor to add edge to my sentences. But the truth is, I'm just nice. It's never going to leave me. That made this lesson a particularly hard one to master.

Good coaches don't hold back hard feedback. They don't couch it to soften the blow or sandwich it between two compliments. They just tell it like it is. Couching tends to confuse the people receiving it rather than help them. You're not doing them any favors. You're only making yourself feel less mean.

There are two ways people fail at this:

1. They can't bring themselves to give the hard feedback.
2. 他们给硬feedback without building trust in the relationship first.

You can tell your direct report anythingifthey trust that you are doing so because you respect them.

Kim Scott, an author who's previously worked with companies like Twitter, Apple, Google, and Dropbox credits much of her development to having mentors who understood the critical intersection between these two things.In an interview with The Growth Show she recountedthe time her mentor Sheryl Sandberg told her that the "ums" Scott had been interjecting while speaking made her sound unintelligent -- well, actually not unintelligent, "stupid."

“It was actually the kindest thing that Sheryl could have done for me. But part of the reason why she was able to do it for me was that she had shown me in a thousand ways -- and everybody that worked for her -- that she really did care personally about our growth and our development.”

Had Sandberg softened her feedback it may not have resonated so strongly. Had Scott not trusted that Sandberg wanted the best for her, she would never have put her defenses down to truly hear it. The combination of the two made this an important and formative moment for Scott.

4) Meetings really do matter.

When was the last time you left a meeting and thought, "That was exceptional."?

It's been awhile, right? For many, it's been a professional lifetime. While most productivity articles focus on finding ways to shorten meetings and optimize work-time, a better question might be: What would it take to make meetings actually worthwhile? It's a responsibility that sits largely in the hands of managers.

It may seem like a silly little thing, but the clearest way you can show your team you respect them is to prepare for team meetings. Don't just show up. Don't adhere to the same agenda month after month. Make every second of your meeting productive, educational, or interesting. You will inevitably bobble this. You will have some bad meetings, but it's a skill worth honing.

Treat your meetings like college professors treat their seminars. Set aside time before each major meeting to prepare for it. If a meeting takes your team away from their work for an hour, then you better be sure you put in the prep time to make that houras productive as possible。

Make your meetings interactive.研究建议people lose focus in a lecture somewhere between 10 and 18 minutes. At that point both you and your team need a break from hearing the sound of your voice. It's okay. Build that in. Tap members of your team to present or shift into a brainstorm when you hit that point. Again, make sure everyone presenting does the prep work and respects the time that their teammates have given up to be there.

5) You can't approach everyone the same way.

在好日子和糟糕的情况下，最有帮助我作为经理的一件事就是了解团队中的人们。这听起来很明显，但是花时间去知道是什么激励了每个团队成员，什么使他们灰心的是战略优势。拥有这种理解意味着您可以在分配项目并将反馈适应每个人学习的方式时发挥作用。

There are a number of trainings and personality tests that can help you know your team better. Here at HubSpot, we use something called aDiSC assessmentto help classify work styles so new managers have a basic roadmap. The real understanding however comes over time, through conversation, and by paying close attention. It doesn't hurt to ask directly how each person likes to be recognized for a job well done and what makes them happiest in their role. Use one on one meetings to discover how you can best coach the members of your team and what they're looking to do next in their roles and their careers.

There is no grand conclusion here. Everything you've just read comprises a starting point, a few stumbling blocks of what could be many in the path to managing well. That I suppose is the bonus lesson: Managers are almost never fully cooked. There are always more mistakes to be made and greater lessons to learn. But if you get a few essentials right, including those in this post, you'll have a good navigational compass for learning the rest.

What do you wish you knew before you became a manager? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.