The Effective Manager, 2nd Edition

1What Is An Effective Manager?

There's a lot of talk about good management. When someone tells you they know how to manage, or what it takes to “be” a good manager, ask them: “How do you measure what a good manager is, or does?” If you don't get a crisp answer (like the one we outline next), don't take what they tell you very seriously.

We suspect you've seen good and bad managers. What makes them so? Is it what they do? How they think? Their personality? What they feel? Where they went to school?

Think about it for a minute. How do you know someone is a good manager? Literally, what is the definition of being a Good Manager?

When we ask this at our public Effective Manager conferences, we get all kinds of answers.

• Their people like them.
• They communicate a lot.
• They're smart.
• They CARE.
• They listen well.
• They are respected.

These are good efforts, but they're still wrong.

Suppose a manager reported to you who did or embodied all of the traits just listed and, for the past 3 years, had never achieved a single objective the organization had set for him. Would you describe him as a good manager? Of course you wouldn't.

Your first responsibility as a manager is to achieve results.

This may be the most important concept related to being a manager. And we here at Manager Tools didn't invent it. A lot of business books reverse‐engineer a rubric to define what managers are supposed to do in order to support what they teach to managers. But they don't have data to support it.

But ...