The New Manager Mindset

Chapter 1. Introduction

So you’re a manager now. (Or you’d like to be.)

Odds are, you got here by being good at something other than managing. Odds are, you’re a little nervous now about whether you’ll be as great at this as you were at that other thing. Odds are, you’re already getting tired of platitudes and generic business advice and op-eds about leadership and you’re hoping this time things will be different.

It is. It is different.

Leadership advice is cheap. It’s also loose and vague—just vague enough that you can project whatever you want into it. If you want to hear that it’s all going to be okay and that if you just lean in and finally learn to use your project management software, you’ll be well on your way to success in no time. You can find someone to say that. Probably a lot of people, in fact. You can find studies to tell you how to deal with Millennials. You can learn how to be a Millennial who’s also a manager. You can read up on the latest stats and thinking on employee retention and positive feedback loops and opportunity for growth. You can find a hundred books on all of the aspects of leadership you can imagine, written by every current and former leader you’ve never heard of. You can do all that, sure.

I don’t think you want to do all that.

I think you want to turn off the “Complicator” switch. I think you want to simplify the whole thing and learn how to Zen-out about management and be the kind of manager you wish you had, or like that one you really admired once a few years back; the one who was really great and who inspired you to become good at whatever it was you were good at before you became a manager yourself. I think you want to develop a mindset that will help you navigate all the situations, not just this one or that one. I don’t think you want tactics. I think you want a belief system. One that makes you feel calm, confident, controlled.

I’ll say that again: I think you want a belief system.

You want a set of guiding principles for good managers. A collection of truths you can latch onto and use as your North Star. You don’t want a solution; you want an approach to solutions. One you can use all the time, every time.

Okay then. Let’s do that.

A Note About How I Learned

Like you, I began my career in subordinate roles and dealt with more than my fair share of bad bosses with remarkably few great ones along the way. Eventually, I worked my way into the Director chair at a good-sized company, where I remained for a while until I’d built up enough consulting work to become self-employed full time. After eight or so years of that, I joined a startup for a few months as a Director, and then returned to consulting work (I didn’t want to relocate).

It’s a very different thing to be a consultant than to be an in-house manager, I know. Before we get too far, I want to acknowledge that. Whereas I can usually get in, do my work, and get out without getting mired down in the daily life of it all, for example, in-house staffers have to deal with internal politics long term, working with the same people, the same constraints, the same internal issues and roadblocks for months and years. My projects haven’t worked that way. When someone has bothered me, I could take comfort in knowing I wouldn’t need to deal with that person for very long. On the flip side, internal staff members get to stick around to see the long-range outcomes they’ve spent so much energy trying to achieve, whereas I’m off on another project. When—if—I’ve heard about the results of my work a year after the fact, it’s because I remembered to get back in touch with the client and ask.

What all this did for me, though, was something that can help you. It put me in a position to watch hundreds, if not thousands, of people wing their way through projects in all kinds of situations, in all kinds of companies, in all kinds of team setups. It put me in a position in which I could study what made the successful ones successful. What made the struggling ones struggle. Who did well, who didn’t, why they could or couldn’t navigate their way to a good outcome, and what they did, said, and thought that got them there, whether positive, negative, or somewhere between.

It put me in a position to develop an approach to management that could, did, and had to work in every situation.

During my nine combined years as a consultant, most of my work involved serving as the ad hoc strategy consultant and project manager for teams ranging in size from single-person startups to Fortune 500 companies. I did this for dozens of companies on hundreds of projects, temporarily running projects and teams, sometimes for a few days, other times for months on end. Basically, I spent a lot of time being a person who had to walk into unknown situations, take charge of them, and get things done. And I spent a lot of time looking at leadership from all angles—studying the qualities and actions and behaviors that made people effective, trusted, and respected. I’ve been able to watch these skills play out in every direction.

In client situations, I rarely had more than a day or two for getting to know people, building rapport, earning trust. If I didn’t do this well, projects could go wrong. If I did do this well, I had the chance to leave lasting guidelines in place that could shape a product or team for months or years to come.

So over time, I learned to forge a path from the first day I showed up—to position myself as a leader and get others to go with me down that path. I learned to do this well, and I learned to do this fast. I learned how to consistently walk into a situation, no matter how different it might be from the last or all the others before it, and lead it wherever it needed to go.

I had to. My job was to be a leader.

In each and every situation, the approaches I discuss herein have been crucial to success, and not just mine. They are the things I’ve seen make other people effective, too—the in-house people, whether VPs, PMs, or lowly team members with barely six months under their belts working just to be heard. These are the qualities and actions and behaviors that have made people successful across the board, regardless of their situations, regardless of their roles.

I offer them here as lessons and approaches for new managers and those who aspire to become managers.

While all of them contribute to being a good leader and to helping you build credibility and trust, a few skills, I think, are also specific to leaders—to those already in leadership roles.

I’m betting you’ve spotted most of these qualities in people who weren’t bosses a few times yourself. I’m betting you’ve really liked working with them. I’m betting you’ve wished the people who are your bosses were more like them.

If you were lucky enough to work with one, I’m betting you stayed. If you left, I’m betting it’s because you learned so much from this person that you felt it was time to hold yourself to the standard to which that person held you.

If you’re reading this now, I’m betting it’s because you’d like to learn what made them great. How to become great yourself.

You can do that.

Here’s how to get from here to there.