The New Manager Mindset

Chapter 3. Learning as a Habit

As you likely know by now, to the people on a team, managers aren’t peers. They’re usually the people the rest of the team points to as the ones doing everything wrong, the ones holding progress back.

There’s some truth to that.

Managers become managers by previously having been good at something else. Our hierarchical professional structures all but guarantee the “Peter Principle ”—that we tend to rise to the level of our own incompetence. We get good at one thing after another until we end up managing—a skill that presumably has almost nothing to do with whatever we were good at before, a brand new skill for which you have no prior experience.

Congratulations. As a new manager, you’ve just risen to the level of your incompetence.

Don ’t stay that way.

The Peter Principle might be entirely accurate, but it excludes all talk of the idea that we are, in fact, built to improve. Ambition isn’t an inherent evil; it just tends to advance us to higher and higher positions until we reach one for which we have zero skill. This achievement doesn’t render us incapable of learning. We can still learn. We can still do better. We can figure out how to be managers. Then we can figure out how to be great ones.

Likewise, we can learn to be better craftsmen at whatever craft it is we were originally hired to practice. We can help push our professions forward by poking holes in standards and digging for better options. We can remember that it’s more fun to get better ...