Introduction

Management is the engine that drives our corporations. It ensures—or prevents—the daily completion of work and overall strategic implementation. This may sound very things oriented, but make no mistake; management is a people-driven job. Our organizations need managers who bring individuals and teams together such that they do their best work in the service of company goals. It’s tough to be a great manager, but it’s also fascinating, enriching, meaningful, and fun. And never boring when done well! Unfortunately, some managers struggle to succeed because they let barriers like these get in their way:

• They become a victim of circumstances. Managers are needed to improve the organization and its results, but corporate dysfunction or immaturity can seem overwhelming. It is important to own your role in making things better and to resist becoming part of the problem.

• They confuse the need to manage with the need to control. Some managers think that their job is to control people and operations. Control is a myth; you can’t and should not try to control people. The manager’s job is to ensure that people and processes are doing their very best work toward achieving the goals of the enterprise. To do this, managers must connect to and relate with people and enliven their motivation. Actions that attempt to control people move results in the opposite direction. Great management is focused, service oriented, and relationship driven.

• They let management become maintenance. It is the manager’s responsibility to make something happen that would not have happened without them. Management should never turn into maintenance. If you are doing the same things every day and spending most of your time maintaining your piece of the business, you are not actively managing. It’s easy to fall into the trap of getting comfortable with success, but managers need to resist this urge and ensure that they continue to drive performance forward.

• They fail to tune up and realign. Management A produces Results A. If you want Results B, you cannot get there using Management A. Great managers periodically tune and align their practices and approaches to produce desired results. Corporate strategies, initiatives, and goals frequently change, requiring managers to change too.

Do you struggle with any of these barriers or others? Please don’t get discouraged; nearly every manager I’ve met has, at some point in their career, been challenged by the cruddy bits of management. The good news is that you can reduce these and other daily pain points by consistently applying best practices for management like the ones I share in this book. You have the opportunity to make a significant impact on the business and your team members’ lives. You’ll need to blast through organizational politics and dysfunction. But that’s why you’re here! Embrace the challenge and triumph over management barriers. Make this the best job you will ever have.

Management and Leadership

Before I get into the specifics of the 10 steps, I want to address a common question: What’s the difference between management and leadership? My perspective on this may differ from what you’ve heard before or read in books about leadership. First, I don’t believe that management and leadership are different positions or jobs. Many companies distinguish managers and leaders based on their pecking order in the organization. That seems like nonsense to me. We see and experience leadership at all levels of the organization. Some people believe that leadership is something you do when you move beyond management—that leadership is a set of higher-level tasks and that it takes more skill to be a leader than it does to be a manager. This belief does not make sense either. In fact, people with all ranges of education and sophistication and at all organization levels can and do demonstrate leadership.

So let’s draw the distinction. Management is a set of methods and practices—a regimen—that enables us to run a business or a piece of the business. It’s a job. Leadership is not a job; it’s the way we do the job.

Imagine four peer managers sitting in a meeting together discussing the progress of a major project. The discussion itself could be considered part of management—it’s part of the process. Having update meetings about major initiatives is a management task. Let’s say that one of those managers, you, demonstrates courage and initiates a frank discussion about concerns that the others are too chicken to bring up. At your prompting, the discussion addresses important issues that need to be defined and resolved. During that display of courage—in that moment while the four of you were managing—you demonstrated leadership.

We ought to be managers all the time and show leadership when it’s needed. If you are an operations manager, you ought to be a great operations manager all the time and demonstrate leadership when the situation calls for it. The same is true at all levels of the organization. Frontline workers ought to be great frontline workers all the time and lead when necessary.

The 10 steps offered in this book fall into the category of good management practices. Along the way, I’ll share examples of where and when leadership—the way you approach your work and relationships—will help you improve momentum and connectedness. To be most successful in a management job, you’ll also demonstrate leadership.

What’s New in the Second Edition? Alignment With the ACCEL Model

In 2015 and 2016, the Association for Talent Development (ATD) conducted survey-based research to determine the crucial skills for managerial success. They then outlined the top five skills—accountability, collaboration, communication, engagement, and listening and assessing—in the report ACCEL: The Skills That Make a Winning Manager.

I’ve been managing people, observing great and not-so-great managers, and writing about management for three decades. That’s a long time! I was thrilled when I reviewed the ACCEL model because these five skills cut to the core of what’s needed to manage people to bring out their best, engaged performance. These capabilities show up—or don’t—in nearly every workplace encounter with predictable results. As I wrote in the opening paragraph of this introduction, management is a people-driven job and the skills highlighted in ACCEL are decidedly social.

When the ATD Press editors and I started talking about doing this second edition of 10 Steps to Be a Successful Manager, we agreed that we should highlight the ACCEL model and align the book’s content to support your development of these five important skills.

This edition is organized a bit differently from the original, and I’ve added new content that I think you’re going to like a lot. That said, you won’t see “Step 3: Accountability,” or other chapter headings that match the ACCEL skill names, and here’s why: The ACCEL model offers a road map for the skills or capabilities that managers need to succeed. The 10 Steps books, on the other hand, offer actionable best practices or techniques that managers should use to succeed. In other words Said another way, practicing the techniques suggested in this book will help you develop the ACCEL model skills.

As I’ve noted, these skills are fundamental to great management, and therefore they will support your efforts in many ways. The table on the next page details how the best practices presented in each chapter support your development of the ACCEL model skills.

Notice that several skills are cultivated in each step. This is natural and expected, especially when addressing people-oriented capabilities like listening, communicating, and working with others. We apply these skills in many ways and situations. And here’s the good news: The time you spend building these five fundamental management skills will serve you well because they impact nearly every aspect of your job.

Target Audience

This book is for managers at all levels and with varying years of experience. Whether you are a new manager or a seasoned pro, you need to tune and align your management skills to make sure your hard work is producing optimal results. If you’re a more experienced manager, you can use the “Your Turn” section at the end of each chapter to refresh your daily regimens. As a new manager, you’ll want to follow the recommendations in a more deliberate and methodical way. Be sure to use the provided worksheets, tables, figures, examples, and pointers to help you get the most from the book’s recommendations. Those elements will help you envision the technique, and they offer suggestions for applying the best practices to your work.

Sequence of the Steps

I’ve intentionally put each of the steps in 10 Steps to Be a Successful Manager in a particular order. Whether you are a new or experienced manager, this book will work well if you follow the steps in the order I recommend. Some steps can be completed in a single meeting or planning session; other steps will take months to accomplish. You can begin working on the next step before the previous one is complete.

That said, remember that management isn’t like changing a light bulb, with specific actions that must come one before the other. Management is a multifaceted position, not a single process. If you find it beneficial to skip around the book, that’s fine—with this one recommendation: Do steps 1 and 2 in order and before moving on to the rest. The work of steps 1 and 2 is important and most often overlooked. Underperforming managers almost always need to retune and align those two steps.

Structure of This Book

10 Steps to Be a Successful Manager will help you establish or realign your management practices and regimens for improved results and satisfaction. Each step in this book describes one area of action you need to develop to create a robust and healthy management practice.
Here is a summary of each step:

Step 1: Know Your Business. Not all management jobs are the same, and it’s important that you understand your role as defined by your manager, employees, and peers. To manage well, you need to know what home-run performance will look like for the portion of the business you manage—in the next month, six months, the next year, and beyond. Great managers know what is working well and where their managerial regimen needs more attention.

Step 2: Work Well With Others. Management is a social act. It occurs in conversation and within the context of several organizational teams. Managers who are excellent team players and leaders will have more opportunities to make a difference and to influence others. Make sure you are a terrific partner.

Step 3: Define and Model Excellence. Your team members want to succeed, but can only do so if they clearly understand what excellence looks like. How do you define and share expectations, including teaming standards? In addition to what you say, your day-to-day actions define expectations and excellence.

Step 4: Hire for Fit and Onboard for Success. You have a chance to improve the strength and effectiveness of your team each time you fill an open position. The decision to hire affects you and your team for years, so it is important that you hire for fit. Learn how to determine job, culture, and team fit and make hiring and promotion decisions consistent with your definition of excellence and performance expectations. Ensure that your onboarding program enhances job embeddedness (connections to the job, team, and company) for better employee retention.

Step 5: Use Pull Versus Push Motivation. Engagement is a choice; managers cannot require that employees be engaged. Creating a work environment that has more pull for team members is one way managers can enhance engagement and satisfaction. Learn how to create workplaces with more pull, and how focusing on engagement does not need to compete with or contradict efforts to improve accountability.

Step 6: Reinforce and Reward the Nonnegotiables. Managers, by definition, manage performance. Explore the fundamental building blocks of a highly accountable workplace and learn ways to effectively communicate feedback and requests, including how to handle difficult or uncomfortable conversations.

Step 7: Bring Out the Best in Others. An engaged and focused team needs less supervision and more coaching. When you hire and promote talented people, you are able to direct your time and energy toward proactive and meaningful endeavors. Learn the questions you should ask your team and employees to build job satisfaction and support their career development goals.

Step 8: Plan, Measure, and Adjust. Work planning is essential to tame your mile-long need-to-do and want-to-do lists. There are ways you can ensure your team is focused on the right tasks at the right time. Explore when to kill projects and shift people’s energy to more important or fruitful initiatives. Learn ways to ensure you and your team know what’s working and where additional attention or a change might be needed to ensure deliverables are met. To help team members complete their work on time and well, relish your barrier obliterator role. Managers exist to facilitate the forward movement of work. Identifying and getting rid of barriers is a great use of time that will improve results and morale.

Step 9: Manage Change and Transition. Change is inevitable, but how people respond to change is a choice. It’s important that your department be nimble in the face of change. There are many things managers can do to promote smoother transitions when changes occur. It’s also important to be ready for change. Learn ways to improve your and your team’s agility to improve alignment and results.

Step 10: Build a Career, Leave a Legacy. Why are you a manager and what difference do you hope to make? Knowing “what’s in it for you” is important and helpful. Great managers build teams and improve organizations. Learn how to hone your managerial regimen so that you leave a legacy consistent with your goals.

Review the 10 steps once a quarter or as your business goals change to ensure that your hard work yields the greatest benefit and job satisfaction.

Being a manager can be a blast because, as the engine of the organization, you can set the tone and pace for success. What could be more fun and rewarding than that?