Your Journey

You may be at different stages on your journey. You may have picked up this book because you were interested in whether being a manager is something that you might like to do. You may have just been promoted within your existing company. You may have taken a leap into being a manager somewhere completely new. It doesn’t matter where you are: you will find value in these pages. Even if you never become a manager, you will understand better about how they work. You can empathize. Bond. We will discover plenty of tools and techniques that are applicable to anyone, regardless of what job they are doing.

However, for the purpose of this book, we’re going to imagine that you’ve turned up for your first day of your first managerial role in a new company. We’re going to start afresh together and build from the ground up. It’s going to be fun, and I’m honored that we’re going to go on that journey together.

This book is split into three parts. It begins prescriptively: you’ll be asked to try this or do that. Give it a go. As the book progresses, we’ll consider more abstract and nuanced issues of management of which there is no right answer. There’s only you and your way of doing it. How you act in those situations is where you begin to understand the most about yourself in this role.

You don’t have to read the book from the beginning to the end, although you’re welcome to do that. Care has been taken to write this book in such a way that will allow you to read chapters independently when you need some guidance on that subject.