Time, however, always reveals the truth. The best employees donât tend to stick around for years and years under a boss who treats them poorly or whom they donât respect. And talented managers can typically turn around poor-performing teams if they are empowered to make changes.
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You can be the smartest, most well-liked, most hardworking manager in the world, but if your team has a long-standing reputation for mediocre outcomes, then unfortunately you canât objectively be considered a âgreatâ manager.
As a manager, you are judged on your teamâs outcomes, so your job is to do whatever most helps them succeed. If your team is lacking key skills, then you need to spend your time training or hiring. If someone is creating problems for others, then you need to get him to stop. If people donât know what they should be doing, then you need to construct a plan. A lot of this work is unglamorous. But because itâs important, it must be done, and if nobody else does it, then it falls to you.
This is why adaptability is a key trait of great managers. As your team changesâwhether itâs goals shifting, people joining or leaving, or processes evolvingâwhat you do every day will also change.
One of the biggest mistakes new bosses make is thinking they need to jump in and exert their opinions right away to show that they are capable.
Actually, that approach tends to backfire. Few things are more annoying than a new person wasting everyone elseâs time because they are trying to prove they know something when their opinion isnât actually informed.
There are two major errors with that line of thinking. The first is overestimating what you, the manager, are capable of. Yes, it may be within your power to solve a wide variety of issues, but as a single individual, you canât solve that many of them. The best work comes from those who have the time to live and breathe a problem fully, who can dedicate themselves to finding the best solution.
The second error is assuming that nobody wants to take on hard problems. In fact, the most talented employees arenât looking for special treatment or âeasyâ projects. They want to be challenged. There is no greater sign of trust than handing your report an intricately tangled knot that you believe she can pull apart, even if youâre not sure how.
Your teamâs culture is like its personality. It exists whether or not you think about it. If youâre not satisfied with how your team works togetherâmaybe the vibe feels hostile instead of helpful, maybe it takes a long time to get things done, or maybe thereâs constant dramaâitâs worth examining why this might be and what you can do about it.