Running a team is hard because it ultimately boils down to people, and all of us are multifaceted and complex beings. Just like how there is no one way to go about being a person, there is no one way to go about managing a group of people.

And yet, working together in teams is how the world moves forward. We can create things far grander and more ambitious than anything we could have done alone. This is how battles are won, how innovation moves forward, how organizations succeed. This is how any remarkable achievement happens.

I believe this as deeply as I believe anything: Great managers are made, not born. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you care enough to be reading this, then you care enough to be a great manager.

As a manager, you are judged on your team’s 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 don’t know what they should be doing, then you need to construct a plan. A lot of this work is unglamorous. But because it’s 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 changes—whether it’s goals shifting, people joining or leaving, or processes evolving—what you do every day will also change.

In each case, you’re giving someone an opportunity to grow in a way that speaks to their interests and strengths. “There is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: they discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it,” says Buckingham, the renowned management consultant who has studied hundreds of organizations and leaders. “The job of a manager . . . is to turn one person’s particular talent into performance.

New managers sometimes ask me, “A decade into the job, what’s something you’re still continuing to learn?” My answer is, “How to be the best leader I can while staying true to who I am.”

Managers so often think of the role as being in service to something else—the mission of the organization, the goals of the team, the needs of others—that it’s easy to forget about the most important character in your management journey: you.

The lesson: Recruiting top talent is all about the relationships you build. Good, seasoned leaders aren’t short of options, because everybody wants to hire them. When they’re looking for their next role, they tend to choose opportunities that they already know to be great.