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.

To manage people well, you must develop trusting relationships with them, understand their strengths and weaknesses (as well as your own), make good decisions about who should do what (including hiring and firing when necessary), and coach individuals to do their best.

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.

I finally realized that I had to give up wanting to be both a design manager and a designer, because in attempting to do both, I was doing neither well. Don’t learn this the hard way—at the point in which your team becomes four or five people, you should have a plan for how to scale back your individual contributor responsibilities so that you can be the best manager for your people.

You must trust people, or life becomes impossible,” the writer Anton Chekhov once said. This is true of all relationships—friendships, marriages, partnerships —and the manager–report relationship is no different.

Sounds obvious, right? But it is easier said than done, especially when you’re the one holding more of the chips at the table. No matter how you slice it, you are your reports’ boss. You have more impact on their day-to-day than they have on yours. This means that the responsibility of building a trusting relationship lies more with you than with them.