In my 30 plus years of working, I’ve had many managers in various jobs. Recently I heard this quote, People never quit their jobs, they quit their managers. Having once been a manager for 8 years I can most assuredly say there is a lot of truth in this quote. Unfortunately, I hate to admit, I probably cause some people to quit or move on. Being a manager is not something you wake up one day and start doing. Managing people as well as managing the day-to-day aspects of a business is not a skill many people can do. I’m in the Information Technology (IT) industry and sad to say, I’ve seen way to many times, people are put into management positions simply because they are good at being technical. For example, Say; so in so is an awesome programmer or they have managed several computer systems with great success, so to keep these people around we offer them a management position. Ugh! Just because someone has had success with computers does not make them any good at managing people! I’ve seen this in both the private sector and in education.

In my young, early days struggling being a new manager. I was very fortunate to have a Teammentor help guide me through some very difficult days. His name, Fred Tedrow. Fred was what you would call a manager of managers. There were many things He taught me years ago which help shaped my character and the way I communicate with people. Fred was a no bones kind of guy, who from what I can remember, wasn’t really all that technical, but He knew how to motivate you to do the right thing. The most memorable times were the  countless hours sitting in a Hotel lobby writing down on a napkin, goals and things I needed to deal with. One time Fred and I sat down together (notice I said together) to fill out my performance review. He let me rate myself. Of course in my mind I thought I was the best, so I naturally rated myself Superior and Distinguish on everything. Fred interrupted and said that we human beings always tend to overrate ourself. So with that, he marked everything commendable, then said, now let’s go back and highlight your strengths and areas you need to improve in. I learned a valuable lesson that day. I learned to quit thinking more highly of myself and realized there will always be areas I need to improve in.

nother thing I learned is that, good managers are more administrative and less, hands on. In fact, you could say the higher up you go in an organization the less and less you become hands on. This was another area I miserably failed in. Inexperienced managers will tend to want to do things themselves and not delegate to their people. This was exactly me, until a good friend politely rebuked me for being so foolish (got to love good friends). Once I set my mind to training anyone who wanted to learn, I realized running the business was a lot easier and I was able to give better service to our customers.

So much more could be said about the skills to be a good manager, but that would go beyond the scope of this forum. There are many, many excellent books on the subject, but from what I have seen there are very few examples. This is pretty sad….. Someone asked me if I would ever go back into management again. If given the opportunity, I probably would, but only as the CEO of my own company. 🙂