Do these 3 things to be a stronger manager | Neil Irwin | Big Think

You know, I think a lot about what managers actually do in an economic sense.

I think more and more I believe it's creating an environment where the people underneath them are more productive than they would be otherwise, and it's finding ways to make people create things that are more than the sum of its parts that are more effective than they could be alone or without your supervision.

I think that's the key idea and can be the guiding star that drives a manager. Having a happy and motivated workforce is just part and parcel of that.

I think we all know we do our best work when we're excited to get something done.

You know, it's amazing how hard people work when they feel like it's to do something bigger than themselves. I think having a culture, having an environment that promotes that is essentially one of the most effective possible tools of achieving that goal of achieving greater productivity than you would if those people were on their own.

So the three things that I think it really takes to be an effective manager are these. First of all, learn to delegate.

You know, the most important thing is you have to trust your people to do work themselves. If you're in the business of overseeing every single decision they make, you're not gonna be a very effective manager because you'll be stretched too thin.

You'll certainly never be able to rise to higher levels of management where you're overseeing dozens or hundreds or even thousands of people. So that's the first thing.

The second is work hard to understand what the people underneath you do. There is this tendency to think, you know, if I came up through one skill, as I oversee people with different skills, I'm just gonna trust them to get it right.

Of course, you're not gonna be able to understand what everybody on your team does all day, but if you can understand their motivations, their terminology, their way of communicating, you're gonna be a lot better as a manager.

Finally, this is a kind of simple thing, but have as many one-on-one meetings as you possibly can. I think one thing that there's a lot of evidence is that having one-on-one meetings, especially with your direct reports, is one of the strongest predictors of success as a manager.

Big meetings aren't good. Little meetings can be very good.

It's time-consuming, it's hard, but it's a thing that really correlates with success as a manager.