Learning who help people master life's most useful skills every day.
The Backstory
Let's face it: great managers are rare, and becoming a great manager can take many (difficult) years. But what if there were a way to simplify the complexity of leadership, and become a great manager faster? There is a way to do just that, and we've written this book to show you how. The skills we'll share with you aren't hard, but they do require deliberate practice. As you master each skill, you'll notice your life getting easier, and you'll see yourself making a bigger difference in the world, every day. But first let's talk about why managers matter.
Why Managers Matter
Here's the bad news: 88% of people say they are relieved when their manager is out sick (Leone 2020). Worldwide, only 20% of employees strongly agree they are managed in a motivating way. Poor management costs roughly $7 trillion globally every year in terms of errors, inefficiencies, and turnover – not to mention people's mental and physical health (Wigert and Harter 2017). If you've ever had a bad manager, you've experienced firsthand how it can turn joyful work into daily dread.
There. Now that that's out of the way, let's spend the rest of this book together dwelling on the good news. Great managers make work and life better. They help teams achieve amazing results. They help individuals do their life's best work. We (Tania and LeeAnn) have seen this time and time again thanks to the work we do through our company, LifeLabs Learning, where we train hundreds of thousands of employees at innovative companies around the world, including Google, Warby Parker, the New York Times, Yale, TED, Sony Music, and over 1,000 others.
Our workshop participants told us countless stories of managers who changed their lives. There was Marta, whose team members said she helped them bring their real selves to work for the first time in their careers. There was John, who celebrated every milestone his team reached with such consistency that people said it taught them to be better parents. There was Bernardo, who helped lead a company from near extinction to success. There was Niko, who helped her team members keep updating their résumés so they could see how much they'd grown. And there were so many others. We saw that great managers had infinite ripple effects at work and in life, so we made it our mission to help more people become great managers faster.
Sure, folks can learn on the job, but experience is a slow and confusing teacher. We can't afford to sit around and wait for leadership skills to kick in. There are too many costs and too many people at stake.
Can someone really learn to be a better manager? You bet. Just as in any profession, from medicine to music, some people find some skills easier than others. We don't recommend that everyone be a manager, just as we don't recommend that everyone be a ballet dancer. But everyone can become a better manager faster by applying the lessons in this book.
How do we know? When we follow up with managers we've trained at LifeLabs Learning three months and one year later, over 90% say they are still applying the skills they've learned and are better managers as a result. Our clients report an increase in manager effectiveness, employee engagement, and company productivity. Our favorite part? Our workshop participants tell us that becoming better managers has also helped them become better versions of themselves.
What a Manager Is (Today)
Before we get into the skills of great managers, let's align on what a manager is in today's workplace. The etymology of the word “manager” is actually pretty cringeworthy. It comes from the term “to handle,” especially tools or horses. The dehumanizing implication is that people are resources to be managed. This way of thinking created efficiencies when craftspeople became factory workers, and managers had to ensure uniformity and predictability. Thinking was the manager's role, while doing was the responsibility of the workers.
As you know, things are different now. Given the growing rate of change and competition, companies today rely on everyone collaborating, communicating, learning, and innovating. Unlike the original managers who had to limit people's thinking, today's managers have to help people think faster and better. The best managers no longer manage people. They manage resources, processes, time, priorities, and even themselves. They catalyze results rather than control behavior. They help their team members achieve what neither the manager nor the team members could achieve alone.
The long-debated distinction between leaders and managers is also growing obsolete. It used to be said that leaders handled the unknown, while managers handled predictable work. It was once believed that leaders guide others through influence, while managers control through authority. While leaders don't have to be managers, nowadays managers must be leaders. For this reason, we'll use the terms “manager” and “leader” interchangeably throughout this book and equip you with skills to manage and lead well. So, if you want to become a great manager faster, where should you start?
The Surprising Skills That Matter Most
Great Managers, Assemble!
Consider this: in a 10-minute exchange with one person, a manager uses hundreds of words, microexpressions, and gestures. Which of these behaviors result in a team member who's productive and engaged and which result in the opposite? When we began our mission to help people become great managers faster, we couldn't separate the signal from the noise. So we thought back to the Martas, Johns, Bernardos, and Nikos. We wondered: can we learn directly from these leadership legends? Thanks to this insight, we assembled our first group of research participants.
At LifeLabs Learning, we had the unique opportunity of training people at many different companies around the world. So, every time we went into a company to lead workshops, we asked, “Who here is a great manager?” The people who were named again and again had the most engaged teams and a track record of achieving results. We also compared these “greats” with average managers. Our initial plan was to conduct interviews with the greats and the average, and look for differences in their answers. To make a long story short, this approach was mostly … a flop. When we asked managers which behaviors led to their success, the answers of the great and average folks were not predictive of performance. For example, guess which type of manager (average or great) most often said, “I think it's important to be a good listener.”
The answer? Nearly every manager talked about the importance of listening. So what actually made the greats different? We interviewed the managers’ teams to see if we could gather more helpful data. This approach yielded some interesting insights. For example, we learned there was no correlation between managers believing they were good listeners and their team members rating them as good listeners. But we were still no closer to understanding the behaviors that distinguished great managers.
What's in the Black Box?
You see, one of the challenges with studying management is that it is a uniquely private practice. Nearly all exchanges happen behind closed doors, whether physical or virtual. So, as our next plan of action, we wanted to see if managers would open their doors to us. We asked if we could watch them share feedback, lead meetings, and give pep talks. We wanted to recreate the “black box” of the aviation world – the recording device that has enabled countless improvements in flight crew dynamics. Surprisingly, many said yes. (And to them, we are eternally grateful.) As a result, we got to sit in on one-on-ones and team meetings, as well as solo working sessions where we asked managers to “think out loud” as they made complex decisions. With the black box open,
