The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You

Nine times out of ten, the other person is not out to get you. Your coworkers don’t think you’re an idiot. And, yes, you deserve this job.

I left with a deeper appreciation of both the importance of planning good meetings and the value of giving feedback to improve bad meetings.

We resolved to find other ways to invest in design education and building relationships, including sharing a detailed write-up of the meeting notes and hosting more leadership

“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.

The solution is to help everyone come prepared. The change we made to our decision and review meetings was to ask the organizers to send out any presentations or documents the day before so that everyone got the chance to process the information in advance.

And as a reviewer, I felt I needed to choose my words carefully in front of such a big crowd, which meant I couldn’t be as casual and direct as I would have liked.

To have a high-functioning team, people need to work well with one another, so you need to find ways to nurture empathy, create trust, and encourage collaboration. Sometimes, you may decide to get a group of people together for the simple purpose of focusing on relationships.

People feel that their side wasn’t presented well, so they don’t trust the resulting decision. Decisions take a long time to make, which delays progress. While important and hard-to-reverse decisions deserve deep consideration, be wary of spending too much time on small, easy-to-reverse decisions. Decisions keep flip-flopping back and forth, which

Little Wins. Every day, I’d jot down something I did that I was proud of, even if it was small.