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

“Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have,” he says. “That’s because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration.” Hackman’s research describes five conditions that increase a team’s odds of success: having a real team (one with clear boundaries

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.

management is the art of getting

Being awesome at the job means playing the long game and building a reputation for excellence.

The purpose is the outcome your team is trying to accomplish, otherwise known as the why. Why do you wake up and choose to do this thing instead of the thousands of other things you could be doing? Why pour your time and energy into this particular goal with this particular group of people? What would be different about the world if your team were

If I spend all my time personally selling lemonade, then I’m contributing an additive amount to my business, not a multiplicative one. My performance as a manager would be considered poor because I’m actually operating as an individual contributor. When I decided to train Henry and Eliza, my efforts resulted in slightly more lemonade output, so I h

when people say they are interested in management, I try to understand what they find appealing about it and whether that matches what would be their actual day-to-day job.

A MANAGER’S JOB IS TO . . . build a team that works well together,

he looked at was my team’s results—did we achieve our aspirations in creating valuable, easy-to-use, and well-crafted design work? The other half was based on the strength and satisfaction of my team—did I do a good job hiring and developing individuals, and was my team happy and working well together?