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People don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses.
So Now You’re a Manager…
Managing a team is a challenge for many reasons, not the least of which is it’s not something we’re taught. Even in management school, (especially in management school) dealing with people is not the focus. The emphasis is on managing projects, productivity and profits. As a result, we end up with a bunch of assumptions about people and about managing them. We rarely question these assumptions, maybe we don’t even know we have them. Unexamined assumptions about managing can get us into all kinds of trouble that can be absolutely mystifying once we’re lost in that forest.
…managing is not intuitive or automatic; the skills don’t magically appear with the title.
Without training we manage based on what we’ve experienced
Most of us are managed by people never trained to be managers, primarily our parents and teachers. Teachers are taught classroom management, but that is based on maintaining order in the classroom, which I contend is not the model for managing a team. And our parents, bless them all, most ultimately used fear as a method to get us to do what they wanted, or not do.
