Management Thoughts - Skills
What are the skills that make a good manager
The Meta
Good management goes in all directions (up, down, and sideways). Making your reports effective is only one part of the job. You also manage your own manager so they can give you cover and clarity, work with peers so the org doesn’t tear along its seams, and manage down so your people can grow. Effectivity++, applied across the org chart.
Strategic thinking ties the other skills together. I think of the day-to-day as side quests about the main quest: the tickets, meetings and fires matter because each should move the larger thing the team is here to do. Without that connection, it is easy to stay busy without making useful progress.
Then there’s the distinction I keep coming back to: Management vs Leadership. Management is the allocation of resources (time, money, people, attention) towards known ends. Leadership is the making of the ends themselves, the meaning and direction and values people choose to follow when nobody is allocating them. Management is mostly a science and leadership is closer to an art, but a manager needs both. Being fluent in one does not make it the whole job.