How to manage well-enough

How much of time will you save if you go with 150km/h vs 130km/h to a destination 100km away? The answer is 6 minutes 9 seconds. A time that is not really relevant in terms of your day 99 out of 100 times in my life. So why risk it? This question is even more relevant when investing time into researching skills, instead of practicing them with knowing less about the fine details of it. Management is the same.

The trap of infinite resources

It is so satisfying to research, read, listen or watch educational resources about a certain topic we feel passionate about, and after each session we feal fulfilled. There is no problem with this if we are not fooling ourselves by thinking that we got better at something just by taking in information, sadly we actually need to practice.

Management demystified

To be a good manager the only thing you need to do is listen, analyze and act. Most of the times you can get this wrong and you can get it wrong multiple times without having an impact on your life. There are usually many projects in the pipeline and with people while there are not so many available to work with you, but they are much more forgiving than a deadline.

Listen

Before trying to do anything, do nothing, and by nothing I mean contributing no ideas, just trying to solve problems by asking open questions, if they do not solve the issues, ask even more questions, if that does not work ask different people, and as a last resort use yes or no questions. I have never seen a situation where this didn’t work. And while you are being of no use while still helping the project and the people succeed take notes of the how things progress without your inputs, where are the main blockers, where things go well effortlessly, and where they go well but in an unsustainable way. Also keep it in your mind that what people are saying is never objective even if is told objectively, try take an extra step to understand the situation. It’s important to understand that you you do not need to know about all the small things happening in your team, you just need to know about the main issues, and strengths.

Analyze

After you have some ideas about what to improve upon, you can introduce small changes to mitigate them, but be careful: no change is small enough not to affect other things, it is always a balancing act. You might have somebody on the team who is slow to respond, but they might be slow because they are prone to get into a flow state during their work and deliver great results, while if they are forced to check messages this benefit will disappear. It might be more beneficial, but it depends on the situation. A good manager tries to solve problems on an individual level, and treat processes as dangerous animals in the wild which help reduce effort from your side, but will deliver smaller impact than a more personalized way of doing things would do. This is also something you must balance, as having a common way of doing things can also speed things up, and reduce mental load on people, if done correctly.

Act

After introducing the change in the process or in what and how you communicate with a person you will be prone to concentrate on validating that your changes were beneficial while you will neglect how this change affects other attributes of the project or the team. Be mindful about this and never think that it is too late to rollback a change.

Summary

You do not need to be great, you can, but first you need to be good. So stick to the fundamentals, and practice before taking some idea that worked somewhere else. Being good does not require a great toolkit, just mindful use of a simple one.