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ISBN 978-1-119-24460-8 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-119-28611-0 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-119-28612-7 (ePub)
This is what I tell my friends
Dedicated to my wife Rhonda and our wonderful children:Kate, Travis, Ashley, Courtney, Drake, Christopher, and Jaggars
On behalf of Mike Auzenne, my Manager Tools cofounderand our great team of professionals at Manager Tools
INTRODUCTION
WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR, WHAT IT'S ABOUT, AND WHY
If you're a manager, this book was written for you. If you've ever struggled to lead your team or wondered how to handle a difficult situation, this book is for you. If you find the people side of management (and that's all this book is about) difficult at times, this book is definitely for you.
To be clear: this book isn't about “management” the way most business publications talk about it. To them, “management” means big organizational ideas like strategy, or finance, or organizational change. If you scan the Management section of The Wall Street Journal, you'll see articles about those topics. That's not what this book is about. Frankly, if you're just a frontline manager, or maybe even a director, you don't need to know a lot about that kind of “management” just yet. What you do need to know about is how to manage people. If that's you, this book is for you.
This book is about managing people. It's about getting the most out of your direct reports, for two reasons: because most managers are very bad at that part of their job,yet that's the most valuable thing they do as a manager.
Isn't that sad? Most managers are terrible at the most important thing they're supposed to be doing: getting top performances out of the people they are managing.
In a way, though, it's not surprising. Lots of folks think getting a Master of Business Administration (MBA) will make them managers. But MBA programs don't teach much about managing people. Part of the reason for that is that many of the professors have never managed a group of people with responsibility for their output. Also, people aren't easily placed into neat conceptualized models that can be analyzed and measured. People are messy.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of managers describe their “training” this way: I got promoted, and they didn't tell me anything about what I was supposed to do or how I was supposed to do it. They just gave me a team and wished me luck.
One new manager I worked with, years ago at a great firm, told me that the day he got promoted, his new boss handed him a stack of folders regarding his team members, pointed to a corner of the building, and said, “Your team sits over there, by the windows.”
This is mind-boggling. The upside of this, however, is that you're not alone. That feeling you have that others know what they're doing but you don't is wrong.
