Towards being a great manager
18 Feb 2025Most people managers are bad.
People management doesn’t come naturally to most people, most companies have little or no training in place for managers, and managers often get “promoted” into management because they were the strongest or most senior IC on the team when a manager role opened up.
On top of that, being a people manager is often a thankless path, and you’ll hear executives and senior leadership question why we have people managers at all. After all, can’t HR approve vacation requests and submit raises for approval?
Despite the prevalence of bad managers, and the barriers that sometimes prevent great managers from doing their best work, there are very few things most of us will achieve professionally that are as rewarding as helping a team of people work together to achieve something they didn’t think they could do. Being a great manager is a superpower, and the path to get there may be shorter than it seems.
Below are the traits that all of the great managers I’ve worked with have shared. Each person manifests them differently, but they all have these traits.
If you internalize these ideas and put them into practice, you won’t automatically be a great manager, but you will be on the right path.
Be present
Your job as a manager is to help your team become more than the sum of its parts. To do this, you need to engage with your team and their work every day so you can understand where problems are and work to remove those problems. Being present allows you to give useful feedback (we’ll talk about that later) and have credibility when you step in to coach and mentor. Engaging with the team’s work and understanding it deeply also allows you to advocate for your team and their work, and provide context to the rest of the organization when a problem comes up or priorities need to shift.
Sometimes being present means providing context to the team for decisions they don’t understand, or giving direction when ambiguity exists. Defusing issues and confusion, and keeping frustration down when organizational decisions come through that don’t make sense at the IC-level. Other times it means putting yourself on the line to fix things in the organization to unblock your team. To be present means being there, visibly, for your team and backing them up. If you do that, they’ll do the same for you.
Put this into action by:
- Attending your team’s recurring meetings (or creating those recurring meetings, if they don’t exist), always.
- Making time to review work output, provide feedback, ask questions, and understand where blockers and inefficiencies are.
- Advocating for your team and their work with your manager and the broader organization.
- Providing context and clarity so the team also knows what is important and why.
Be available
The basic currency of leadership is trust. You can’t earn trust if you aren’t around.
Work is stressful, life is hard, and everyone has their own unique nuances and quirks. Every member of every team you manage will need something different from you that you’ll learn by being available to your team and open to connecting with them. If you’re fortunate enough to manage the same people for long periods of time, the things that each person needs from you will change over time.
You are their direct conduit to the broader company strategy and vision, their sounding board for big ideas, their place to vent about the weird bug they had to fix last week. You earn trust by being there for those conversations, and by making those conversations safe to have.
Put this into action by:
- Scheduling weekly one-on-ones with every member of your team. Every week, every team member. Really.
- Learning who each member of your team is as a person. Start one-on-ones with non-work topics and let the conversation roam.
- Noticing when someone is struggling or needs more from you than normal. Pair with them on a problem they’re having, shift your schedule to accommodate theirs, put in the work to help them get back on track, even if it means more of your time than usual.
Be trustworthy
Once you earn trust, you need to keep it.
Your team relies on you to advocate for them, provide guidance and direction, and to help them grow their careers. They rely on you to remove ambiguity and keep them focused on the right tasks. To do that, your team needs to trust that you keep your commitments. They need to know that you will have their backs. They need to see that you prioritize them and their needs.
If they can’t trust you to follow through, to guide them in the right direction, or to protect them and advocate for them, they won’t stretch themselves, they won’t take risks, and they won’t speak up when you need them to.
If you show them you won’t show up for them, or you can’t be counted on to meet your commitments or provide good direction, you’ll lose their trust. Once you lose their trust, you will no longer be able to guide them to great outcomes. You’ll achieve mediocre or worse results at best.
Put this into action by:
- Show up on time to your meetings, prepared and ready to go.
- Follow through on your commitments.
- Own the failures, celebrate the wins. When something goes wrong on your team, you are responsible. Don’t pass the blame down the line or point the finger to someone else — own it, commit to making it better, and then make it happen. When the team wins, give them the credit. Publicize their work, brag about them to the broader org, make sure that each team member’s contributions are known — especially the glue work.
Be direct
Great managers give feedback directly and kindly. Your team counts on you to let them know where they stand, how they can improve, and what actions and behaviors you and the organization value.
If you don’t share direct feedback — both positive and negative — your team can’t improve, and your team members will begin to feel disconnected from you and from the organization. Great feedback creates a virtuous cycle. Mistakes and misses become learning opportunities. Individual team members know what they need to improve on, what their strengths are, and they begin to chart a course to new levels in their career.
Teams led by weak managers feel that weakness most acutely in the lack of feedback. Instead of valuable feedback they get shit sandwiches, passive aggression, and indirect, unclear comments that leave them off balance, confused, and frustrated by the person they count on to help them grow.
Put this into action by:
- Learning to give feedback, and then giving it regularly
- Being kind. Feedback is a gift, not a weapon. Use feedback to help your team grow and learn.
- Shut down passive aggressive comments immediately. Toxic leaders use passive aggression, backchannel complaints, and other conflict-avoidant means of tearing people down to avoid having difficult, direct conversations. Don’t be one of those people.
Be curious
The best managers I’ve worked with all share a curiosity about the world around them and the people in it. They want to learn new things. Their default mode is investigative. When they encounter a new idea or something that challenges their beliefs, they try to understand it. They have strong opinions, but they adjust those opinions when new evidence is uncovered.
This approach to the world — finding joy in learning, in being proven wrong, in growth — makes for a manager who is adaptable, engaged, and excited to dive into problems with the team. They take in new information readily, allow their opinions of people and processes to evolve, and are more capable of making good decisions over long periods of time than people who approach the world without curiosity. Curious people also make better managers because they genuinely care about the people they manage. They want to learn from them, not manage them. People feel that and respond to it positively.
Put this into action by:
- Conquering your ego. Being wrong isn’t a failure, ideas aren’t weapons, disagreements aren’t battles to be won, and letting others be smarter than you is a key step to shifting into a curious state of mind.
- Learning to listen. If you are always talking, you aren’t learning. Ask questions and then sit back and listen to what the other person has to say.
A note for founders
In startups, founders are the first people managers, not out of any special skill or interest in managing people, but because who else is managing the first hires? Learning to be a great people manager is vital, especially if you take the bootstrapped route. Your teams will be lean by necessity, and your budget for your early hires will probably require you to hire people that will be learning on the job.
Take the time to learn to be a great manager; not only because it is the right way to treat your people, but because the management culture you create with your early hires is the culture you will get when you begin to scale. If you are a bad manager, you will have a company made up of bad to middling managers. Your costs will rise, you’ll struggle to hire great people, and, eventually, you will begin to struggle to keep up with competitors that are more resilient and better able to manage the challenges of growth.
Conversely, if you are a great manager, you will build a culture that values and creates more great managers. Your teams will stay together, you’ll retain more of your top talent, and you’ll find your company to be more resilient to change and competition as the years go by. You don’t have to be a great manager to build a great company, but you are more likely to find sustainable success if you take the craft seriously in the early years.
Wrapping up
It isn’t quite as easy as all of that, of course.
Being a great manager takes practice. You’ll fail a few times. You’ll probably make someone cry. Hopefully by mistake. You might cry too.
If you are trying to be a great manager in an organization where most managers are bad, and managers aren’t supported by senior leadership, you’ll hit walls that are hard to get over.
If you are a founder taking on management responsibilities for the first time you might find yourself struggling with being available and being present because you have a whole business to run. You won’t always be perfect, but that’s okay. The goal is to be great, most of the time.
I don’t think reading about management can make you a great manager. You have to do the thing to really learn it. But if you want to read more than this short blog post, you might find Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager to be helpful. I did.