The most precious resource you have is your own time and energy, and when you spend it on your team, it goes a long way toward building healthy relationships.Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can. Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will only take you so far. We’re aiming to have a weekly takeaway-and-brainstorm evening as well.We now regularly have a weekly team standup.I now do regular 1:1 meetings with each team member.How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book. If you like the idea of one day starting a business, don’t read this book yet – wait until you’ve got a business already, and you’re at the point where you’re needing to hire people to help it grow. If you’re not yet a manager of people, there’s probably not much point in you reading this. If you’re a very experienced manager, you should still read it because you might pick up some tips. If you’re a manager of people, you should definitely read this, especially if you’re new to the job. I immediately bought it on Kindle, and as soon as I started reading it, I knew that it was the book about management that I’d been looking for all along. I’d dabbled with a few management-type books, but it was in a session with my performance coach (Chris Sparks) in November 2020 that I heard about The Making of a Manager. How often should we be having meetings? What should we be talking about in meetings anyway? Aren’t meetings just a corporate-waste-of-time? What’s the role of each team member? Do they need roles at all? What ‘goals’ are we working towards as a company? Should we have goals at all? As a team, we were getting things done, and the business was growing in a reasonable fashion, but I knew there were lots of unknown unknowns that I could improve in. Throughout 2020, I knew that my ‘management skills’ needed work. Then around April 2020, Elizabeth came on, initially as my personal assistant, but she quickly took charge of a few other aspects of the business too.

Angus came on board around January 2020, first as a freelance writer, then later as a full-time contractor working on video scripts, blog posts and course logistics. I hired my first full-time ’employee’ around November 2019 – this was Cristian, our original Head of Content. I learned so much about being a manager, and my management skills (and our team’s effectiveness and happiness) immediately improved after I started to do some of the things that Julie recommends. One of my most highlighted books of all time. This book is a must-read guide to being a good manager.Management is really a matter of purpose, people and process.Being a good manager is hard, and scary, but a very learnable skill.

The making of a manager book