Do this to be a great manager

When I worked as a consultant for a corporate ISP company, it was openly acknowledged that there was a massive problem with moral in the company.

I imagine we’ve all been there.

I remember one time, driving my manager to a server farm that wanted to work with us, and her yelling at me and losing her shit because I thought we missed the turning.

Despite never having been there myself, I was blamed for missing the turning.

And this kind of stuff happened a LOT with her.

I remember another time where a product launch did super well and our marketing team won some kind of award.

She stepped up on stage, accepted the award and acted like she alone was responsible for the success.

She literally didn’t even mention the team.

And when she got back to our table, the first words out of her mouth were blaming us for her not having a speech ready.

The job I had was well paid, pretty easy and if I wanted to, I could have just kept my head down and collected the paycheque.

But there’s a saying with hiring and keeping talent.

“People join for salaries. They leave because of managers.”

Frankly, I had been spoiled by my managers in the past. All women, funnily enough.

And they were patient, understanding and most importantly, I loved working with them.

When I left my consulting position, I couldn’t even last a full year, my current nightmare manager asked why I was leaving.

I was respectful because I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But I mentioned that her management style didn’t suit me.

Of course she took this as a personal insult, told me I wasn’t nearly as good at marketing as I thought (agreed) and that I had no passion or drive.

In fact, she made a prediction that I’d be asking for my job back within the year.

And it made me wonder, “why would I still be in contact with two of my past managers, but have zero interest in even being paid to be near this manager?”

And I made a list.

Of events that happened with all my past managers, good and bad. 

Things like campaigns going wrong, poor results on my behalf, mistakes, successes, problems solved, good news.

Anything and everything.

And I wrote out how each one reacted to positive and negative events.

A very VERY clear pattern emerged.

Without going to specific. It looked like this.

Great managers did two things.

  1. Credit everyone else with success of a project and praised them when it went well. Anything that we a positive or a success, they credited to luck or the hard work of other people
  2. Anything that went wrong, they held themselves accountable and only allowed themselves to be blamed. Even if it was clearly someone else’s fault, they took the blame and worked on ways of it not happening again

Nightmare managers did two things also

  1. Took the credit for absolutely all the wins and successes and never even acknowledge their team
  2. Blamed other people and everyone else for the failures and then expected other people to fix things – things that are fixed they would take credit for

Now, does that mean that being a good manager means you’ll never be credited with success, is ultimately a thankless task and people will think you’re just lucky and hired the right people?

Yes.

And that’s the job.

And you should be grateful for it.

Because to me, crediting my team with the wins and seeing them flourish and succeed is the most rewarding aspect of running a business.

Taking the losses and learning from them, accepting the blame and finding ways to fix things – that’s the job.

So are you a great manager, or a nightmare manager?

Mike Killen

Mike is the world's #1 sales coach for marketing funnel builders. He helps funnel builders sell marketing funnels to their customers. He is the author of From Single To Scale; How single-person, small and micro-businesses can scale their business to profit. You can find him on Twitter @mike_killen.