So, Are you a good manager?

A coffee mate once asked me whether I was a good manager?

That got me thinking. Am I a good Manager? May be. May be not. In my 14 years in a responsible management position in one of the most trusted employer brands in the country, I have never been asked that, either by my bosses or by my peers or by my staff. That’s why it got me thinking.

To be the judge and jury of your own work is a bit selfish. For me, the work I have done over the entire course of my tenure as a team leader, and later as a manager, has been deeply satisfying. I have not mastered all, but I have learnt to see growing complexity, uncertainty, volatility and ambiguity through a different lens.

Most of us are bad at most things by default. We are wired that way. The good thing is that our brain’s efficacy for putting the dots together and make sense of our environment, our body and the people around us is so damn good we can mold ourselves to be the experts at anything we set our minds to.

So the secret to becoming a good manager lies in how much we are willing learn and put what we learn in to practice. What separates a good manager from a bad manager is simply his attitude towards learning new things and put in deliberate, focused practice with plenty of repetitions. This has certainly worked for me. But it came with a lot of perks.

Becoming a good — or a great manager — is not an easy feat by any means. For one thing, how do you practice being a manager? How many of us tried to manage for 4 hours a day for 6 days a week? A professional badminton player can practice his strokes, his footwork, his endurance, his speed and agility for 6 days a week and become a great badminton player. My friend Athif, the Iron Man, is an endurance athlete. He is good at what he does because he put in a lot of practice to adapt his body to go beyond what is humanely possible for Flesh Men like us. My kids started running at a very young age and continue to run 40 to 50 km per week over the last few years. And guess what? They can easily complete a 5k run in under 30 minutes with no additional efforts. There is absolutely no way for a potential manager to practice “managing” or “being a manager”.

The problem is Managers do not start as Professional Managers. As with most managers, I was promoted to a manager through the ranks. Day 1 was Day 1. Period. I started anew. My 3,257 days of work in the same company, in different capacities, under different managers was worth nothing. I was a beginner and the feeling was overwhelming! What I learnt in the classroom and numerous professional development courses over the years meant very little. I was totally unprepared to pick up the guitar and strum the beautiful pieces I was accustomed to listening my whole adult life.

Being a beginner was one of the reasons why the start of my journey was so overwhelming. There were other reasons too. People are not numbers, not squares, triangles or even hexagons. People are humans. They are governed by beliefs, experiences, emotions & perceptions. And the worst part was I was a human too. As a manager, the most difficult thing I had to overcome was to understand myself, the people around me, to develop a 6th sense about “if-this-then-that” results of a situation or a series of situations. Over time, I developed this acute gut feeling towards predicting what would bring out the best outcome from particular set of inputs. Hand people something and the expected result is different if we pick up the same thing together. This needs a bit of work to understand. When I first became a manager, I had the urge to put my fingers where it did not belong, and more often than not, it turned out to be a deterrent more than an encouragement.

These learning did not come cheap. The trials and repetitions required to be good at managing are difficult to come by. From the onset, I was on stage. There were consequences. Failure could cost me my job, and what’s worse is someone else could lose his job because of me. Or we could lose thousands of dollars in revenue (profit), lose customers or the burn the reputation of the company. Balancing these priorities was risky. Success Metrics became complex and the decision-making became slow. I risked becoming the worst bureaucrat. Over time, and through experience, I learnt that what brought me up through the ranks was my ability to quickly decide a way forward and my ability to spot risks early on and mitigate any damages quickly and efficiently. I had to stay true to myself and keep doing what I do best. Decide quickly, based on the information I had. Spot early signs of things going wrong and mitigate the damages quickly and efficiently.

There were times I felt quite helpless. “Why did they react that way?” In the early days, I had to take a lot of time to think about the outcomes of certain situations and ask my direct reportees this question. Over time, I learnt to rephrase this question. Now I ask myself “what could I have done differently to achieve the desired outcome?” When I started asking this myself, I got really surprised of the answers I came up with. Asking myself what I could have done differently gave me the feeling of being in control, gave me space to play around and helped me evaluate the processes. I have learnt that people react based on the result of a series of processes and I have the opportunity to tweak those processes to bring about the outcome I desired. A great manager has the capability to assess and identify what prompted the reactions and more importantly, how to harness or mitigate the impact. He would have seen it all, if not the most. A great manager develops a sense of empathy through these experiences. Classrooms, lectures, simulations, HBR articles & TEDTalks are worthless in this regard. You learn to empathize by living and reliving these experiences.

In the early days of my management journey, one of my mentors told me stop interpreting situations on my and NEVER to make any assumptions. ASSUME makes an ASS of U and ME. To different people, the same words have different meanings. A great manager understands that the context of the spoken words is a product of the sum of all the experiences one person has gone through. Each person’s experiences are different. Bring both of this together, it brings a whole of new dimension to internal communication and collaboration. Great managers ask questions. Great managers learn from the people around them. Over the years, I have developed a keen appreciation for diversity within & across teams; a 6th sense for who to ask, what to ask and more importantly, when to ask. This, again, is something very difficult to learn or simulate. It comes over time, through experience.

At the beginning, I had this notion that the best motivator for better performance was a proper rewarding system. Over the years, I have learnt that rewarding may work for a while, but created a gaps and rivalries between different teams and individuals within the same team. The biggest discovery I made as a manager was that the best motivator was psychological safety; people feel safe when they know they are not going to be penalized for bad luck or for an honest mistake. People feel safe when they are valued as human beings, when they knew fairness was the key to all the decisions that govern people. I learned that fairness is a universal language that everyone spoke, from University Graduates to Primary School dropouts. I learned that people felt happy when they see they colleagues treated fairly. I learned that when people perceive a situation to be unfair, they tend to feel pain. They try to distance themselves from the situation. On the contrary, when people see their friends and colleagues treated fairly and justly, they own and defend those decisions as if it were their own. Later, I learned the science that backed this behavior. Whenever people see unfairness and injustice, it triggers their reptilian brain that deals with threats and survival. When the reptile in you is active, it quickly shrinks the space normally reserved for innovating, inspiring, serving and collaborating. Motivation, Creativity, Team Work will be pushed way down.

In short, the hardest thing about managing a business is not the number crunching, the ROI calculations, the cash flow statements and preparing balance sheets. The hardest part of running any business is people management. As teams grow, as teams get down-sized, as teams collide, as departments vie for superiority, all sorts of energy can be released. Until you get the hang of this, until you had the chance to corral these energies and harness it for the betterment of the business, you are going to make a mess of it. The trick is to get yourself out of the regressive cycle soon enough so that you can shine like the star you are meant to be.

I don’t see myself as a manager anymore. When you have been managing people for as long as I have been doing, you’d be completely bonkers and utterly stupid if you see yourself as one. I hate when my staff, my peers, my bosses call me a manager. I don’t like when my staff refers to me as their boss either. Another cliché term people often refer to me is a “leader”. I am none of the above. I consider myself as an Enabler. A Helper. Enabling People to Succeed, Helping People Achieve their Dreams.

The biggest lesson I have learned over the years was summarized by the late Poet, Singer and Civil Rights Activist, Maya Angelou. “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”