The ability to organise, guide, and support individuals or teams to deliver results effectively and sustainably. It involves setting clear expectations, communicating with clarity, delegating appropriately, and addressing challenges constructively.
“Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practised that way, it’s a magnificent profession.” Clayton M. Christensen
Why managing others matters
Managing others matters because most work that actually gets delivered in an organisation happens through people, the leader isn’t doing the work themselves, they’re creating the clarity, conditions, and support that let someone else do it well. A team with a genuinely good manager routinely outperforms an equally talented team with a mediocre one, not because the manager works harder, but because less of everyone else’s effort gets wasted on confusion, rework, and guessing what’s actually expected.
Without competent management, a team’s capability gets capped well below what its individual members could actually produce, since talent that isn’t given clear direction, real feedback, or genuine support tends to default to self-protection rather than full effort. The cost of this rarely shows up as a single dramatic failure, it shows up as good people quietly doing less than they’re capable of, or leaving for somewhere that asks more of them and gives more back in return.
This also compounds over time in a way that’s easy to underestimate. A well-managed team develops faster, which earns more autonomy, which frees the leader to spend more time developing the next person, a cycle that keeps building capability. A poorly managed team stays dependent, which keeps the leader stuck firefighting and further starves the time needed to develop anyone, a cycle that locks a team’s performance at whatever level it started from, without anyone deciding that’s what should happen.
“No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it.” Andrew Carnegie
What good and bad managing others looks like
| What bad looks like | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Sets a task with the assumption that “get it done” is a clear enough instruction. | Confirms the other person can restate what “done” looks like before they start, not just what task they’ve been given. |
| Waits for a scheduled review to mention that something isn’t working. | Flags a concern close to when it happens, while there’s still time and context for it to be corrected easily. |
| Delegates a task but keeps making the small decisions within it themselves. | Delegates the decision rights along with the task, so the person doing the work can actually exercise judgment, not just execute instructions. |
| Treats every team member’s motivation and working style as basically interchangeable. | Manages each person somewhat differently, based on what actually motivates and unblocks them, while holding everyone to the same standard. |
| Only makes time for the team when there’s a problem to solve. | Makes regular, low-stakes time available, so a real issue doesn’t have to become urgent before it gets raised. |
| Assigns work purely based on what needs covering right now, without regard for anyone’s development. | Looks for real opportunities where a stretch assignment serves both what needs doing and someone’s growth at the same time. |
| Treats recognition as something reserved for finished, visible wins. | Recognises good effort and good judgment along the way, not only the final result. |
| Manages everyone the same way regardless of how experienced or capable they already are in a given task. | Adjusts how much direction versus autonomy someone gets based on their actual demonstrated capability in that specific area, not their general seniority. |
“Management is the art of getting things done through people.” Mary Parker Follett
Barriers to managing others
Impatient: Developing someone almost always takes longer than doing the task yourself would, and a leader who finds that gap frustrating will keep reaching for the faster option instead. Over time, that impatience doesn’t just slow development, it teaches the team that bringing a half-formed question or attempt to the leader isn’t worth the friction it causes.
Inappropriate approach: A style that worked well as an individual contributor, moving fast, working alone, trusting your own judgment, doesn’t automatically translate into managing people who need something different from you now. The mismatch rarely announces itself; it just shows up as a team that seems oddly hard to read or motivate, for reasons the leader struggles to name.
Inexperienced: Managing people draws on a distinct set of skills, giving feedback, setting expectations, reading what someone actually needs, that being good at the underlying work never taught. A new manager without this experience is often making these calls for the first time on a live team, which means some of the learning happens at other people’s expense.
Low interest: Management responsibilities compete for time against work a leader may find more immediately satisfying or better suited to their strengths, and when interest is low, management is what quietly loses that competition. The team experiences this as inconsistent attention rather than as the leader’s stated preference, since the preference is rarely made explicit.
Transformation overload: When a leader is absorbing and reacting to significant organisational change themselves, there’s less capacity left to translate that change into something clear and manageable for the team. The team ends up experiencing the same uncertainty the leader is feeling, just without the context the leader has access to.
Too many new people: Every new person joining a team changes its dynamics slightly, and a wave of new members at once can outpace a leader’s capacity to onboard each of them properly. What looks like a straightforward staffing increase is often a much larger management task than the headcount alone suggests.
Personal effectiveness: A leader’s own deliverables usually come with visible deadlines, while management time doesn’t, which makes it easy to protect the former at the expense of the latter without ever deciding to. The team notices whose time gets protected and whose gets sacrificed, even when nothing is said about it directly.
Poor communication: Instructions that feel perfectly clear to the person giving them can still leave real gaps for the person receiving them, especially when context the leader takes for granted was never actually shared. The resulting confusion is usually blamed on the listener, when the more fixable problem was in how the message was built.
No vision: Without a clearly stated direction, a team fills the gap with its own assumptions about what matters most, and those assumptions rarely all point the same way. The resulting effort can look busy and still add up to far less than a team pointed at one shared target would produce.
Poor delegation: Holding onto work that could be delegated protects a leader’s sense of control in the short term, but it also caps how much the team can actually grow, since capability is built by doing real work, not by watching someone else do it. The leader ends up busier and the team ends up less developed, which is close to the opposite of what good management is meant to produce.
Managing former peers: A leader newly promoted to manage people who were recently their equals often hesitates to use real authority, worried that being directive will damage friendships or feel like a betrayal of the old relationship. That hesitation doesn’t read as kindness to the team, it reads as inconsistency, since the same standards that apply to everyone else suddenly seem to bend around a few particular people.
“Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.” Paul Hawken
Enablers of managing others
Seek honest feedback on your impact: Regularly ask colleagues, peers, and your own team how your management style actually lands, not just whether targets are being hit. Specific behaviours like impatience, public criticism, or devaluing others’ input are often invisible to the person doing them and painfully visible to everyone else.
Adjust the specific behaviours that undermine trust: Once you know what isn’t working, change the actual behaviour, not just the intention behind it. Protecting real time for your team, however small, does more to fix an “unavailable” reputation than simply resolving to be more patient.
Enhance your communication: Ensure your communication is clear, consistent, and effective. Focus on how well you inform, listen, explain, and provide feedback.
Delegate more effectively: Delegate tasks appropriately to empower your team. Avoid micromanaging by giving your team the authority to complete their work. Ask your team for feedback on tasks they believe they can handle and delegate accordingly.
Bring more structure: Ensure your instructions are clear and tasks are defined and well-organised. Set clear goals and objectives to guide your team’s work.
Celebrate more: Acknowledge and celebrate your team’s successes and members’ achievements. Recognising achievements motivates others and encourages team performance.
Address problems at speed: Tackle issues as they arise to prevent escalation. Addressing problems quickly ensures the rest of the team is not adversely affected and maintains a positive work environment.
Reflect on what brings you joy: Reflect on whether you genuinely enjoy managing others or prefer working independently. If management isn’t your passion, consider roles that allow you to contribute individually without the responsibilities of managing a team.
Learn from the best: Identify effective managers within your organisation and observe their practices. Compare their methods to your own and learn from their strengths. Reflect on the traits of the best and worst managers you’ve had and strive to emulate the positive characteristics.
Invest in people’s growth deliberately: Treat developing your team’s capability as a real part of the job, not a side effect of assigning tasks. Regularly ask what someone wants to be able to do a year from now, and look for real assignments that build toward it, not just whatever needs doing today.
Reset the relationship deliberately: When you start managing former peers, name the change directly rather than hoping it goes unspoken, acknowledging that the working relationship is different now even if the friendship isn’t. Leaders who address this openly early tend to have a much easier time applying consistent standards later than those who let the ambiguity linger.
“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right thing.” Peter F. Drucker
Reflection questions on managing others
What are your personal strengths and weaknesses as a leader? Have you recently sought feedback from your leaders, peers and team to gain a comprehensive understanding of how you lead? What’s one piece of feedback you’ve received but haven’t actually acted on yet?
Have you evaluated your leadership/management practices recently? Which techniques do you excel at, and which ones need improvement? How would your team answer that second question about you, and would it match your own answer?
Does your management style positively or negatively impact your team? Are there specific behaviours you should adjust to be a more effective leader? If you asked your team to name one specific behaviour to change, would you already know what they’d say?
How effectively do you communicate with your team? Do you ensure your messages are clear, consistent, and that you listen actively and act appropriately to feedback? When did you last check whether an instruction you gave was actually understood the way you meant it?
Are you delegating tasks appropriately and empowering your team to take ownership of their work? What tasks could you delegate more effectively? Are you delegating the task itself, or also the authority to make decisions within it?
Are your instructions and expectations clear and well-organised? Do you set specific goals and objectives that guide your team’s work? Could each member of your team state, in their own words, what a good outcome looks like right now?
How often do you acknowledge and celebrate individual and the team’s successes? Do you recognise good effort and judgment along the way, or only finished, visible results?
Do you address issues promptly or let them fester? How can you improve your approach to handling problems quickly and effectively? How could you include your team more?
Are you genuinely interested in managing/leading others, or do you prefer working independently? How does your interest in leadership/management affect your performance as a leader? If you’re honest, is management something you chose, or something that came with a promotion you wanted for other reasons?
Who are the effective leaders/managers around you that you can learn from? What specific practices do they employ that you can adopt to improve your skills? Have you ever actually asked one of them how they handle a situation you find difficult?
“Why do anything unless it is going to be great?” Peter Block
Micro practices for managing others
1. Confirm “done” before work starts: When assigning something non-trivial, ask the person to describe back what a good outcome will look like, in their own words, before they begin. A five-minute check now is cheaper than discovering a mismatch after the work is finished.
2. Protect one recurring slot, no agenda required: Hold a short, regular check-in with each direct report that isn’t tied to a specific problem or deliverable. Its value comes precisely from not being urgent, which is what makes it a safe place for a small concern to surface early.
3. Give the decision, not just the task: Next time you delegate something, name explicitly which decisions within it the person now owns outright. Ambiguity about decision rights is what quietly turns delegation back into disguised instruction-following.
4. Diagnose before you fix: When someone isn’t delivering, ask what’s actually in their way before assuming it’s a skill or effort problem, it might be an unclear priority, a missing resource, or a dependency on someone else. The fix for the real blocker is often completely different from the fix you’d have reached for by default.
5. Ask what they want to be able to do next: In your next one-on-one, ask what capability someone wants to build over the next year, not just what task is due next. Look for one real assignment in the coming month that serves that goal, not only the immediate workload.
6. Compare your account to theirs: Once a quarter, ask a direct report to describe, in their own words, what’s expected of them and how they’re doing against it. Where their account differs from yours is exactly where your management has been less clear than you assumed.
7. Name the shift out loud: If you’re now managing people who used to be your peers, say plainly, once, that the working relationship has changed, rather than letting everyone quietly figure it out through your behaviour. One direct conversation early prevents months of ambiguity about which version of the relationship applies in any given moment.
“Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.” Sam Walton
Explore related leadership resources
To further develop this capability, examine how it intersects with other core leadership dimensions across the libraries:
Leadership library:
- Accountability (holding): Establish clear ownership and consequences, ensuring that team members understand their responsibilities and the standards of excellence required.
- Assertiveness: Communicate expectations and feedback with confidence and directness, reducing ambiguity and ensuring your team remains focused on the right priorities.
- Building Effective Teams: Move beyond individual management to foster a high-trust, collaborative environment where collective strengths are leveraged for better results.
- Vision and Purpose (Managing): Connect daily tasks to the broader organisational mission, providing the “why” that inspires sustained effort and commitment.
Supporting libraries
- Interpersonal relationships (EQ-i): Build the strong professional bonds necessary to support your team through challenges and celebrate their successes authentically.
- Impulse control (EQ-i): Manage your immediate emotional reactions during high-pressure situations, allowing you to respond to team issues with composure and objectivity.
- Sociability (Traits): Leverage your natural ease in social settings to stay accessible and approachable, facilitating open lines of communication with your direct reports.
- Strategic orientation (Traits): Ensure your management style is not just about the “now,” but is actively preparing your team for future organisational needs and shifts.
Continue exploring: Return to the Leadership Library to view the full directory of competencies and resources.