How to Be a Great Manager (or at Least Avoid Being a Terrible One)

Managing teams can be a grueling job.

Sometimes that is because of dynamics that come from the team.

Sometimes the complexity and pain of management comes from inside those of us who lead.

As a developer and leader of mission-driven, global organizations, and as a global educator and coach, I have had the opportunity to lead all kinds of people in a wide diversity of organizational and relational contexts. Through the years, I have definitely worked with and led team members who brought plenty of toxicity and pain to everyone’s lives, and hurt our ability to get our shared mission accomplished. On the other hand, if I am honest, some of the worst damage I have ever seen done in teams has resulted from my own idiotic and proud thinking and behavior.

In the spirit of sparing others from similar mistakes and causing similar damage, I want to offer some lessons I have learned, distilled from reflecting on my own managerial missteps and the missteps of those who have brought damage into my life as well through poor managerial practices.

Here’s a short guide to being a healthy, helpful manager, and avoiding some of the hardest knocks on the descent into managerial incompetence:

1. Don’t Kill the Team with the Knife of Micromanagement

There’s nothing quite like having a boss who requires that every decision, communication, and action be dissected and pre-approved by them before anything can move forward. That kind of micromanaging doesn’t just make people miserable; it actively erodes their ability to function like adults. It ties the hands of the team. If you don’t trust your team to do their jobs, you might have hired the wrong people or, even worse, you might have a pathological need for control. Both situations are incredibly damaging to your team, your shared mission, and even yourself.

If you often find yourself thinking, “Why am I the only one who can do anything right around here,” you probably need to take a long look in the mirror and do some reflection. Get a trusted colleague who knows you well and is able to be direct with you with difficult feedback, and ask them about your management mentality and struggles. Chances are, much of your team’s problems are rooted in your own insecurities and arrogance, and you need help identifying and working through those barriers.

The best managers set clear expectations, provide the necessary resources, and then get out of the way until their team members need fresh direction.

Your job isn’t to babysit. It’s to make sure your team has what they need to succeed.

2. Don’t Be a Managerial Ghost

If your version of leadership is lobbing passive-aggressive emails into your employees’ inboxes like grenades and then ghosting them when they have questions, you likely have a massive morale problem on your team. Or, if your team members only ever see you on a platform, but never sitting in their workspace, you likely have the same morale problem. I have seen this style of management up-close and personal and felt the isolating impact of it.

Healthy management requires actually talking to the people who serve alongside and under your leadership. It requires real life, face-to-face, in-the-flesh, personal interactions, as much as possible. Access to and personal touch from a leader communicates respect, dignity, and value to team members, and it inspires initiative, faithfulness, and collaboration.

3. Own Your Leadership Mistakes

The inconvenient truth when we make a mistake in management and leadership is that everyone in the team or organization typically knows. As a manager, the team’s eyes are always on you, if only to make sure they are following your lead and fulfilling expectations. Because of this, when you make a bad decision or do something that hinders progress, trying to cover it up makes everything worse. Instead of saving face, you look insecure. If you blame your team, it makes you look like a narcissist. The best managers admit when they’re wrong, take responsibility, and sometimes even use their missteps as case-studies for the team to learn from so they can move forward in a stronger way.

People respect honesty. They despise it when a leader’s impulse for self-preservation brings them and the team pain, and hurts the mission.

4. Don’t Weaponize “The Vision”

Too often, managers treat team members like they are soulless robots, only valuable as long as they are pouring every ounce of strength and creativity into achieving quantifiable results. The moment a team member shows signs of humanity like exhaustion, burnout, or emotional deflation, the leader begins to pontificate about how important it is to keep going because of the value of the vision and mission of the organization. They don’t care for, invest in, and support the humans in front of them. Instead, they simply ask for a stiffer spine and more output.

Vision is great. Clarity of mission is great. A culture of hard work is great. Using any of these things as an excuse to overlook burnout, cut corners, or expect employees to sacrifice their personal lives for the greater good of “the brand” is a tragedy.

Healthy leaders don’t just care about and pitch an inspiring vision; they actually care about the people executing it. If you’re using “the vision” or “the mission” as a reason to underpay, overwork, and undervalue your team, it is time to take a step back, re-humanize the workplace, and use the mission to HELP those who serve with you instead of using it to justify or rationalize their destruction.

5. Be the Shield, Not the Sword

In my opinion, empowering leaders make a practice of taking the public credit when the team fails to deliver, but diverts public credit to the team when the team is successful. They absorb the blows from higher-ups and protect their people as much as ethically possible when the criticisms come. They shield the team from unnecessary stress, instead of amplifying it.

If your first instinct when things go wrong is to blame your employees rather than advocate for them, you are showing a very dehumanizing mentality about how you view your colleagues. You see them as tools to attain and expand your own vocational power and opportunities, as opposed to dignified humans you have a responsibility to empower, encourage, and enable to thrive. As painful as it may be to realize, that type of managerial leadership is exploitive and cannibalistic at best.

6. Actually Care

Managerial leadership is a busy world.

You have meetings, reports, and a never-ending pile of messages haunting your existence from your collaboration platforms. But, heres the thing: People still need the personal touch of those who lead them. If you can’t take regular, even brief moments to ask your team members individually how they’re doing (and actually listen to their answer when you do), the hard truth is that you might be the reason they’re polishing their résumé.

People need to know that they are seen, heard well, considered, and respected. If the opposite is true and they feel unseen, silenced, unconsidered, and disrespected, they leave. For most people, it doesn’t take a whole lot to encourage them and help them to feel seen and valued, just some basic moments of genuine, direct interest.

Great managers don’t treat employees like interchangeable cogs in a productivity machine. They recognize that people have lives, struggles, and aspirations outside of work. If you don’t actually care about your team, they won’t care about your leadership or your cause.

It’s really is that simple.

The Bottom Line: We can be Better Managers

Managing people is hard. It’s messy, frustrating, and occasionally makes you question your life choices. But at the end of the day, it’s not about being perfect as much as it’s about being someone your team can trust.

If you lead with integrity, communicate like a functional adult, and treat your employees like human beings instead of productivity units, you’re already on a great trajectory.

When things get tough and tensions happen on the team, just remember:

Nobody wants to work for the person who made them cry in the break room.

Grow Your Leadership!

If you want to grow in the attitudes and skills that it takes to be a great manager or team member, we would love to partner with you in a coaching relationship! Atlas offers personalized, relational, strategic coaching experiences that empower you to become exactly who you want to be.

Reach out now for a free, no-pressure exploratory conversation and let’s talk about how we can help you reach your goals!