One daily habit to become an amazing manager

The single most powerful habit for becoming a better manager:

Show up for your team everyday.

At 25, with no business experience, I was running a 50-person company. I wasn’t delusional about my management experience. I had no clue how to be a manager, but, like any habit, I figured the best way to get better was to show up and make a little progress each day.

Along the way, this meant that each day I would try to do one of these things:

• Give honest feedback for their sake at the risk of not being 'liked.'

• Study our financial performance transparently with the team

• Get to know the people who worked for me, deeper than what they did for me

• Track the promises I'd made to the leaders and the company

• Prepare for my meetings so they aren't time wasters

• Ask my team, "I'm new to leading meetings, how can I improve them?

• Ask my partner or my team, "What am I missing?"

• Solicit feedback from my team on my management methods

• Solicit feedback on the tools (tech stack) we used as a company

• Study the data behind the business with the teams who tracked it

• Show up in an unexpected place on behalf of my team

• Ask an employee to teach me what they did, regardless of their level

• Take a customer service call

• Take ownership of something that wasn’t working

• Get in the trenches with a team member to solve problems

• Take a team member to lunch or schedule a virtual coffee

• Spend 30 minutes one day a week writing emails saying 'I've noticed' or 'Thanks.'

  
  

Even on the days when I failed as a manager or wanted to hide away in my office, I would show up. Because I knew effective management compounds into big wins, and even if I suck as a manager, improving as one only takes effort.ntial.