We Don’t Teach Managers How to Manage

Here’s a lightweight way to give them the skills they need

I watched a Simon Sinek lecture on YouTube the other day, and he said something that resonated with me. He observed that when you begin your career; you are trained to have the skills you need to do your job, and if you do the job well enough for long enough, you will inevitably be promoted into a leadership position. However, leading people typically requires a very different skill set than the job you were previously trained for, yet we do not take time to train people to have the new skills required for the new job. (Here’s a link to the specific part of his lecture that I’m referring to.)

I can relate to that. I felt ill-equipped as a manager for a long time. Self-doubt creeps in, and you think you could make a bigger impact as an individual contributor than as a leader. It took time — and it was a difficult journey — but I feel like I made it through to the other side.

Now I’m thinking about the next generation of leaders that’s coming behind me. I want to make their road a little smoother, and I’m constantly looking for “the thing” that I wish I would’ve had when I was getting started.

I recently discovered the book Behind Closed Doors, which takes an interesting approach to teaching these skills. It asserts that part of the challenge with learning to be a great manager is that so much of what great managers do cannot be observed because it happens in private conversations and meetings, i.e., behind closed doors. It attempts to show the skills as opposed to simply explaining them.

Instead of preaching rules of management and inundating you with bullet points and checklists, we’re going to open those closed doors and show you firsthand how a great manager handles the normal, day-to-day challenges and crises that arise.

In the book, we get to follow a great manager, Sam Morgan, as they navigate the leadership and management challenges that come with taking a new position as Director of Development in a high-tech organization. Sam’s journey is broken into a 7-week “program” that takes him through meeting the team to uncovering its problems, fixing them, and expanding capability for the future.

The final section, Techniques for Practicing Great Management, is essentially the rules of management, bullet points, & checklists that the author didn’t want to inundate us with at the beginning of the book. Still, it’s immensely valuable as a standalone reference — and I’d consider sharing it with any new leader.

One of the things I like most about the book is that it pivots between a simple fictional narrative, where we see Sam interacting with his people and putting his initiatives into action, and an instructional mode that explains what he’s doing and why.

I’m excited to put some of what I’ve learned from the book into play immediately, too. One challenge I see with my company is that every team feels like it’s resource-starved — which is the universal problem that Sam finds among all his managers during his first week. He addresses this by constructing a project portfolio, questioning if projects align with company goals, and prioritizing.

I’ve invested a lot of time into improving my team’s growth and career development processes, and I was excited to see how Sam tackled this. I liked how he asked his reports, “What skills do you want to learn?” This, paired alongside well-articulated expectations for the destination role, seems like the ideal way to help folks progress to where they want to be.

Overall, Behind Closed Doors is a great resource — and one that’s completely free to Medium subscribers as part of the Pragmatic Programmers bookshelf!

The story examples are very basic, and its simplicity is a double-edged sword. Having been through many experiences similar to what Sam encounters, I see how his techniques make sense and can apply to real scenarios. I’m not sure a new manager will extract the same value without that common foundation. Still, this is about as good of a starting-from-scratch, everything-you-need-to-know guide to management as I’ve seen, with lessons for new & old managers, alike.