Summary

The author's journey as a manager evolved through three distinct phases: Supportive, Confident, and Enabling, shaped by personal experiences, mentorship, and formal training.

Abstract

The author reflects on the evolution of their management style over their career, starting as a young, supportive manager in retail sales forecasting. Initially lacking formal training, they emphasized being available and supportive to their team. As they gained experience and confidence, their approach shifted to include more assertive guidance on work practices and personal development. Formal training and early successes contributed to this confidence, equipping them with techniques to share personal experiences and relate to their team's challenges. In the final phase, the author's style became enabling, focusing on empowering team members to make decisions and preparing them to advance in their careers. The author highlights the importance of mentorship and continuous learning, expressing a readiness to adapt and grow into new management challenges.

Opinions

The author values being supportive and available to their team as a fundamental aspect of good management.
They believe that formal training and personal experiences are crucial for a manager's development and confidence.
The author emphasizes the importance of evolving from managing day-to-day tasks to developing employees' individual work styles and personal growth.
They advocate for the concept that the best managers enable their teams to function without them, ensuring stability and fostering independence.
The author is open to continuous learning and adaptation, looking forward to evolving further in their career with new experiences and challenges.
They encourage young managers to seek out free online training resources to enhance their management skills and career prospects.

Your Management Style Will and Must Evolve

As a young manager, I was friendly, polite and supportive. Over time this has evolved…

When I started out as a young manager, I was friendly, polite and I hope supportive of people I influenced. Over time this has evolved and I think I’ve become a more rounded manager, open to challenge, ready to influence and share my years of experiences. What I certainly am, is very different from that inexperienced manager who wasn’t sure what being a manager, let alone a mentor, really meant.

I was 23 when I was first asked to manage someone, back in the days when I was working in retail as a sales forecaster. It wasn’t something I was expecting but it was something I was immediately comfortable with and thrived on.

From day one I have always taken pride in people that work for me and put a big emphasis on seeing them succeed, following the careers of people long after I stopped managing them. Over that time, my style of management has evolved, based on my experiences and on other factors, in particular my personal mentors.

As I look back over my career, I put my style of management into three clear phases of development

Supportive — Confident — Enabling

Phase 1 — Supportive

Now don’t get me wrong, my style now is still very much about supporting my team, but I think in the early days it was the predominant part of my style — because I didn’t know much else.

I wasn’t given any formal training before becoming a manager and I certainly didn’t cover management skills doing a maths degree, so it became quite natural that my style would lean towards trying to offer support and just being available if people wanted to talk to me.

Another reason for this style would be that my boss at the time, who has gone on to become a friend for over 25 years, was certainly someone that always made time for me, always made me feel like a priority for him. It’s a trait I have always retained. Regardless of what I’m working on, I try to be available to my team and by proxy when I took over running a business, I tried to be available for anyone in the company.

The easy part of management is telling people what to do, the important part is listening and being there to support people. I would encourage any young business leader to remember that its the people around them that make the business grow, not them as individuals.

Phase 2 — Confident

Over time two key things happened that changed my style — formal training and initial success as a manager.

What they did is make me more confident as an individual and as a manager. So whilst I continue to be supportive, I started to have the confidence to make strong suggestions on how individuals should be working, not just in their jobs but in how they organise themselves and work. I think that’s one of the key things that changes over time, you evolve from advising on the day to day job and start developing people’s style and helping them as individuals, not just employees.

The training started to give me techniques on how to talk to people and the ways to use my personal experiences to make my points. I think the ability to relate to problems with your personal examples is always a great way to help people and something I always look to do.

So many young managers don’t get proper training before being thrown into management, but the difference now from when I started as a manager is the depth of free training available online. I encourage all young managers to get online, find those courses and invest in your development, it really does pay off for your career long term.

Phase 3 — Enabling

This is the time when I hit my stride and when I was able to develop careers, not just influence how people work. This is the point in my career when I always focused on having the people around me being in positions to take over from me and step up.

So much of this came from advice I was given by a mentor of mine — “your role as a senior manager is to build the base below you”.

The old adage is that the best manager can disappear at a moment’s notice and things don’t fall apart and it is 100% true. But to achieve that means evolving as a manager. I’d moved to the point that I didn’t need to help people to do their ‘job’, what they needed was to be given the confidence to make more decisions themselves. My role became about being a sounding board for ideas. So my style became about challenging, questioning and enabling.

Ultimately, as I now embark on the next phase of my career, I’m a combination of all these things.

Whilst it might be some time before I’m a manager again, I remain a mentor to business owners, advising on boards and working with some exciting young businesses, so these skills will continue to get utilised and I will personally continue to evolve.

Part of why I took my new career direction was to learn new things and change. To challenge myself to be different and to do new things. I’d love to be able to update this article in 2 years and have a phase 4, which is based on what I’ve learned working with new people and in new ways.