Highlights §
- Before I became a manager, I applied for a manager role in my department and didn’t get it. The candidate who was selected already had management experience even though they had no experience in my department. (View Highlight)
- Self-awareness and introspection are essential to benefitting from seat time. Mentors and a good boss can help you learn more quickly and avoid some mistakes. Time is an essential component of this kind of learning. You can’t shortcut the process. (View Highlight)
- It’s easy to read about the need for clear feedback and nod along, but hard not to soften feedback to someone you like at the moment you’re giving it. (View Highlight)
- Seat time is sitting across the table from someone, listening to them describe a situation, and realizing you’ve seen this pattern before. You know how to navigate the situation — even or especially if it involves tricky interpersonal dynamics. When you come across a situation you haven’t seen before, it takes more time and energy to handle it than if you’ve seen variations of it several times. (View Highlight)
- Seat time is sitting across the table from someone, listening to them describe a situation, and realizing you’ve seen this pattern before. You know how to navigate the situation — even or especially if it involves tricky interpersonal dynamics. When you come across a situation you haven’t seen before, it takes more time and energy to handle it than if you’ve seen variations of it several times. (View Highlight)
- It’s not that the emotional work of managing gets easier with seat time. You do get better at compartmentalizing and processing the emotional challenges of management. (View Highlight)
- One cool benefit of management seat time is seeing patterns play out. You see more than just your own work and gain a lot of perspective and understanding from seeing what’s going on with your reports. I learned two key lessons from my seat time, the first of which was … (View Highlight)
- One cool benefit of management seat time is seeing patterns play out. You see more than just your own work and gain a lot of perspective and understanding from seeing what’s going on with your reports. (View Highlight)
- A closely related lesson is that you can’t treat everyone the same way. It seems like it would be fair or even right to do this, but it’s not. (View Highlight)
- Coaching and growing your team is one of the most important duties of a manager. I couldn’t coach effectively until I learned to tailor my approach to each individual and what they needed. (View Highlight)
- One of your jobs as a manager is to build a network with other managers and teams to get things done. You must build relationships outside your team for your team to succeed. Management success is not about what you, personally, can do. It’s about what you can get done through and by others. (View Highlight)
- You can’t solve problems bigger than your team without a network of friends and allies within your company. It’s important to cultivate this network purposefully and intentionally. (View Highlight)
- If you are a manager you need advice on how to manage — you need someone you can call. Someone other than your boss, someone you trust, someone who will call you on your BS, and someone who has more experience than you do. A lot of my regrets my time as a manager come from situations where I should have asked for help and didn’t. (View Highlight)