How to be a good manager?

TL;DR

To be a good manager, focus on taking care of your people rather than just driving results. Effective leadership requires a people-first approach that includes:

• Establishing clear communication: Use a personal "readme" outlining your working hours, communication preferences, and feedback style.
• Striking the right balance: Act as both a buddy and a boss while using proper KPIs and quality assurance for delegation.
• Coaching constructively: Guide team members through mistakes by connecting performance to career goals and asking how to approach tasks differently next time.

Insights

Create a personal operating manual (readme) for yourself as a manager and share it with your team, covering how you prefer to communicate, your typical working hours, and how you provide feedback. This small, proactive document reduces friction and makes interactions more productive.

To be a good manager, it is observed that you must shift your focus from simply doing the job or driving results to taking care of the people responsible for doing the job. Research shows that effective leadership is a people-first role, requiring you to genuinely care about those in your charge, listen attentively when you ask how they are doing, and support their career growth.

https://www.youtube.com/live/M3IczMAa2KE?si=LZfjeRhr7wym_yqW&t=1349

Experts suggest several practical ways to excel in this role:

• Establish clear communication: Create a "readme" or personal operating manual that outlines your working hours, preferred communication methods (such as Slack or calls), and feedback style to minimize surprises and help the team work together smoothly.
• Strike the right balance: Maintain a dynamic of being both a buddy and a boss, rather than just a buddy, while putting proper quality assurance measures and KPIs in place for delegation.
• Coach constructively: Instead of using vague insults, personal attacks, or punishments when mistakes happen, guide team members by connecting their performance to their long-term career goals and asking how they could approach a task differently next time.