One of the things I help my a lot of my business coach clients with is training their management team or hiring a new manager. One of the main concerns of many of my clients is that when they hire someone new or promote someone to a management position is that the new person won’t know what they are doing and it will take months of training to catch them up to speed. Another concern that we all hear frequently, as a business coach, is that the new manager won’t do well because they have never managed people before. The cool thing that we get to help them realize is that it is a lot easier to train up a manager than the majority of people originally think.
If you are a manager that cares about being loved than having confrontational conversations will not be something that can be done.
Clay dove into this concept in-depth this week doing one of our morning business coach meetings. He said that there are 3 main keys to being a successful manager. The first one being that it is better for the employees that you manage to be afraid of you than to be your friend. Clay referenced the famous Niccolo Machiavelli quote, “It is better to be feared than loved.” This is the hardest part of managing for most people. This is because this concept requires you to not give a single care about what people are going to think about you. It is the job of a manager to enforce that the needed work is actually being done which as you can imagine will cause some friction. If you are a manager that cares about being loved than having confrontational conversations will not be something that can be done. The second key to being a great manager is making sure that there are extremely detailed checklists in place for the new manager to complete each day, week, and month. When there are checklists and processes it will be so simple that anyone can learn to be a manager within a matter of weeks. The third and final key point that Clay talked to us about was more of a concept for the business owner. Clay said that as a business owner if the manager ever sides with the employees over you, you have to fire them immediately. Your manager is there to assist you and once they start siding with the many opinions of employees your business will get real weird real fast.
Hearing a business coach like Clay break it down into these three steps was an eye-opener for me, especially this week as I was right in the middle of helping a client fire his current manager and hire a new one. Giving 3 simple actionable steps is a lot more powerful than trying to explain the entirety of what a manager is and how to train one. The only disclaimer to these key points is that whoever you hire or promote needs to have an attitude of coachability. If someone is not coachable then it will always be incredibly difficult to train up a new manager.
