Management is an amazing responsibility. It’s a position that we all aspire to in our careers—whether we’re gunning for the dream position, or simply trying to be the best steward of our jobs that we can be. Getting offered a management position is an incredible honour, and it’s an absolutely amazing ride.
Along the way, if you haven’t already, you’ll discover all the responsibilities that really come along with the word “management.” Under that term is the picture of a well-oiled machine, each piece carefully attended to and fitted for its best purposes.
In that regard, here are 13 responsibilities that come along with being a manager that can help you to understand your role a little bit better. If you’re not in management yet, these are things that you can strive to understand better for the future—and see how you fit into them even now.
Leading
When we talk about it leading, it’s most often through serving, or leading by example. While we all want to be the kind of leader that our employees look to for inspiration and motivation, that only comes if we show them how hard we can work ourselves.
If you want to be the kind of leader who’s heading the charge, you have to be willing to be the first one into battle.
Supervising
Supervising is much more than being a watchful eye. It’s having the skills in your back pocket to know how to tackle the tasks that are “below your pay grade.” If your employee is struggling, you need to be able to swoop in and help handle the problem, not simply point out that they’re doing it wrong.
Administration
Administration is a fairly broad topic in and of itself, but one that’s vital to good management. For one, it simply means handling the affairs behind the curtain. For all of the tasks that you may have mastered in your past role, you’re now in charge of helping everyone to carry out their tasks smoothly.
From crunching numbers to ordering, there’s a lot of “less-than-sexy” tasks you’ll need to handle as a manager.
Delegation
You need to be able to identify when you’re overwhelmed, and what’s more is that you need to be able to trust your employees to carry out the tasks themselves. Delegation requires having the humility to say that you can’t solve every problem, or handle every task on your own. It’s one of the most valuable virtues you can carry in management.
Planning
Speaking of the little details, planning can be one of the more foreign parts of transitioning to a management position. Not that you don’t do some forward looking in other roles, but planning as a manager is an entirely different beast. It takes an intimate knowledge of the day to day, as well as your customers, and then some serious intuition.
All in all, it’s definitely a skill that you develop along the way.
Organising
Like planning, this is a much more involved skill at the management level. You’ll have to look at each of your employees and understand how they fit into the patchwork of your company. You’ll be doing some HR, accounting and administration all in one here.
Firing
Firing is hard. It never gets easier. Sometimes the decisions will be extremely clear, and other times it will feel unfair even to you. At points, you’ll feel like you’re doing it for the sake of setting an example, and other times because you’re the victim of hard times.
No matter what, firing makes you a sharper and stronger manager. If you can handle it well, those employees will be better for it too.
Hiring
While all a part of the same cycle, hiring is nothing like firing. You’re taking a gamble on someone, and learning how to match new personalities with old ones. This is a job that requires a lot of humility, patience and care. If you don’t exercise those qualities, it could lead to disastrous decisions.
Training
When you on-board someone well, it can make or break their career. By giving a new hire the tools they need to really own their position, whether it’s dishwashing or managing the books, you’re empowering them to make the most of their job.
Good training takes patience and an understanding of every position. Delegation can often come in hand here.
Communicating
No doubt, your employees are going to experience miscommunication, whether form you or their coworkers. If you can get to the root of it quickly, however, you’ll save yourself and them a world of headaches.
Communicating well as a manager comes down to thoughtfulness and respect. If you can be mindful of your employees’ situations, then you’ll know when and how best to speak with them.
Evaluating
As a manager, you have to take a critical eye to every aspect of your team, because you have to know if things are getting better or worse. The problem comes when you blur the line between evaluating, micromanaging and just constantly criticising.
Good evaluation means that you’re not simply striking fear into the hearts of your employees, but rather, you’re learning how to make judgments from an open and honest perspective.
Refining
When those evaluations do come, you have to know how to make things better. For some new managers, they get lay-off happy, others will dramatically change the way a business functions. While that may work for many, it may not work for you.
Try to determine what’s best for the business as a whole, not just what’s dramatic in the way that it changes a business.
Scheduling
Finally there’s scheduling. An otherwise mundane task, you won’t find a much more difficult chore than getting your employees all on the same page. Determine the best tools, create a system, and just make it happen. The more autonomy you can give them to work it out on their own, the better it is for you.