@Pandora you are gaining experience and that is valuable and marketable for your future, whether it be for yourself in your own endeavors or in a corporate capacity.
You are always managing someone. Good managers guide, support, course correct & get out of the way. Good managers reward solid employees and hold shaky or sub par employees to account & if required, fire them (sub par people). It’s important to fire the bad apples because otherwise good employees are demoralized by the bad or lazy ones.
The thing that struck me as a senior management professional is just how much interpersonal drama you end up dealing with. Employee A doesn’t like employee B; employee C doesn’t appreciate middle manager D’s management style, etc. Fully 40% of the role is personnel personality management.
I reported to the owner & chief medical officer of one company as Senior Site Director and had three other senior level people lateral to me & three middle managers (and their teams beneath them) below me. We set up this structure during my tenure in that role based on competency but each person had different strengths & weaknesses and each middle manager needed to be guided & supported accordingly.
One guy was very technically brilliant & efficient but he had an acrid and at times off putting sense of humor and if his team wasn’t doing something well he tended to take over that task. He knew he could do the task quicker & better. So he needed better social calibration/awareness/sensitivity and he needed to learn to teach & empower his people up to his level & then let them learn by doing the work themselves. Neither was easy for him to do but he grew as a manager in that role & his team grew as well as far as competency.
To be able to do that takes 3 things:
1. Ability to accurately evaluate strengths & weaknesses in your team
2. Willingness and diplomacy to have the difficult conversations (Gee, your humor rubs people the wrong way….Gee you can’t just do it all yourself)
3. The recognition of improvements and encouragement of the better way of doing….
Which assumes
4. The knowledge of what the best or better way of doing is.
The final bit of advice Id give is this:
Credit and recognize people publicly for good ideas and outside the box thinking or solutions; implement great ideas and credit the origin, nothings builds confidence like that, nothing encourages solution based thinking like that.
Criticize and guide privately.
Good management invokes trust. Without trust things get very rotten very rapidly.
Just my $0.02.
