Last time, I talked about how individuals, especially those starting out, could earn more money from their jobs in a professional environment.   And it boiled down to learning as many skills necessary to accomplish valuable tasks as efficently as possible.

The older I get, the more apparent it becomes that there are huge gulfs in capability between individuals. We're not talking like one person is twice as capable as another. We're talking about one person being 100 times more capable than another.

At some point, the up and coming professional will hit a brick wall on how much they can earn going it alone. They'll need help in order to either accomplish more valuable/complex tasks or accomplish more tasks total.

The more people you need to accomplish a task, the less you'll make from each task. Therefore, you bring on more people only if that enables you to get a lot more tasks done or accomplish more valuable tasks.  If this is the case, you're about to become a manager.

Unfortunately, most people can't even accomplish the part of the task they're responsible for. The three most common reasons people fail to accomplish their specified tasks are:

I'd say 75% of people have one of these 3 issues. The good news is that items 1 and 2 can be addressed by having a good manager or mentor. The last issue is probably terminal. But these are obstacles that managers will have to deal with.

Many entrepreneurs never move beyond targeting tasks that they do almost completely by themselves. Many more entrepreneurs attempt to become managers, discover that it's actually taking longer to accomplish the same tasks even though there's more people working on it, and give up.

What seperates a typical manager from a good manager is the ability to get your team to accomplish those tasks significantly faster than you could have done it yourself. And that's no easy thing because, like I said, there can be a 100X difference between the capability of one person and another.

Moving from being an individual agent of good task completion efficiency to being a manager can be very challenging.  Below is the example of what I went through.

Welcome to management, here's your shovel

So now you're a manager. And now your relationship with the task may look something like this:

Now that other people are involved, your piece of the task is that much less. Therefore, that task needs to be correspondingly more valuable or you need to accomplish more tasks.

So now all you have to do is tell people what to do right? Wrong. Many managers will wrongly assume that managing is just giving people assignments and having big ideas that they then delegate out to others to do.  In corporate America, many managers do just that. But that will limit how far they can go. 

The typical new manager will quickly discover that without learning management skills, they not only won't be able to accomplish more tasks, they won't even be able to accomplish the tasks they used to be able to do on their own in the same amount of time. More people can actually slow things down.

That's because those people may be 1/100th as capable as you. Even if they're 1/5th as capable as you, if there's only 4 of them and you've switched from doing the task yourself to assigning others to do the task, you've lost ground.

A good manager will then need to decide carefully when they should focus their attention on improving the capability of their team versus simply accomplishing more of the task directly themselves. It's a tough balancing act. Do too much yourself and you've lost any benefit from having a team. Spend all your time trying to get less capable employees to be more effective and your tasks don't get complete.

What's worse for the super-manager (which we'll talk to in the next section), not only are 75% of workers inefficient due to the 3 issues we talked about earlier, 75% of managers have those same issues and were simply promoted because of things like seniority or politics, or because they were really good at accomplishing specific tasks but have no capability as managers.

To be an effective manager, the first step is to make sure you yourself can clean up any issues that make you less effective (poor time management, poor organizational skills, or laziness). Only then will you have a chance at maximizing the efficiency of your workers. And I stress the word chance because odds are, if 3 out of 4 of your workers has efficiency issues, only an unknowable % of them can be cured. Some will have to be fired and some will have to simply be managed as best they can.

The truly good managers recognize that their job isn't managing people. It's accomplishing tasks. The people represent make up the team that exists solely to accomplish that task.

The good manager works with their people to increase the effectiveness of individual members but also will choose to accomplish parts of the task directly if the effectiveness of their people is lacking sufficiently to justify going in.

A good manager does the math: The sum of the members of the team (and their corresponding cost) must exceed the native capability of the manager or else the task is not going to be done as well as it should.  The manager needs to make sure the members of the team either are effective, eliminated, or bypassed.

Put another way, the good manager is focusing on the best way to accomplish the task, recognizing that some of them may be incompetent to varying degrees. Sometimes the manager simply doesn't have someone on their team who can even accomplish a crucial part of the task. 

The successful manager therefore has to know when to put their energy on improving the performance of their team, when to eliminate a member of the team, and when to simply do part of the task directly in order to get it done. 

Next, we'll talk about how to get those tasks done and how to take things to the next step.