I managed technical teams for 33 years. First as VP of consulting at two different companies, then as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services for Trader Joe’s. Nobody handed me a manual. I learned what works and what doesn’t by getting it wrong, watching other managers get it wrong, and occasionally getting it right.
People who have never managed anything write most management advice. They recycle the same HR talking points about “fostering collaboration” and “building trust” without telling you what that looks like on a Monday morning when half your team is feuding and your boss wants a status report by noon. For more, see the secret to motivating teams.
What I learned:
Be the Manager
From the podcast
Terry Fossum separates the title from the job in one sentence on Leaders and Their Stories:
That’s a figurehead at best, a boss, a taskmaster, and not a leader. A true leader develops other leaders.The test isn’t how well the team runs while you’re watching. It’s what they become.
The single most important thing a new manager needs to understand is that you have to BE the manager instead of a buddy or a peer who got promoted.
That means you lead your team, you support them, you get the resources they need to do their jobs, and you set the boundaries. You must have authority or you can’t manage effectively. You must be the boss. Temper that with kindness and understanding, but never to the detriment of your company. For more, see how to deal with a micromanager and What Happens to a Residential Agent’s Business One, Three, and Five Years After a Book.
Too many new managers try to stay “one of the gang.” That ends the moment you have to write someone up or deny a raise. Make the transition cleanly. Be fair, be decent, but be the manager.
Correct Problems Immediately
The first time is the easiest time to correct behavior. If you let it slide, you’ve set a precedent. The more you let things slide, the worse it’ll get.
I watched managers let small issues fester for months because they didn’t want confrontation. By the time they finally addressed the problem, it had infected the whole team. One conversation on day one would have fixed it. Six months later, it took formal write-ups, team meetings, and two people quitting. It took me until late in my career to see it, but one rotten apple can ruin the whole barrel. Correct fast or fire fast, whichever way you want to put it. The rotten apple needs to go. A scene in a TV series I watched put it well. Someone asks whether you give an employee a second chance after catching them stealing $10, and the answer is no, because the first time you catch somebody stealing is rarely the first time they stole. The same goes for stealing time, or for the person who clocks in late all the time.
The first person I ever fired taught me this the hard way. She’d take long lunches and come back with her productivity way down, acting goofy and doing strange things. Other employees didn’t want to tattle, but she was alarming everybody. When I talked to her, she got hostile and said everything was fine, so I left it alone and hoped she’d gotten the message. It got worse. The lunches stretched to two hours.
Finally my boss told me she was coming back from lunch drunk. I don’t drink, I was young, and I didn’t hang out with drunk people, so I hadn’t recognized the signs. Once I knew, it was obvious. HR told me to build a long paper trail because we could get sued, so I wrote everything up. She quit on the same day I would have fired her.
When you see something wrong, handle it that day. Not next week. Not at the annual review. Today.
Manage in All Directions
Your job covers more than the people who report to you. You manage your boss, your peers, and your team. You’re an information filter. You decide what goes up, what goes down, and what stays at your level.
Your boss doesn’t need every detail of every problem your team encounters. Your team doesn’t need every political battle happening above them. Part of your job is shielding each group from unnecessary noise so they can focus on their work.
At Trader Joe’s, I learned this fast. The people on the floor needed clear direction and the right tools. The executives needed accurate status and honest assessments. My peers needed cooperation. The manager who can’t work in all three directions at the same time is going to struggle.
Reward Producers, Stop Rescuing Non-Producers
This is the single biggest mistake I watched new managers make for three decades: spending 80% of their time and energy trying to fix the one person who won’t produce, while the people who carry the team get nothing but more work.
Stop. Reward the people who produce. Give them your attention, your resources, your advocacy. The person who refuses to do the job after clear expectations and fair correction isn’t your project. That person is a termination waiting to happen.
I spent years early in my career trying to save people who didn’t want to be saved. Every hour I spent coaching someone who had no intention of changing was an hour stolen from the people who deserved my attention.
Praise in Public, Correct in Private
Never embarrass someone in front of their peers. If a team member needs correction, pull them into your office. Close the door. Have the conversation. Be direct, be specific, and be done.
When someone does good work, say it where other people can hear. An email to the team, a mention in a meeting, a word to your boss about who made it happen. Public recognition costs you nothing and builds loyalty that no bonus can match.
Set the Standard by Living It
Your team watches everything you do. If you show up late, they’ll show up late. If you cut corners, they’ll cut corners. If you gossip about other departments, so will they.
Be punctual. Be prepared. Be professional. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. I kept my workspace organized, my meetings on time, and my commitments honored. The teams that worked for me did the same because they saw it.
Keep Personal Problems Out of the Office
Everyone has bad days. Managers don’t get to show them. Your team needs stability from you. If you’re going through something, handle it outside of work. The moment your personal issues start affecting your team, you’ve failed at the most basic part of the job.
I kept a strict line between work and home. When I left the office, the work stayed there. That kept my life balanced, and a balanced manager is a lot easier to work for.
This goes both ways. Your team members have personal lives that sometimes go sideways. Be understanding. Give reasonable flexibility. But the work still has to get done, and the rest of the team shouldn’t have to carry someone indefinitely because of personal problems.
How Often Should Managers Hold Meetings?
Every meeting that could have been an email is time stolen from productive work. Before you schedule a meeting, ask yourself: does this require a real-time conversation, or can I send a message?
When you do hold meetings, have an agenda. Start on time. End on time. Document the decisions and send them to everyone who attended. If someone doesn’t need to be there, don’t invite them.
I inherited teams that spent half their week in meetings and wondered why nothing got done. Cut the meetings, and suddenly people had time to do their actual jobs. I was more ruthless than that. If one of my people was more than a few minutes late, I locked them out of the meeting, and they didn’t like it. My meetings were very short. I’ve fired a number of people, and my only regret is that I waited too long. You can fix a lack of knowledge, but you usually can’t fix somebody’s attitude or the way they approach work. I hired my share of wrong people too, back when I was a young and naive beginning manager. As I got better, I hired better. With consultants I ended up hiring a lot of ex-military people, special forces and Marines among them, and they did the job on budget and on time with no problems. For a while I used one whole consulting company staffed with veterans. I once had a programmer who kept lying to me about a script behind a major failure, even after I’d read the code myself. I sent him to look inside our closet and asked if he saw any crosses. He didn’t, so I told him he wasn’t going to be crucified, and this was his last chance to tell me the truth. He told me. Email chains are part of that filter. I used to edit everybody who wasn’t needed off the CC line, and then my boss would come chew me out. Those were the people he wanted copied to cover his ass. Do what you say. Larry Winget, an author and speaker, wrote a great book called People Are Idiots and I Can Prove It! He says if you make a promise, you need to keep it. If you promise someone a consequence, you damn well better follow through, because you promised it.
Shopify tried this at company scale. In January 2023, chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian told employees the company was deleting every recurring meeting with more than two people from their calendars, according to CNN. Staff were told to wait two weeks before adding any back. The company also brought back meeting-free Wednesdays and pushed meetings of 50 or more people into one window on Thursdays.
CNN reported that the purge wiped out nearly 10,000 calendar events and more than 76,500 hours of meetings. Later that year, Shopify’s CFO, Jeff Hoffmeister, told Fortune about an internal calculator that pegged a 30-minute meeting with three employees at $700 to $1,600.
Somebody finally put a price tag on it, and it was overdue. Most managers would never approve a $1,600 expense without a reason, yet they’ll book that meeting every week without a second thought.
Fight for Your People
Your team needs to know you’ll go to bat for them. That means fighting for fair compensation, reasonable workloads, proper equipment, and recognition from above.
If your best performer deserves a raise, make the case to your boss. If an unreasonable deadline is going to burn out your team, push back. If someone above you is wrong about your team’s capabilities, correct them with facts.
The managers I respected most were the ones who stood between their teams and the dysfunction above them. The ones I despised were the ones who passed every bad decision down without question and blamed their team when things went wrong.
Do Not Pass Your Problems Upward
Your boss hired you to handle problems. If you bring every issue up the chain without a proposed solution, you’re not managing. You’re forwarding emails with extra steps.
Solve what you can at your level. When you do need to escalate, come with the problem, your analysis, and your recommended solution. Your boss should be choosing between options you’ve already thought through.
Build Consensus, Make Decisions
Get input from your team. Listen to their expertise. Consider their perspectives. Then make the decision yourself and own it.
Consensus-building isn’t the same as decision-by-committee. Your team needs to know their input matters, but they also need to know that someone is in charge. If a decision goes wrong, that’s on you.
Career Development is Your Job
Every person on your team should have a clear path forward. If they don’t, you haven’t done your job. Talk to each person about where they want to go. Help them build the skills to get there. Advocate for their promotions when they’ve earned them.
The best teams I ever managed were the ones where people knew I was invested in their growth. I keep the rest of this together in my Leadership Hub. They worked harder, stayed longer, and produced better results because they knew I’d recognize and reward the effort.
Base Reviews on Production and Behavior
Annual reviews should never be a surprise. If you’ve been managing correctly, every issue has already been addressed in real time. The review is a summary.
Evaluate people on what they produce and how they behave. Not on whether you like them personally. Not on how much they socialize. Not on whether they agree with you. Production and professional behavior. That’s the standard.
Document Everything
Every significant conversation. Every performance issue. Every agreement. Every deviation from policy. Write it down, date it, and keep it.
Documentation saved me more times than I can count. When someone challenged a termination, I had the paper trail. When my own boss tried to rewrite history about what we’d agreed upon, I had the emails. When someone claimed nobody told them about a policy, I had the signed acknowledgment. I’ve been on the other end of that. One boss kept me analyzing a purchase and writing reports about it, over and over. After a huge analysis of something that cost somewhere under $20K, she just said, “It’s your responsibility. Make it happen.” I tended to be more confident than I should have been, so sometimes I decided too fast because I thought I knew the answer. I’ve seen the opposite too. Get chewed out 15 times in a row for the wrong call, or just not the call the boss wanted, and you stop wanting to make any damn decision at all. Don’t agonize over it for a month. Just make the damn decision. You know whether the person did a good job or not, and if you don’t, you’re not a manager. I’ve hired a couple of interns, and I was never satisfied with them, because they didn’t know what they were doing. A lot of interns don’t get paid, and I found that unfair whenever I used them. You get what you pay for.
I was once dropped into an industrial equipment company that had moved into control systems. It had three projects about ten years overdue and millions over budget, and nobody told me I’d been brought in as the white knight. The young man running the project was the problem. My boss kept asking how to fix it, and I kept saying he had to go. His boss said he couldn’t fire him. I said good, make him work for me. Then I fired him and finished the project in six months.
I had an employee who was a real pain in the ass with a bad attitude, and I was heading down the firing route. Then I realized he was producing. What the hell did I care about his attitude? He was doing his job. So I had one talk with him about correcting a few things, and he fixed about half of them. That was fine. I adjusted my own approach, and as far as I know, he’s still there.
Documentation saved me with another employee who wasn’t doing his job. I had an outside auditor check his work, and the auditor asked whether he was even logging into the system, because there was no evidence of it. I gave him an oral warning, then a written one. As I was about to give him a second written warning, in the middle of an open office with people all around us, he started screaming at me and took a swing.
It didn’t connect, which was lucky. He was a big guy, and a full haymaker would have knocked me on my ass. He stopped and looked almost sheepish. I told him, “Thank you. You just made it very easy for me.” A couple of my people escorted him out, I packed up his stuff, and we told him not to come back. We mailed him his check.
If it’s not documented, it didn’t happen.
Learn to Delegate
You can’t do everything yourself, and trying will burn you out while stunting your team’s development. Identify what only you can do, and delegate everything else.
Delegation isn’t dumping work on people. It means assigning tasks with clear expectations, providing the authority and resources to complete them, and then getting out of the way. Check results. If the outcome is right, the process is their business.
25 Rules That Work
After 33 years, these are the ones that held up:
- Be the manager. Not a buddy, not a peer. The manager.
- Correct problems on the first occurrence. Waiting makes everything worse.
- Keep your personal life out of the office. Your team needs stability from you.
- Set the standard through your own behavior. They’re always watching.
- Build consensus with your team, then make the final decision yourself.
- Solve problems at your level. Don’t pass them up without a solution attached.
- Manage in all directions: your boss, your peers, and your team.
- Praise in public. Correct in private. No exceptions.
- Maintain work-life balance for yourself and your team. Burnout destroys productivity.
- Focus on output. Every team member should know their role and expected production.
- Base reviews on production and behavior, not personality or politics.
- Build clear career paths for your people and fight for their advancement.
- Fight for fair compensation. Your team knows if you’re advocating for them or not.
- Minimize meetings. If it can be an email, send an email.
- Document every meeting decision and distribute it to attendees.
- Invest in training and development. Skills stagnation kills motivation.
- Keep communication direct and honest. Say what you mean.
- Recognize good work publicly and immediately. Don’t wait for the annual review.
- Lead by example in everything. Punctuality, preparation, professionalism.
- Build real collaboration, not forced team-building exercises.
- Encourage problem-solving, not problem-reporting.
- Build relationships with other departments. You’ll need allies.
- Learn to read the room. Emotional intelligence isn’t optional.
- Listen more than you talk. Your team knows things you don’t.
- Reward producers. Stop rescuing non-producers. This is the one that matters most.
What should new managers avoid?
The flip side is just as important. These are the patterns I watched destroy managers and teams over three decades.
Micromanaging kills initiative. If you hired competent people, let them work. Checking every detail signals that you don’t trust them, and they’ll stop trying to earn trust that’s never given.
Avoiding conflict guarantees bigger conflict later. The conversation you don’t want to have today becomes the crisis you can’t avoid next month.
Taking credit for your team’s work is the fastest way to lose a team. Give credit where it belongs. Your boss will figure out that you’re the one building a team that produces.
Playing favorites poisons everything. The moment your team sees different rules for different people, you’ve lost credibility that takes years to rebuild.
Making decisions without input from the people who have to execute them is arrogant and usually wrong. You don’t have all the information. Your team does.
Blaming your team for failures that happened on your watch is cowardice. You’re the manager. The results, good and bad, belong to you.
What should a new manager do first?
Management is difficult, but it’s simple. Support your people. Set clear standards. Correct problems immediately. Reward production. Document everything. Fight for your team. Make decisions and own them.
I made every mistake on this list at some point during 33 years. What separates a good manager from a bad one is learning from the mistakes fast enough that your team doesn’t pay the price for them twice. Someone on my team once pissed off the fire inspector while we were building a computer room, and the inspector refused to expedite our permit. I went over his head to his manager’s manager and paid a fee in the thousands to get it done. I took the blame myself instead of pointing at the employee, and it still came up on my own review. I was pissed about that.
What I kept trying to get across to every manager who worked for me is that keeping an incompetent person costs more than firing them. Everyone else watches. If one person can come back from lunch drunk, so can they. Your group rises or falls to the competence of its least competent person. You get what you tolerate, and I got quicker about firing people once I understood that.
I wrote three books on management and workplace survival based on my 33 years of corporate experience:
Street Smart Management Wisdom,
My Boss Is Insane: And Other Workplace Nightmares, and
The Ethical Workplace: A Survival Guide for Modern Professionals
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