Live Life With No Regrets!

After revising most of the One-Minute Manager series of books that I read like 15 years ago and taking my Project Management course, I realized this: That I've been learning management skills from untrained managers for most of my working life! (A lot of management skills and habits I learnt were actually bad habits.) And this makes me the bigger idiot!

(To digress, this shows why Maxwell's law of reproduction works. Work for great leaders, you learn their good habits and behaviour. Work for idiots, you learn their bad habits and behaviour. Therefore you have to make a conscious effort not to copy bad habits if you happen to work for one.)

The reason is that management is an entirely new skill altogether. Just because a person is good at doing his work, doesn't mean he is a good manager.

Unfortunately, the current world corporate and training environment doesn't teach or prepare people to be managers. It is a people skill. Programming or teaching are individual skills. But managing is the skill at handling people. It is getting things done through other people.

We teach technical skils in school. We teach business policies or systems. But do we teach people to learn how to build rapport? To be decisive? To be humble? To be understanding? To be wise? Is there a course for this in school?

If communication skills are 90% of a manager's work, why isn't stressed? Of course, the technical and hard skills are important.

In light of this, and since it is difficult for a single person to change a system I come to this conclusion: Learn the hard skills, the accounting, the finance, the programming, the organizational and systems training in school.

But make sure you develop your leadership, communication and soft skills. These are far more important in life, if it means 80% of your succes depends on this then make it your priority. You can always delegate accounting, programming, and secretarial work to far more competent people. But you cannot delegate responsibility and leadership.