Mistakes - Intro

Being a first time manager is exciting, but all first time managers face many challenges. I created this book to help new managers learn the rope, and I’ve tried to include a wide variety of the problems you will face. The table of contents will give you an idea of the topics we will discuss. Many sections of this book are written for departmental managers within businesses, but there is much information that will also help small business managers.

We start with “Congratulations, You’re a Manager – Now What?” That’s how I felt the first time I was put in charge of a business. I was excited and scared at the same time. This section includes tips to help you get your feet wet in the management pool. I’ll share ideas about what to expect and how to handle the initial problems and concerns you will encounter. When you become a manager, you will need to establish your authority. There are good and bad ways to do this. We’ll review these.

Once you are settled in, we will work on honing your skills, including your leadership and management skills. Then we will review ways to improve your effectiveness. There are things you can do to make your job easier while still gaining the respect of your boss and your employees. You may also be in a situation where you will need to interact with people in other departments. We’ll talk about ways to make these situations better.

Your employees are a key to your success. As a manager you will probably be called on to interview, hire, and train new employees. The chance for you to handpick the people you will work with each day is a gift, and I’ll help you learn to make effective choices and how to keep these people on your team. Once you hire and train the people you want, then you will need to manage them properly. Handling your people wrong will undo the good you did when you chose them. I’ll share tips on how to deal with employees and how to maintain a good working relationship. Employees will respond better if you create a positive work environment. No one likes to work in a negative and dreary environment.

In all the years I’ve been a manager, I found three major topics that all managers need to understand and implement properly. These include communication, delegation, and motivation. We’ll review how to communicate with, delegate to, and motivate your employees. This will be crucial to your success as a manager and in maintaining the hand picked team that you assembled.

You will encounter many issues and situations when you deal with various employees. No two employees are alike and no two situations are exactly the same. We’ll delve into how employees differ and how to handle those differences.

Periodically you will need to evaluate your employees. There are negative and positive ways to handle this. I’ll share these tips with you. Sometimes employees don’t do their jobs in a way that is beneficial for themselves or for the company. In these cases, you need to discipline them, and occasionally, you have to fire them. This is one of the hardest things a manager must do, and we’ll review ways to handle these situations. You will need to conduct effective meetings with your team. And last, we’ll discuss how to effectively schedule and reward employees.

Each chapter and section of this book will begin by giving you information about each subject, and then I will include various common mistakes that managers can make. Each mistake will have an explanation on what should be done differently. Reading this book will not eliminate all possible mistakes, but it will arm you with the information to fix many of the problems that you'll face.

On a final note, you may wonder why I feel qualified to write this book or why you should listen to anything I have to say on the matter. I’m proud to share my background with you. At the age of nineteen I managed my first business. I was the office manager in a land surveying office. It was a busy office and we maintained a steady stream of work. Soon after that, I got a job managing three busy departments in a large department store. This was a totally different atmosphere from managing an office, but it required many of the same skills along with an assortment of new abilities. A couple of years later I became an assistant manager and worked my way up to managing a franchise pizza business. It was a challenge, but I learned a lot about effective hiring and personnel management.

My next position was to manage and re-organize a video store. This gave me the opportunity to acquire new skills and to use some of the other skills I had already learned. From here, I went to work at a local hospital and was promoted to a department manager. I spent a lot of time working with people in other departments, and learned how to work together more effectively. After that, I was hired to for a position in a chain furniture store where I worked with several different departments. A couple of years later, I managed a chiropractic office. The doctor had recently bought the practice where he worked and this job utilized all of the skills I had acquired over the years. I also used all of my experience when I went to work with my brother in his contracting business. Now I work for myself, helping other business owners to streamline their businesses and to run them more effectively.

I hope that gives you an idea of the experience and background that I bring to this book and to you. Through the course of this book, I will also bring you real examples of things I tried that worked and I’ll share things that didn’t work. An effective manager can learn from the good things and the bad things.

Let’s turn the page and dive into the world of management.