Manager Readiness Insights

When I was first promoted into a management role, nobody sat me down and explained what had changed. There was no conversation about what the role actually required. No discussion of what success now meant. No acknowledgment that I had stepped into something fundamentally different from anything I had done before. There was an announcement. A new title. And an assumption that I would figure it out. I did figure it out. Eventually. But the path was longer and harder than it ne

For several years, I owned a complex management estimate for accrued revenue. I had built the model. I had presented it to the company's executives and walked the external auditors through it. It had been reviewed, tested, and accepted. It worked. It was mine in the way that finance models become yours when you have built them from the ground up and defended them in rooms where people ask hard questions. Every month, our financial analyst updated it. She was responsible for e

You've worked alongside these people for years. You know their work styles, their quirks, which ones thrive under pressure, and which ones go quiet. You've covered for each other, complained about deadlines together, and celebrated the same wins. Now you're their manager. And almost immediately, something feels off. It's not that the work is harder. It's that the rules of everything have shifted underneath you: the relationship, the role, and the way you measure yourself. And

And How To Fix It I am going to tell you something about myself that did not become fully clear until I retired. Throughout my career, I was the consummate overextended manager. I led finance and HR teams while continuing to carry a significant portion of my own technical work. In an entrepreneurial environment where even the president did not have an administrative assistant, I regularly absorbed responsibilities that were not mine to hold. I kept activities as the team grew

Early in my career, I managed someone who had been in his role for a long time and made sure I knew it. He was experienced, knowledgeable, and quietly resistant. Every time I got close to the way he worked, he pushed back, not loudly, but in the subtle way that experienced people do when they have outlasted several managers and expect to outlast another. I told myself I was being respectful. He knew his job. He did not need me hovering. I was giving him the independence that