How to be the manager you never had

How to be the manager you never had

And how it drives performance

Most people don’t become managers because they’re great at leading people. They become managers because they were great at doing the work.

You crush your role, hit every deadline, and one day someone says, “You should lead the team. Here’s a promotion.”

Or maybe you set out on your own, start a business, and when you finally make that first hire—you’re floundering, with no idea how to actually manage someone.

Suddenly, you’ve gone from being a top performer to being responsible for other people’s performance—with no training, no manual, and no real examples of what “good management” looks like.

It’s one of the most common—and quietly cruel—career transitions out there. We assume that knowing how to lead is intuitive, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Most of us learned everything we know about management by simply surviving it. Few people spend their careers working under great managers. More often, they’ve spent them under unclear, reactive, or burned-out leaders—so it’s no wonder “good management” feels like a mystery.

And while you may have missed out on the professional development that comes from working under strong leadership, it’s still your responsibility to break the cycle.

The good news? Management isn’t innate. It’s a practice. And anyone can learn to lead—with curiosity, consistency, and a little humility.

Because here’s the scoop: your job as a manager is to drive performance. Not in a rigid, metrics-only way, but in the truest sense of the word—helping a group of humans consistently deliver exceptional results.

That’s the work. And it’s a hell of a lot more human than most people realize.