The Cycle of Self-Improvement starts with your behaviour. We start by doing our best to act in the same way that we’d imagine a great manager would act. We research, and we apply what we’ve learned to what we do and how we do it. Or, to put it another way, we fake it until we make it. This is difficult at first, because we’re trying to be something that we don’t necessarily understand … The good news is that this is something you used to do all the time. You’ve just forgotten how to do it.
How Children Start To Learn
When we were small children, starting at pre-school age, we all played a lot. We used our imaginations to play games like Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, and many others. We sure had a lot of fun, and we also learned a lot from it. Children play games as a way to explore new ideas and roles. The more they explore, the more sophisticated their ideas in this area become. Eventually, those who remember their dreams and work hard go on to play these roles for real as adults. But most of us do not.
As we grow older we get a bit more serious, and playing games (especially in the workplace) no longer seems appropriate to us. We exchange learning through playing for learning through doing, with a sprinkling of training and education thrown in for good measure. Most of our doing as adults comes through holding down a job to pay the bills, and it becomes the environment where we find most of our opportunities to learn.
On the job training has become something of a dirty term in the workplace today, because it’s normally a euphemism for being thrown in at the deep end with insufficient / non-existent help and support. The reason for the lack of support is simply that many employers and managers don’t know how to instruct and coach their staff. It is something that they have no interest in, and are not comfortable doing. But they should have such an interest, because the irony is that the workplace is the best place to learn work-related skills - provided we are able to play before we have to be. ((I will talk about the relative merits of training courses in a later article.))
All play starts with behaviours - actions and attitudes that we show to others (externalise). The game we are playing is how to manage yourself. If you’re on your own, where can you look for help and advice?
Turn To The Coach
In this field, the work of John C. Wooden stands head and shoulders above everything else. John C. Wooden was the head coach of the UCLA college basketball team from 1948 to 1975, where he not only consistently created great teams, but where he consistently got the very best out of his charges. His outstanding work was honoured in 1999 when Coach Wooden was voted ‘Coach of the 20th Century’ by ESPN, and by the award of the President Medal of Freedom (the USA’s highest civilian honour) in 2003.
During his time in basketball, Coach Wooden developed his Pyramid of Success. It has three key ingredients that make it a great approach for learning how to manage yourself.
It is principle-based, not practice based - created decades before management books and coaching understood this fundamental approach. Practices come and go, but the right principles are timeless, and can last for thousands of years.
It has stood the test of time. Created over 50 years ago, it was honed through Coach Wooden’s teaching to his college students and teams. His students took the Pyramid out into the wider world of sports and business, and made it the foundation of their success too. And since 2003, the management community at large has been able to learn about and apply Coach Wooden’s work through his book Wooden on Leadership.
It is about you, not about others. In a time of short-termism, downsizing, offshoring and the threat of recession, it can be no surprise that management writing has come to focus so strongly on the here and now. All sports coaches are in one of the ultimate results-driven environment; they need immediate results far more than your average manager does, and they have to contend with a turnover of staff (in their case, players) that your average manager never has to face. But Coach Wooden and his record of coaching at UCLA proved beyond all doubt that, even in such an environment, both short-term results and long-term success comes from within, from internal work that at first seems both unnecessary and without immediate reward. Success comes from within you the manager, and it must be instilled within each and every member of your team.
The Pyramid of Success
Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success contains 15 separate building blocks for you to work on. Along the bottom are the five foundation blocks that leadership is build upon.
Industriousness: Success travels in the company of very hard work. There is no trick, no easy way.
Friendship: Strive to build a team filled with camaraderie and respect: comrades-in-arms.
Loyalty: Be true to yourself. Be true to those you lead.
Co-operation: Have utmost concern for what’s right rather than who’s right.
Enthusiasm: Your energy and enjoyment, drive and dedication will stimulate and greatly inspire others.
If the foundation layer is about your heart, then the next layer is all about using your head.
Self-control: Control of your organisation begins with control of yourself. Be disciplined.
Alertness: Constantly be aware and observing. Always seek to improve yourself and the team.
Initiative: Make a decision! Failure to act is often the biggest failure of all.
Intentness: Stay the course. When thwarted try again; harder, smarter. Persevere relentlessly.
At the heart of the Pyramid is the formula for teaching success that Coach Wooden learned from Coach Ward Lambert during his playing career.
Condition: Ability may get you to the top, but character keeps you there - mental, moral and physical.
Skill: What a leader learns after you’ve learned it all is what counts most of all.
Team Spirit: The star of the team is the team. ’We’ supersedes ’me’.
The first twelve blocks together create a platform for success, but to elevate yourself to achieve your full potential, you have to master the cornerstones of true greatness.
Poise: Be yourself. Don’t be thrown off by events whether good or bad.
Confidence: The strongest steel is well-founded self-belief. It is earned, not given.
Finally, we reach the very pinnacle of the Pyramid of Success - the behaviour that the rest of the pyramid supports:
Competitive Greatness: Perform at your best when your best is required. Your best is required each day.
There is far more to Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success than I can do justice to in this article, and I would much rather you learned more about it from Coach Wooden himself. You can download a printable version of the Pyramid, and learn more about each of these building blocks from Coach Wooden’s website. His 2003 book, Wooden on Leadership, expands on them still further, and is essential reading for anyone looking to follow the Invest In Loss philosophy.
Coach Wooden used it to build a great basketball coach; you can use it to build a great manager - yourself.
Learning to manage yourself is essential if you want to manage others. You affect other people at all four levels of interaction within your company or organisation:
At the personal level, you’re a role model for everyone around you. People will look at you and take the message that it is okay for them to act that way too.
At the inter-personal level, you’re directly influencing how other people feel about working with you. The way you treat other people directly affects the results you’ll obtain from them.
At the managerial level, you set the tone for how the whole department will function. Your choices here will determine how well the department functions - especially when (not if) you’re not around.
At the organisational level, your individual actions determine whether your department adds value at all, and whether it’s because of you … or despite you.
But how do you go about improving your self-management?
Start Here - Acceptance
You must start by accepting a simple truth: you can learn to consciously choose your responses to whatever happens in your life. You are not just responsible for your choices - you are able to choose your responses (response-able).
It can be very difficult for new and inexperienced managers to come to see - and especially to accept - just how much influence they really do have, and it always comes down to how much you choose your responses. Most people do want to be lead, and they do want to be governed, but it must come from someone they can look up to in one way or another. If you are not cultivating yourself through self-improvement, through learning to choose your responses, then what could there possibly be about you for anyone to look up to? If they don’t look up to you, at best they follow you reluctantly - if at all.
You are not your past achievements, and if you do not learn to choose your responses, it’s down to luck and circumstance as to whether or not you’ll be able to be successful again in the future. It won’t be down to you!
The Cycle Of Self Improvement
There is no substitute for hard work. A person who works hard, and who learns to self-improve, is far more likely to achieve their full potential than someone who always finds things easy. There is a deeper understanding that comes from hard work and applied brain power than what comes from applied brain power alone. This is something I’ll come back to in a later article.
With self-improvement, we’re all about stacking the odds in our favour. We want to reduce both luck and chance as factors in our success, and instead we want to increase ourselves as the factor in our success. Hard work without direction, organisation and supervision relies entirely on both luck and chance.
The Cycle of Self Improvement contains five key areas where you will find the self-improvement that you are looking for:
Behaviours are where we start. We start by doing our best to act in the same way that we’d imagine a great manager would act. We research, and we apply what we’ve learned to what we do and how we do it. Or, to put it another way, we fake it until we make it. This is difficult at first, because we’re trying to be something that we don’t necessarily understand …
Paradigms is where we start to gain an understanding. By changing our behaviours, and learning what works and what doesn’t, we start to change the way we think about ourselves and our work. If we make a conscious effort to study whatever we are trying to improve at, we will create new models in our heads of how this particular area works.
Maturity is where our actions (our behaviours) and our thinking (our paradigms) are refined in the crucible of experience. As we mature in our role, there’s less faking it, less mistakes, and more genuine ability. Our understanding matures, and we move beyond mere knowledge to the point where we ‘get it’.
Character is where our maturity of understanding feeds back and we internalise what until now have been entirely outward changes. We start conquering our demons (and those of our parents that we’ve inherited), and move towards a freedom of operation, of living, that most people never achieve. We become more rounded as people as we smooth off corners and jagged edges.
Eventually, we go beyond ourselves and learn to Invest in Loss. It isn’t about us any more; it’s about what is and what needs to be. We learn to accept reality and work with things instead of against them. We move from trying to be masters of the universe to being its servant, which is where life suddenly gets a whole lot easier :)
Finally, we start again with behaviours; we apply our new understanding all over again, continuing round the cycle once more. No matter how good any of us get, we’re all capable of further improvement, of further polishing. There are always deeper levels of understanding available to us, but only if we put the hard work in first and master the outer levels.
These are the five steps of the cycle of self improvement, and we’ll look at each one in turn over the next five articles here on the Invest In Loss blog.
We Have An Infinite Capacity To Improve
There is always more room for improvement, which is why the cycle goes back to the beginning and starts again. Our aim is to smooth things out, to bring every aspect of ourselves up to the same level, and then to raise that level over and over again. It was this strategy - to find and improve 100 things by 1% - which is widely attributed to bringing World Cup success to the England Rugby Union team in 2003.
A word of caution though: entropy (and specifically the principle of use it or lose it) applies just as much to self-improvement as to any other aspect of life. If you stop trying to improve, you will inevitably regress over time. This isn’t work you can do during study days, or through a few days on a management training course. There are no secrets, and there are no quick wins. You have to integrate this work into your life, and into every single day that you can.
If you can achieve that, you’ve done the hardest work of all.
No matter how many people you have to manage, there is always one more person who you can never afford to overlook: yourself. Many managers focus exclusively on what they manage, believing that this is where results and success come from. It simply isn’t true.
The roots of success always come from within. Your team, your organisation, the results it produces and the service you provide to your customers; ultimately all of these will be a reflection of you and the way that you conduct yourself. You can only control and influence others through your own actions; if you don’t have control over yourself, how can you possible extend that control to others successfully and sustainably?
The very first step in managing using the Invest In Loss philosophy is to learn to manage yourself.
Know Thyself
Someone once told me that you can’t manage what you can’t understand, and I believe that this advice applies equally well when it comes to managing yourself. How can you manage yourself if you don’t understand yourself?
How well do you really know yourself?
The place to start is to simply become aware of your behaviour, and how close it does (or does not) relate to the reality all around you. How many lies and half-truths do you have to tell to get through each day? How often do you have to bluff and bluster your way through situations and relationships with your colleagues, your friends, and your families? When do you stand and get stuck in, and when do you run and avoid? When do you say one thing, but do another? Why are you having to do so? What are the reasons behind you behaving in this way?
At first, simply focus on becoming aware of when you act like this, and on determining why. Don’t do anything in particular at this stage to change your behaviour, just focus on improving your self-awareness day by day. If you don’t already, start keeping a daily diary where you can capture your observations and thoughts. Look in particular at the boundaries of your world - your interactions with other people, both professional and personal. Seek out where friction occurs, where things are not smooth and plain sailing, and where emotions (especially yours) regularly boil over. Focus entirely on what you are doing.
You Reap What You Sow
When you’ve been building up your observations for some time (I’d recommend at least a month, and preferably several months), the next step is to see how far you are (or aren’t) disjointed from the reality around you.
Continue to capture the observations of your own behaviour, but now start to add in observations about your external world. How well is that latest project going? What are your customers grumbling about this week? If you are already a manager, what are your staff saying about you? What are they saying about your decisions? How are the family? What should be happening, but isn’t?
Over time, you will start to gain a new awareness: how your lies and half-truths, how your blustering and bluffing, and how your avoidance and your fear are related to the problems you encounter in the external world. Your world - your reality - is a reflection of your behaviour, and more importantly of the way that you choose to behave. You must stick with this exercise for as long as it takes for the penny to drop. As a manager, your team or organisation will also be a reflection of the way that you choose to behave.
You cannot sustainably manage others until you can manage yourself.
Deep Roots Are Hidden From View
Deep and meaningful change comes from internal work. It is not for the faint of heart. It requires a commitment and dedication that you probably haven’t known before. You must give up being both selfish and selfless, and become self-ful instead. You must become completely focused on observing and altering your own state of being. You don’t need to worry about changing other people at this time. If you make the right changes, other people will respond to you in the right way if they can.
This is work that never ends, which is precisely why it produces truly sustainable results.
Working from the principle of cause and effect, start to look at whatever comes before the situations where your behaviour is disconnected from reality. In any situation, you behave the way you do because of the state you are in when you enter the situation. Focus on understanding what your entry state currently is for your each of your situations, and add those observations to your ongoing diary. Seek to understand your starting point each and every time, and on how these starting points result in the behaviours that we’re seeking to change.
For each of these starting points, take a piece of blank paper, and write down what you wish they were. It might be helpful to create a mind map for each starting point. Work out what you need to ensure that you wouldn’t need to lie, to bluff, to avoid; what you need to be confident, on top of things, and to able to act. Don’t feel constrained in any way by your current circumstances. Don’t compromise on your list.
Once you’ve worked out what each starting point should be, go back further, and look at what you are currently doing immediately before you get to each of these places. This is where you need to make changes. Your starting points are actually the end points of previous activities, or of activities that are currently missing altogether! Fix these activities, and everything else will follow.
This is what we mean when we talk about beginning with the end in mind.
The Never-Ending Circle
The work presented here never ends. The end of one thing is always the beginning of the next, even if the connections aren’t immediately apparent. Thankfully, we’re all capable of an infinite amount of polishing up, of improvement over time - as long as we take responsibility for our own progress. By choosing your behaviour, and establishing your entry state by ensuring the previous activities end the way you need them to, over time you’ll grow the degree of management you have over yourself … and ultimately over others.
I just want to re-assure readers that Invest In Loss isn’t dead or abandoned!
Since setting up this blog to explore what it means to be a good manager, there have been a couple of large changes in my life that have had to take priority.
I’ve found myself having to step forward and take on my instructor’s Tai Chi class. My instructor, and the art of Tai Chi, have both had a major influence on the Invest In Loss philosophy that I’ve been working on. I owe him a debt that can never be repaid; the least I can do is to continue his class until he returns. (If you’d like to know how the class is going, I’ve setup a Tai Chi blog over on my personal website).
I’ve also been working away a lot in recent months. During the summer, I stepped into a project part way through, and applied this philosophy to ensure that we got the Explore website out the door on time and on budget. On the back of that success, I’ve been seconded to the Ordnance Survey to help them in a small way on the next set of features for Explore. The secondment leaves me hundreds of miles away from home, and from my library of books that I’m relying on whilst I explore the ‘You’ aspect of being a manager.
The secondment should come to an end before Easter, and then I hope to be back blogging about good management and the Invest In Loss philosophy.
The next article is slowly taking shape. It will be called ‘First Steps As A Manager: Managing One’, and it will draw heavily on John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success. John Wooden was an American college basketball coach during the 20th century, and a key part of his amazing record at UCLA was a 16-part approach to how you should manage yourself. I’ve worked for some great managers over the years, and I’ve had my fair share of outright awful ones too. All the great managers had fantastic self-management, and they lead by example. Definitely “do as I do, not as I say” people, if you know what I mean. And, equally, all the terrible managers had terrible self-management, with their personal problems always spilling out into the way they managed others.
If you’ve never heard of Wooden, and you’d like to become a better management, pick yourself up a copy of ‘Wooden on leadership’. His work has been an inspiration to countless people over the last thirty+ years; if the Invest In Loss philosophy is for you, then his work should be a great inspiration for you too.
Growing up in Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980’s, one of the maxims I learned in school at the time was that the British disease is bad management. Things are definitely improving in that area, but there will always be room for improvement. There’s plenty of advice out there on how to be a good manager (including the Invest In Loss blog). But why is it important to be a good manager in the first place?
If You Do Not Change Direction, You Might End Up Where You’re Heading
One of the classic signs of bad management is the lack of a clear direction, with an organisation or group just drifting along on a day to day basis. Bad managers walk around all day underneath their own personal cloud - a personal cloud of “dunno”. They are judgemental instead of decisive, and about the only thing consistent about their decisions is their inability to chart a clear course forward. Bad managers have to spend more time micro-managing staff, because they have not established clarity of purpose and trust with their staff. Short term successes are quickly stopped in their tracks by the lack of longer-term planning and preparation. Both employees and customers drift into the organisation and then drift away again, unable to establish long-term partnerships with the company and its management - with the big cloud of “dunno”.
Direction provides the meaning to any relationship, whether it’s between managers and staff, suppliers and customers, or organisations and their competitors. Staff who understand and believe in your group’s goals will work towards those goals, because they understand how their efforts directly contribute to the overall success. Both trust and boundaries are established between manager and staff member. Suppliers who understand the real needs of a customer (especially the Unspoken Question) will do a better job of satisfying that customer, and of securing more business from them in the future. Organisations who mindfully position their services and goods in relation to their competitors are more likely to uncover blue oceans (new markets with little competition) instead of being forced into a war of attrition with their competitors.
It Takes Ten Hands To Score A Basket
As a manager, it’s your job to put the right people in the right place to get the best results possible. It is your people who ultimately get the job done - not you nor your fellow managers. Without their success, you have no success of your own. Their success comes from blending the right mix of personalities, approaches, attitudes and skills with the right number of people ready to take on the work at the right time. (A similar premise holds true for partner organisations, and assets such as machinery and other tools).
Organisation provides the route from start to finish, no matter how large or small the task. Men (and women!), materials and momentum are all managed through good organisation. Good organisation drives efficiency, through economy of resources and effort versus cost. Many crises can be completely prevented, because good organisation delivers robustness. Groups that have good organisation suffer less surprises and less disruption, and over time become more deterministic and predictable in their performance, making it easier for senior management to make their plans with accuracy and confidence.
Arms And Legs Are Like Wayward Children
There are always two aspects to any piece of work - that which is in plain sight, and that which hidden underneath. The plain sight stuff is what everyone concentrates on. It’s in the limelight, which is where the glory is. The plain sight stuff is the functional requirements (or the front-office) - the checkboxes that need to be ticked to say “Yes, it does what my business needs it to do.” But behind it, often hidden away from view, are the non-functional requirements (or the back-office). These are everything that’s needed to make the functional requirements possible. They are also the longer-term responsibilities, limitations, and costs that are incurred by any piece of work. When experienced managers talk about “the devil is in the detail”, this is what they are referring to. All too often, in today’s superficial world, the pressure is to deliver the functional requirements with little or no regard to the non-functional requirements and longer-term implications. Is it no wonder, then, that bad management often expresses surprise and anger at a later point in time when this approach comes back to haunt the organisation?
Supervision provides self-awareness for the group or organisation, by directing attention beyond the superficial and into the substantial. It can be a flash-light, casting a pool of weak light across a wide area, or it can be as focused as a laser beam, burning away the b.s. to reveal a specific truth buried underneath. Well-supervised groups eventually become self-supervising groups, because the understanding of what is required, why it is required, and what long-term implications are acceptable gets transferred from the manager to the workforce.
The First Principles Of Management
Direction, organisation, and supervision are the first principles of management. All management activity, without fail, involves one or more of these principles. Together they bring meaning, the route from start to finish and self-awareness to any group or organisation that adopts the Invest In Loss
Albert Einstein famously said that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again whilst expecting different results.” Do you recognise that behaviour in your co-workers, your staff, or (heaven forbid) your own boss? It seems so obviously a stupid way to behave, and yet we all do it. And we do it without realising. But why? My teacher Robert Earl Taylor says that it’s because we all “look in the Old Book for our answers,” instead of looking at the here and now, and the evidence before us.
The Lure Of The Old Book
We all like the Old Book. We all feel good about it, because it’s like going into an exam with all the answers we believe we need. It contains all the answers we’ve ever learned, and all the instructions that we’ve done well by. That includes all the times where we didn’t really know what we were doing, but we somehow got through it anyway. ((I suspect that these have a prominent place in the Old Book, at least for some people!))
The Old Book contains the sum of all our experience to date, and like any investment, we want to protect it for all that it’s worth. I’m here to tell you that it isn’t worth shit, and that you should protect it accordingly.
The Prison We Build For Ourselves
Take a moment to make a mental list of all of those things you know in your own heart that you’re not managing very well. If you’re having trouble forming a list, reflect on the idea that there’s no such thing as a bad worker, only a bad manager, and then give it another go. Encompass everything that isn’t going well amongst everyone who works under you, or under the people who work for you. ((It’s always worth asking your staff to create this list for you, and then comparing notes.))
It’s not a very pleasant list, is it? Following the instructions from the Old Book is how all of this came to be. You, me, everyone - we’re all doing it. We fall back on almost-automatic behaviours, which just means that we try to apply a solution from the Old Book to whatever it is that is demanding our attention. We’re particularly susceptible to doing this when we’re under pressure ((I deliberately choose the word ‘pressure’ instead of stress. Folks who are genuinely under stress - or distress to use the full word! - typically can’t function at all, and are in urgent need of a different type of assistance)) - what most people would call reverting to type.
The more we do it - the more we get stuck in our ways - the less real choice we make. This behaviour creates a prison as real as any physical gaol. It’s not just a prison for us. As managers, we’re busy ushering into our prison everyone and everything that we manage, and everyone that they manage too.
You Don’t Need That Safety Blanket
Examine the language used to describe your local organisational hierarchy. The chances are that it describes your subordinates as being below you, and your boss as being above you. The very language we use to define our relationships with our colleagues re-enforces the belief many of us hold deep down that we’ve become managers and leaders because we’re somehow better than the people below us ((The next time you find yourself thinking like this, just bear in mind that People are promoted to their level of incompetence!)).
It also creates a similar image in those we manage.
This belief creates a very real psychological need for us to live up to this mental image. We cling to the Old Book like a child clinging to a safety blanket, because the Old Book is how we got into this position. The more insecure we feel, the tighter the grip. The tighter the grip, the more we strangle ourselves and everyone and everything that we manage.
Letting go requires an act of courage.
You need to have the courage to live in the now. Suspend preconceptions. Reserve judgement. Observe what is actually there. Listen for the unspoken question. Be aware of your assumptions, and test them before relying on them. Perceive the possibilities open to you. Understand the depths. Stop seeing only the shallows.
This is one of those areas where you can’t change the outside unless you change the inside first. Changing yourself is hard, and it is scary. We confuse ourselves with the Old Book, and we protect the Old Book mistakenly believing that we protect ourselves. Find the courage to see yourself as distinct from the Old Book, and everything will follow from there.
There’s a wealth of resources to immerse yourself in; many different ways to reach the same goal. Studying the ancient philosophies such as Taoism ((Also spelt Daoism)) and Zen Buddhism ((Particularly shoshin - Beginner’s Mind)) might work for you. The writings of Eckhart Tolle might suit you if you prefer a contemporary writer in this area. If you need a more physical approach, activities that cultivate meditation - such as yoga and many of the martial arts - are worthy of your investigation.
Management and leadership are two sides of the very same coin. They can be roles or skills taken by different people in a project, but just as equally they can be skills exhibited by a single individual. Every project needs both skill sets in order to be successful, and every project requires the right people in those roles to make the whole organisation work.
Different Approaches
The fundamental difference between the two is that you lead people, and you manage things.
Leaders direct those who look to them; leaders get people organised; and leaders supervise the people doing the work. Leadership is an inter-personal discipline with the leader often leading by example. By contrast, managers are concerned with where things are going, how we get there, and how well we’re doing at getting there, within a framework of considerations such as capability, capacity and many more. Management is a cross-discipline skill with the manager leading through others.
And that begs the question - can you be a manager without being a leader?
The Practical Blend
There are practical limits to the number of people that a single person can “lead”, even in this age of the Internet. There are only so many hours in the day, and that ultimately limits the amount of personal contact we can have with those we lead. Without that personal contact, leaders can still accrue a large following, but this comes at the cost of diluting the richness and quality of whatever activity the leader is about.
In order to scale up, leaders have to become managers too.
They have to add that extra dimension of ensuring that their vision comes to pass. They have to learn to achieve their goals through the efforts of others. Their leadership skills have to adapt to leading other leaders, starting with themselves. In return, they are able to tackle larger goals that are simply beyond the reach of small groups. They also gain a much greater chance of achieving long-term success in their ventures, because they shift from carrying the weight of the entire organisation on their shoulders to building an organisation that is more likely to be self-sustaining. In the process, they create the space necessary for others to also make a difference - and this is at the heart of the concept of being greater than the mere sum of the parts.
Which One Are You?
Whilst both management and leadership are skills that can be learned, we all have natural tendencies that bias both our competence and our comfort towards either management or leadership roles. A little pressure is a great thing; it really reveals both character and competence. Under pressure, the natural leader will most likely revert to type, as will the natural manager.
Gain self-awareness, and under pressure you will rule your actions; your actions will not rule you. And that’s the purpose behind this blog; to help you become a good manager whether or not you are a natural manager.
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