Ready to manage

"How do we know if people are ready to be managers?"

It's a classic scaling problem. The moment has hit where you need to add a management layer between your front line and your senior team. You'd like to promote some people already in your team who you know and trust. After all, a lot of what a manager does is mediate between the big picture of the organisation and a person's work, so having someone who you know really gets the big picture, and who has done that work, seems like a great choice. But is everyone made to be a manager? What should you look out for?

I would suggest looking at two things:

1. Self-awareness in relationships

A lot of management is about relating. Relationships are not weird or mysterious, we do them all the time by being ourselves. There are all kinds of ways of 'being ourselves', and they can all lead to good relationships. There is not 'one way'. But a good manager needs to be ready to deliberately work on their relationship. The test is: can they introduce the 'meta-conversation'? The meta-conversation is when we flip from the topic we were talking about to talking about how the conversation itself is going. If you trust someone to do that when it's needed, they are ready to start learning more through trial and error.

2. Willing to sit through the pain of coach leadership

This one is not for everyone. Can they tolerate watching other people do things worse than them, and rather than rush in to fix the problem, have the patience to teach the other person to solve the problem for themselves? This takes maybe twice as long, and involves looking at something be a mess. For many people, this is intolerably frustrating. But some people have this patience, or appear ready to learn it.

Bit of a wordy post in the end, but I would navigate by these two tips. If you trust someone to be able to do both of these things, then they are ready to be a manger.