Living Within Your Limitations
When you become a manager, your work life is no longer about you. It's about your bosses and your employees — what they need and want, and how you respond. Subordinates and superiors alike might expect you to do things like the following:
Know your own job inside and out
Know the jobs of your employees inside and out
Know what everyone needs, and provide it for them
Maintain both motivation and discipline
Enjoy coming to work in the morning more than you like leaving in the evening
Are you feeling a little bit like part of your job description reads, “Walk on water”? Don't worry — it's fine if your awkward sidestroke is what gets you to shore. It's okay to have limitations. Everyone does. You can't do everything. And you can't be everything to everyone. No one can. What matters more is that you know your limits and can compensate for them.
Even with all of the trends in management style, people are still people. It remains a central role of every manager to understand what makes people tick and to know how to use that understanding to motivate and manage them. This is your job, in addition to the myriad other responsibilities your job description specifies.
If you're not a good teacher, or computer whiz, or designer, find out who is and have them do the job. You just need to be able to recognize when it's necessary. You have your talents, and other people have theirs. Your superiors, as well as other managers in your company, might be good resources. And if you need to improve in an area, there's guaranteed to be a book that can help.
The size of your company can also come into play here. If you work for a small company, odds are that you wear many hats and have a broad base of functions and responsibilities. A small operations manager often worries about the details of day-to-day activities, from filling the copy machine's paper trays in the morning to brainstorming new products in the afternoon. If you're a manager in a large corporation, you likely wear a single hat and have a comparably singular focus in your work. A corporate manager might know little about what goes on beyond the boundaries of his or her department.
Whether your company is large or small, its human needs remain the same. What motivates people remains the same. And in the end, the role of managers remains the same. You are the face of your organization, both to employees and to customers.
