5 Rules for Managers

There are few goals in life that can be achieved on your own. Success usually requires a team of people, and how you manage and lead them will dictate your success. Here are five key rules if you manage a team or seek to one day.

1.    The best managers are made, not born. Never stop learning from your experiences, successes and failures.

I often hear from people who say they lack skills to manage others. The fact of the matter is, great leaders are made, not born.

To be a great manager, you need to be enthusiastic, collaborative, direct, honest and lead by example. But most importantly, you must learn from your own failures and always look for ways to improve yourself, your teams, and your organization. If evaluated and discussed, failures can help hone personal skills and change the course of any organization to make it more successful in the future. The key is you need everyone on your team to commit to seeing failures in this way and that starts with you.

2.    Never get complacent. Organizations, especially, are more fragile than you think.

Managers have the dual role of overseeing day to day functions of a team, but also considering the bigger picture strategy of an organization. Do not forget about the latter. No company, no matter how successful, is immune from competition. You must always seek ways to reinvent and improve your organization before being forced to do so.

3.    Hire 10s whenever you can. They are proactive about sensing problems, designing solutions, and taking a business in new directions.

 I’m not a natural manager, but I have improved over the years and have also been deliberate about surrounding myself with others with different skill sets.

You don’t need to do it all on your own. We all have strengths and weaknesses in some of the traits I described above. A trick to leading effectively is to find fantastic people, “10s out of 10,” and provide them with the opportunity to be the best at what they do.

Over time you will know a 10 when you see one. Eights do what you tell them. Nines are great at executing and developing good strategies. You can build a good team with 9s. But people who are 10s sense problems, design solutions and take the business in new directions without being told to do so. Seek them out and bring them on board to help your team thrive.

 4.    Every business is a closed, integrated system with a set of distinct but interrelated parts. Know how all the parts of your organization work with one another.

The best managers know not just about how their team works, but also how they fit with all the others in a business. These connections are critical for success. If you are making cars, you have to have good research so you’ll know what people want to buy; good design, engineering, and manufacturing so you can produce a good product; effective programs to recruit and train your labor force; good marketing so you can create desire for what you are making; and good salespeople who know how to close deals. An organization will perform at its best when managers understand these connections and lead their teams with the bigger picture in mind.

5.    No one person, however smart, can solve every problem. But an army of smart people talking openly with one another will.

Every Monday at Blackstone starts the same way: all of our teams gather together at 8:30am to discuss the firm’s activities and share perspectives about what we are seeing and hearing around the world. It is a way for everyone – from senior partners to junior analysts – to gather insights, stay informed of what is happening in different areas of the firm, and check their thinking about the macro environment.

This collaborative approach is also applied in the investment processes of each of our businesses. Everyone involved in a deal, regardless of seniority, is expected to voice their opinion and participate so that we can incorporate all perspectives into our analysis.

By working together, debating opposing points of view and applying our collective wisdom and experience to evaluate an investment’s risks, we are able to examine our deals more objectively.

The best managed teams are ones that have open and honest communication, where nobody feels uncomfortable to offer their input. You can read more about what it takes to build a strong company culture here.