By: Ben Yi, Grade 10
Oftentimes, being a good employee doesn’t always translate to being a good manager. The skills that go into making someone excel as an individual contributor (mostly within a team as opposed to working on something by themselves), such as focus, discipline, or personal efficiency, are not the same skills that are required to lead others effectively. This disconnect is one of the most common and costly mistakes that organizations make. The same pattern appears very clearly in sports. The best player on the team doesn’t always make the best coach. A player’s instincts and physical ability are deeply personal and live solely within the player who spent the time to develop them. Translating those instincts into something teachable and repeatable and then communicating them to people with different abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and learning styles, is entirely different. Being great at something doesn’t automatically mean that you know how to teach it to others. Most of the time, employees who are promoted too quickly have trouble delegating and scaling tasks through others. They have problems funneling their experience and hard work through others to help them to become more efficient. Strong individual workers often succeed by tuning out distractions and focusing solely on their work and efficiency. Managers, on the other hand, must do the opposite. They must tune into other people’s problems and working styles and find ways to help them learn and improve. While an employee is only responsible for the work they complete, a manager is responsible for work they didn’t do themselves. They inherit the successes and failures of an entire team, receiving credit where due but also blame when they don’t. For a lot of people, going from listening to orders to giving them out, it is a daunting task. The shift in responsibility requires a completely different mindset, one that is sometimes hard for people to develop.
