Your Own Skin
In the end, it’s hard enough being yourself in life and even harder to try to be someone else. While it can make good personal and business sense to tinker at the behavioral margins—to turn down your personal volume, to turn up your volume, to add some B, to adjust the A—ultimately you have to develop a managerial style that works for you. A style that feels right, feels natural, fits comfortably with the person you are.
As we’ve seen throughout these pages, management is nothing if not a many-faceted discipline. There are many skills to learn, many hats to wear. It took years, for instance, for Phil Jackson to learn that it could be effective to coach basketball players—professional basketball players, of all people, who would have thought!—with his own odd blend of Zen and Lakota Sioux philosophy. And for Warren Buffett to become comfortable enough in his own commonsense and considerable financial acumen to give the people who surrounded him the space they needed to make the best decisions. Neither of these accomplished managers was born with these managerial abilities; they developed and evolved them over time. Like all outstanding managers, they found unique styles that suited their unique personalities. Most of all they were comfortable with who they were, comfortable enough to be creative while still being true to their own instincts.
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I knew early on, given the basic components of my personality, that I’d never be successful in management trying to be a highly authoritative, command-and-control kind of boss. It wasn’t me and never would be. But I found over time that I could combine a quieter, lower-key Type B approach with a healthy respect for goals, deadlines, and an insistence on receiving high-quality work in a timely manner. Did I make mistakes along the way? Only a few thousand, as I’ve noted before. But did I ultimately find a management style, a suit of clothes that suited my personality . . . and was I able to do some good work for my company? In the long run I believe I did.
It all comes down to being comfortable in your own management skin. Don’t for a nanosecond assume that because you’re a Type B kind of person—more reserved, laid-back, even introverted—management is a game you can’t play. What matters is how you choose to play it.
Once you gain that confidence in your own abilities—the confidence that enables you to take the difficult actions you need to but to do so in a way that’s neither demeaning nor ineffectual and is true to your own managerial DNA—you’ll have the basic tools you’ll need to move forward.
My hope is these tools will serve you well for many years—in an important, demanding, and rewarding profession.