Monday Morning Leadership: 8 Mentoring Sessions You Can't Afford to Miss
David Cottrell
If you’re thinking this doesn’t seem like my style, you’re right. But I recently got promoted at work to be the direct manager of some people I was formerly on a team with. I’m excited about it, but also nervous about doing a good job of it. Although I’ve managed people before (in college activities for instance), this is the first time I’ve done it in the working world, and somehow it seems totally different. It was odd–I didn’t feel nervous about it until it was publicly announced, even though my boss and I had been talking about the plan for a while.
It’s a good kind of nervousness, though, as in feeling like a challenge that I’ll have to work hard to get good at. So I was happy when my boss came by and, sort of on the sly, gave me this book to read. “It’s kind of cheesy,” he said, “but it’s been useful for me.” (My boss has also only recently been put into a management role, and I think he’s very good at it–in the same way that I would like to be good at it.)
I read the book in an afternoon on a couple of subway rides–it’s about 80 easy pages long. It’s written at a very basic level, which under some circumstances I might have found insulting, but in this case I think I feel very at ease in the role of beginner. It is not a well-written book, and indeed some (many, perhaps) of the lessons seemed cheesy. But I have a feeling some of them will stay with me and prove useful.