Create Inevitable Progress article

Moving into management from an individual contributor role can be somewhat disorienting. You come from a position where progress is fairly well defined. You have peers, you have mentors, and you move into management where it is usually under supported. Your peer network isn't developed and you might not be sure how to develop it. You may not have mentors, and you aren't sure what success really looks like. In addition, you have this manager title which carries with it a lot of expectations, both externally and your own expectations of what a manager is. Those that make it through this initial period and are successful get to a point where what they're doing is good enough. And as a manager, it's understandable that that's kind of a natural time to take a breath. You've worked hard, you've kind of slogged your way through, and things seem to be going okay. But in my opinion, good enough is one of the most dangerous places to be. Everybody else around that manager is happy that things are being taken care of and that things are good enough. So they assume the manager's happy and the manager is for a little bit. But they don't really know what success looks like. They don't know what they can accomplish and they start just settling into the status quo. They languish. Eventually that hurts their feelings about the job, their performance, and even impacts other employees. Managers need a way to understand how to progress in their role. They need to be supported when they move into management, as they're learning and practicing and probably making mistakes. But then they also need to understand what does it mean to be good at your job? What does it mean to be great at your job? And beyond that, how do you make an impact? How do you do something special in the organization? In this article that I wrote for Alaska Business, it introduces a framework that is part of my Management Mastery module. And this is just an introduction, but an outline is a way that a manager can create a development plan that then they can use to talk to their boss about outline actions and steps they want to take. And once they do that, they can then use those same tools and do that for their employees. They can create development plans for their employees, make that the basis for discussions and coaching, and use that to improve engagement among their team. That will help drive increased retention and improve the recruiting efforts as well. The article is just an introduction to this concept. I hope to be doing more videos and content about the topic, but if you'd like to talk about it, I would love to have a discussion. So hit me up. Enjoy the article. Thank you.