Go to the gym

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Why are there no weight loss articles in Fortune magazine? Being in shape is an important aspect of managing your career. It is well documented that if you’re good looking you’ll make more money than an average-looking person doing the same job you are. This is because we are hard-wired to want to help good-looking people, and we’re hard-wired to want to be around them.

Before you start complaining that paying more money to people who go to the gym is totally superficial, consider this: You will perform better at the office on days you workout. Daily exercise improves your interpersonal skills and problem-solving skills.

“The results are striking,” said Jim McKenna, of Leeds Metropolitan University. “We weren't expecting such a strong improvement on productivity linked to exercising. Even more impressive was that these people already thought they were good at their jobs. Participants tracked mood, and as expected, exercising enhanced their mood. However, boosts in productivity were over-and-above the mood effects; it's the exercise”?or attitude related to exercise”?that affects productivity.”

Most CEOs exercise regularly, so you could say that regular exercise is important to getting that top job. But I have a feeling that most people who exercise do not want to be a CEO. The thing to take away from this research, though, is that the same self-discipline that gets you to regular workouts is the self-discipline that allows you to execute plans for your career and your life.

So go to the gym regularly. Or get some kind of exercise. Book it in your calendar the same way you’d book an office meeting. That time slot is done. Full. Non-negotiable. You are committed.

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Is your email out of control? Test yourself

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You cannot be organized if your email is not organized. If you cannot keep up with your email then you scream to people that you’re overwhelmed with your job, and maybe your life (depending on how many personal emails you get and do not answer). Don’t tell me you get too much email. Everyone gets too much email. You still need to be able to be effective with it.
Here are three things people do that they shouldn’t. If you do any of these, you need to get a better grip on your email.

1. Do you keep emails in your in box to remind you to do something?

Get a real to do list. Your email box is not a to-do list. Well for some of you maybe it is, but it shouldn’t be. Your to-do list is very important. It determines what you will get done in your life. It determines what your priorities are and what you value. So why would you let someone else dictate your to do list?

If your in box is your to do list then you have so little control over that list that you don’t even add your own stuff. (Unless you are sending yourself emails, which is so dysfunctional that I’m not even going to make it an item in this list.) If you aren’t writing the items on your to do list then you are not controlling your own destiny. Really. It’s that serious. So write a note to yourself on your to do list about each email, prioritize it, and then delete.

2. Does it take you more than forty-eight hours to respond to people you love?

This is lame. It’s actually lame in response to anyone, but especially for people you love. A twenty-four hour response is the expectation of email. If you can’t meet it don’t use it. It’s like this: If you respond to an IM message ten hours later, you’re not using IM, you’re using email. And if you respond six days later to an email you may as well write a letter.

If people you love send you stupid emails that you don’t want to have to respond to, then tell the person directly. This is a much more effective way to operate than to passive-aggressively take a long time to respond.

3. Do you avoid scrolling through your in box because you know it’s filled with emails you don’t want to have to answer?

Try resorting. I usually sort by date sent. But I accidentally sorted by sender, and I noticed that I owed 80% of my responses to five people and 20% to 20 people. Just knowing that situation encouraged me to get moving. Instead of thinking of the task as thirty emails, I could think of it as five people. Much easier.

Here’s a game I play with myself: No reading unless I’m deleting. Either I respond right away or file the email and add it to my to do list. That’s a lot of work —filing and adding. So I tended to answer quickly and right away. And the more practice I got answering email quickly the easier it became.

I noticed that the primary cause for not answering an email right away was not that I wasn’t sure what to say, it was that I thought I needed to say something amazing. But really emails need to be timely more than they need to be amazing.

Something else I noticed. It’s fine to respond with a quickie one sentence when you are getting back to someone right away. But if you wait five days to respond, and then send a quickie sentence, you look like a procrastinator.

On the other hand, if you spend all day answering your email obsessively, you also scream to people that you’re losing your mind. Because if you answer all mail as soon as it comes in you’re not doing your real job — unless your only job is to answer email.

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Buzzword of the year: Authenticity

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I went on a business trip and I took my mom. When I got there it was apparent that I was underdressed, so we went shopping. I planned on getting rid of my ratty sneakers, but my mom said I needed a suit. Somehow a civilized disagreement turned into an all-out fight with me and my mom using clothing as a metaphor for everything we hate about each other. At some point, I said under my breath, “I’m going to write about this is my column.”

My mom said, “Don’t do that! You’ll make yourself look bad! People will know you didn’t dress properly.”

But here it is. For the world to know. I dressed inappropriately. I ended up buying expensive shoes that I already had at home. And I fought with my mom in public.

Surely you’ve had a moment of failing — maybe similar to this one. Don’t be so quick to hide it from people, because the new battleground in business is authenticity and you’d better get some.

The Harvard Business Review (paid) reports this month that authenticity is the trait that uniquely defines great leaders. Generation Y values authenticity above almost everything else, according to a report from demographic research firm Yankelovich Partners. You can already see that playing itself out in advertising, where glitz is over. The power of authenticity hit me recently, when I had a speaking engagement at the Richard Ivey School of Business in Ontario, Canada. In a post-event survey, the reaction of the students was very positive; though ironically it wasn’t the content of the speech they cited so much as the authenticity.

Research about authenticity by Rob Goffee, professor at the London Business School, explains that authenticity is largely defined by what other people see in you. So you have a good amount of control over how authentic you appear.

Being genuine means you don’t do or say things you don’t believe. Everyone understands this in principle. But people who are authentic are fanatical about it. The other quality you need for authenticity is to be able to relate to a lot of types of people — otherwise you’ll have a career where you only connect to people who are like you.

The first thing, then, is to know who you are and what you believe. Then you need to have confidence that being your true self will get you where you want to go. But you don’t need to tell everyone everything about yourself every time. It would be impossible, in fact, and any attempt at that would sound insane. You need to manage your authenticity by revealing the parts of you that will best connect with your audience.

Success at work requires working well with many different types people while remaining true to yourself. You do not have to agree with everything your boss does, for example. But you have to speak about his policies in ways that remain true to your own values — which means not lying but not undermining your boss, either. People who think this task is impossible are actually people who are too lazy to be authentic.

The real work of authenticity is not just knowing yourself, but taking the time to understand where other people are coming from and to respect them for that. If you have a fur coat and you love skiing, talk to the animal rights activist about skiing and talk to the seventy-year-old heiress about fur coats. In both cases you can be authentic without putting the other person off.

A lot of people think that the business world is not compatible with authenticity. However the exact opposite is true; those who stand out as leaders have a notable authenticity. People are attracted to authenticity because the alternative is so disappointing: Cliched relationships, empty promises and conversation with no soul. What people value in business is what they value in all of life, and that is a real connection. People need to see a genuine part of you and they need to relate to it. So in many cases, a wardrobe mishap or fight with your mom is a good opening.

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You need an entourage

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Anyone who owns a small business knows that if you don't reinvest in the business, the business dies. So why do so many people fail to reinvest in themselves? Even if you work for someone else, you are running a small business: The business of you. You provide a product and you have to market it and make it better and better so you earn more and more money.

If you put all your money into savings, you are like a business with a lot of cash on hand but only small potential for growth. If you spend all your money on fun and toys you're like a business run by executives who throw lavish parties they can't afford and drive the business into the ground. Your aim should be to save a little (for security's sake) splurge a little (for sanity's sake) and reinvest most of your money back into your business: You.

You the careerist that is. Here's what the business of you needs in order to expand: Headcount. Here's what you need in ascending order, depending on how much money you have.

Childcare — pay the highest rate in your neighborhood
The first thing you need to grow a career is to clear your head so you can think. If you have to worry about childcare, if you have to argue with your spouse during the workday about who is picking up the kid, you are spending time in ways that don't grow your business. Pay enough money for a caregiver who can do the job without you micromanaging.

Personal Assistant – $10 an hour
Take a look at your to do list. Think about how long each task will take, and whether or not a person can do it for $10 an hour. Your time is worth more than $10 an hour. So why are you doing tasks that you can pay $10 to have done? Don't tell me you need to do everything. If it's not integral to your life plan, you don't need to be doing it. Examples: Shopping, dry cleaning pickup, waiting for a plumber.

A therapist – $125 per session, but try to get your insurance company to pay
I'm a big fan of therapy. The more you know about yourself the more likely you are to make good choices for your career. Also, the problems you have outside the office usually pop up inside the office also. So go to a therapist to deal with non-work problems and your work life will improve.

Speaking coach – $300 per session
Charisma can make up for a lot of shortfalls, and good speaking skills gives you more charisma. You probably think you're charismatic already, but there's always room for improvement. People believe that a charismatic person is better to work with than a non-charismatic person. You'll also learn to speak in a way that makes people trust you and believe in your judgment. Scary, but true: This is teachable.

Publicist — $1000 month
Most people who are quoted by the press actually have publicists. For a CEOs publicists are a packaged deal with the job: A PR department. For other executives, and even up-and-coming managers, a publicist is someone you hire. Your name will get into the world and you will have an easeier time getting a new job, easier time making sales, and more justifcation for asking for higher wages. I know, you're thinking, how crass. But it's the way the world works. If you want to be noticed in your field, hire a publicist.

I bet you're saying, “Penelope is out of her mind. This is so much money.” But if you reinvest 20% of your cash back into your career, which is, in fact, very low as small businesses go, then this list starts looking reasonable. I have hired each of these people at some point in my career, and the return on investment for each easily exceeded cash output. Really.

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6 most violated resume writing rules

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This is the problem with the resume-writing world: Everyone thinks they're an exception to the rules. Everyone thinks they can pick and choose which rules are important. Do not do this. Until you work in human resources and personally scan 300 resumes a day, you are in no position to discard rules of resume writing. Here are the six most violated rules among the resumes that people send to me to review:

1. One page. The job of a resume is to get you an interview, not get you a job. A hiring manager has to sift through a pile of resumes to figure out which person to interview. Each resume gets about a ten-second look. If you think you need a longer resume, give someone one page of your resume and have them look at it for ten seconds. Ask them what they remember; it won't be much. They are not going to remember any more information in ten seconds if you give them two pages to look at; ten seconds is ten seconds.

2. Ditch the line about references on request. It's implied. Of course, if someone wants a reference, you will give one. No one presumes that you will not. So when you write that you will provide a reference you seem to not understand how the game is played. (Bonus tip: If you have an excellent reference, like a CEO of a Fortune 500 company who vacations with your Mom, have the reference call before you even go to the interview. Sets the tone for the employer to think you are amazing.)

3. Tread lightly on the personal interests line. Your personal interests are not there to make you look interesting. They are there to get you an interview. Every line on your resume is there to get you an interview. So only list personal interests that reveal a quality that will help you meet the employer's needs. If you are in sports marketing, then by all means, list that you kayak. If you were an Olympic athlete, put it down because it shows focus and achievement. If you are a mediocre hobbyist, leave it off. Personal interests that don't make you stand out as an achiever do not help you. And personal interests that are weird make you look weird and you don't know if your interviewer likes weird or not, so leave weird off the resume.

4. You must list achievements, not job duties. Anyone can do a job. Achievements show you did the job well. Past performance is the best indicator of future performance, so don't let someone think you just showed up for your last job and didn't do it well. It's very hard to see your achievements from the trenches; you might think you did not have achievements because your boss doesn't ask you to do achievements, your boss asks you to do tasks and projects. But you need to recognize that you do not see achievements and ask for help to see them. A resume coach, or even a friend, can help you to see them more clearly.

5. Don't be a designer unless you are. If you have more than three fonts on your resume and you're not a designer, I can promise you that you've botched the layout. If design were easy, no one would get paid for it. Recognize your strengths and keep design elements to the bare minimum. And please, save Photoshop for cards to your mom: Just because you know how to use the shading tools doesn't mean you know how to use them well.

6. List your most recent job first. Chronological order is only a good idea if you are looking to get hired to go back in time. Otherwise you look like you're bucking resume writing convention in order to hide something, which you probably are, but you have to do it with a better sleight of hand than that.

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Big goals require big plans: Losing weight after pregnancy

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The fact that good-looking people make more money is truer for women than men, which is especially unfair, because it is very hard to not gain a million pounds when you're pregnant; I gained sixty. This column is about my two-month quest to lose that weight, and the importance of making a plan for any large and difficult goal.

I happen to have a book deal that is predicated on a grand speaking tour, and the speaking tour is predicated on me not being overweight, and the bookings need to start in September. If I can't line up speaking gigs, I can't promote my book, and if I don't promote my book, it won't sell and I won't get another contract. So losing weight became my number one job.

This is what my agent said three days after I delivered the baby: “I don't mean to be harsh, but you look terrible.”

This is what my husband said two days later: “The stress of you having to lose so much weight so quickly will kill us both. Give back the money you got for the book.”

I did what works best for me when I'm in trouble: I wrote lists and schedules. I wrote a schedule for two visits a day to the gym and lists for what I would do there each day. I wrote a schedule for the babysitter, who had to come to the gym with me because the baby is not on a bottle. (Yes, I got off the treadmill to breastfeed.) I wrote a list of food — what to carry with me each day, and when to go food shopping, because if I'm starving in front of a bakery with no food in my backpack I'll do the bakery. Finally, I scheduled the date I would go to my agent's office to show her that I lost the weight.

It worked. I lost twenty pounds just by delivering the baby. But I lost forty pounds in two months. People are shocked to see me, and they ask me how I did it. First I tell them that if you had to lose weight in order to earn a living, you'd be able to do it, too. I gained insight into ultra-thin Hollywood; not being able to work if you take too many bites of cookie gives you a lot of self-discipline.

But the bigger factor here is that I came up with a schedule and followed it. And I realized that I could do this for any goal, not just weight loss.

Many times we are scared that we won't meet our most important goals. Decision points cater this fear— they open the door to self-doubt and inaction. But meticulous scheduling up front, and a belief in your planning abilities will allow you to relax; tune out your worries and just follow the plan.

You can't take this advice for everything in life. But making an extremely detailed, well-thought-out schedule to support an ambitious plan, is a great way to ensure you meet your most important goals — the ones that will make or break your career.

Some of you will realize that your career really is stalling because your weight makes you look out of control. For most of you, though, weight loss will not be all that important. But you might have other goals that you worry you won't achieve, such as switching careers, going back to school, or growing your consulting business.

Make a commitment to yourself and to your most important goals by reserving time in your day and space in your head to meet your goals. Great ambitions are not met haphazardly, and many times are not met at all. You can increase your odds tremendously by planning meticulously.

My next step is finding good places to book my speaking tour. I had been worried that this would not work out. But now I feel more confident. I am making a plan, as detailed as I made for the weight loss. And I know if I execute the plan on a daily basis, I will end up with a speaking tour that I like.

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Organize your days around your goals

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Periodically, a college student sends an email to me asking if he or she can interview me for a term paper. I always say yes, and I always learn something about my work by answering student questions about my career.

Invariably, within the list of questions, there's a stumper. This week, the stumper was, “How do you spend a typical day as a journalist?”

I started to answer the question. But every time I started to write an answer, what I wrote sounded terrible. The truth is that I never set out to be a journalist, so I have never been particularly organized about my typical day.

I was a marketing executive who happened to have landed a column. The pay for the column was paltry compared to my corporate salary, and consequently, I devoted a paltry amount of time to the column —writing it during a sales meeting, on my way to an office picnic, or at my in-laws' home in between shopping and dinner.

Part of the reason for my cavalier attitude toward making time for the column is that initially I did not understand that having a nationally distributed column is a big deal; I was in a business where a big deal equaled a big paycheck. But after I left corporate life for a writer's life, I started to understand how lucky I was. So you'd think, after three years of writing full-time I'd have developed good work habits as a writer, but I haven't.

This is surprising to me because in my corporate life I had very good work habits. As I was climbing the corporate ladder, it became clear that you can only move up as fast as you can adjust your work habits to the next rung. For example, the move into management means you have to learn to finish your own work in a way that leaves room for you to help other people with their work. You have to restructure your workday to make other people a priority.

There were times when I distinctly remember changing my workday in order to accommodate a new position. For example, my boss told me that if I could offload all of my responsibilities as a marketing and software production manager, then I could take seed money from the company and start my own company. I realized that the faster I could reorganize my workload and delegate, the faster I could move on with my career. So I did that. Within weeks, and astounded even my boss with my speed.

Achieving long-term goals and tactical plans all depends on work habits. You need to devote time to getting short-term projects done, to managing long-term projects, and to thinking both strategically and creatively.

Each time I've wanted to make headway in my career the fastest path has been by changing how I spend my days; if nothing else, how you organize your days is one of the few things most people can really control.

Which brings me back to explaining to the college student about my work habits. It was untenable to have to confess to her how I was working. I was such a bad role model because in terms of organizing my day, I still treated my writing career like it's a sideshow.

I could accomplish so much more if I would get more organized. So I worked backwards. I said to myself, what kind of answer would I expect from a successful career columnist as to how she manages her days to make her career bloom?

I think it would look like time slots:
Writing email
Working on projects with deadlines
Thinking about long-term projects
Publicity
Networking

Once I started having days like this, there was immediate change — I accomplished more than usual and the work was higher quality because my days were organized around particular long and short-term goals.

I ended up confessing to the student that I started with sloppy work habits. But I told her that I was reforming myself. I told her about my carefully scheduled days and strategically organized weeks. Then I sat down to write this column, which I now have a special time each week to write. And I was just a little bit more calm than usual because having a detailed work plan in hand makes me feel like I really am going to meet the goals I have for myself.

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Managing during labor

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I had my baby last week. I'm tired. But not too tired to recognize management issues during labor. There were three management styles among the people who were in the delivery room:

1. The micromanager
That was me, ordering my husband around, even when the contractions were so strong that I couldn't stand up. I'm sure he wanted to tell me to shut up, but no sane man snaps at his wife when she's in labor.

One of the more harsh insurance company rules is that when you are in labor you have to call to get permission to go to the hospital. So my husband started dialing the phone. I said, “You are not going to be on the phone when I'm having the baby. Put down the phone.”

My husband said we wouldn't be covered and we would have the most expensive baby in New York City.

But no one at the insurance company was answering the phone, so I started troubleshooting: “Dial zero. Say you’re a doctor.”

My husband said, “I think I can handle calling the insurance company. You just worry about the baby.”

At some point I stopped harassing my husband, but not by choice, only because the contractions were too strong.

2. The coach
About half way through labor I asked for an epidural. At that point, I was in severe pain. For those of you who have not had an epidural, it is a totally magic infusion of drugs that numbs the body from the insane pain of pregnancy without knocking you out. The epidural is not small peanuts. It’s a shot into the spine. I had to sit very still, while coping with sharp pains, and I had to sign a form that acknowledged the risk of death.

Meanwhile, I was at a teaching hospital, so the attending physician (read: real doctor) was coaching the resident (read: still-learning-to-be-a-doctor doctor). Behind my back, literally, I heard the attending using the Socratic method: “How much are you going to use?” and “Why would you go up there when you already found a spot down here?” This coaching is not what you want to hear when it’s your spine, but I see how it’s preferable to say, me screaming at my husband about how to navigate a phone tree. And, frankly, the attending did a fine job because the pain ended.

3. The trusting, encouraging manager
When its time to actually push the baby out, the doctor finally comes in, ready to go. The doctor and nurse together were watching what looked to be about six machines simultaneously. And they were watching me, and the baby, whose head was visible by now. The doctor was definitely in charge, but she almost never gave orders. There was a clear and strong trust between the doctor and nurse that each person knew what the other was doing and that they were each doing a fine job. There was a calmness and efficiency that I wish I had throughout my life.

Which is what made me think, initially, about management. When I saw the doctor and nurse trusting each other, I trusted them. I didn’t trust the resident, but the attending was so respectful of the resident that I trusted that the attending would guide the resident to a good job.

And then there was me, micromanaging. In hindsight I see that managing someone so closely that they want to strangle you is in fact sign of weakness; because either you are meddling where you needn’t, or you are surrounded by incompetence. In either case, it’s a statement about yourself. Competent people are not surrounded by incompetence. Rather, incompetence attracts incompetence.

I think about that and I think of course my husband can function without me meddling. He is smart and capable. And this is how we should feel about people we work with, too. Or we should wonder why we are attracting incompetence. There is never one crazy person in a marriage and there’s never one crazy worker.

My excuse was that I was in labor. But you probably don’t have such a good excuse. So if you don’t trust the people you work with, ask yourself why. You need to either trust them to do their job, or trust them to improve with respectful coaching. If you can’t do either then adjust their job so that they will succeed. Or else you will not succeed.

Sidenote: It was a boy. We are thrilled.

This advice applies to you

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My brother Erik told me, “When I read one of your headlines that isn’t about me, I don’t read the column.”

I usually think of Erik as a good example of my target audience: He loves the details of business, he’s excited about his career, and he wants to be a billionaire. So for one, stupidity-filled moment, I thought of following my brother’s advice. But you know what? I believe that every column applies to everyone who aspires to be a respected manager and effective leader.

Effective leaders need to understand what life is like for the people around them. And since you can’t live through everyone’s problems, reading about them is your best bet for gaining a broad understanding.

To be honest, I recommend you stop reading this column right now, and start reading the literary canon: Thackery, Hawthorne, Maugham; and throw in some women like Zora Neale Hurston and Virginia Woolf; fiction is the best way to understand human nature. But most people don’t have time to work, do their daily life, and read 1000-page novels. On top of that, while you can read this column online, at work, Thackery would be more difficult in your cube.

So, since you depend on furtive, business reading in order to make yourself a better manager, you need to read broadly. That is, read about many different types of career problems in order to understand what your employees and co-workers face.

The best way to motivate people to do what you need them to do is to understand what they want, and approach the task from their perspective. Someone who only reads about their own issues will approach employees from a self-centered, and therefore ineffective perspective.

And don’t decide you can fake it because the only person you’ll be faking out is yourself: You cannot hide disinterest in other people. It shows because you are a bad listener, you have a narrow perspective, and you don’t engage people with your questions.

For those of you who are unemployed, this column applies to you as much as anyone else. You are not going to get your next job out of the want ads because, for the most part, there aren’t any. You are going to get a job from networking. And the best way to network is to learn how to understand people who are different than you so you can make small talk with them: Read broadly about business issues.

For those of you who see yourselves as corporate activists, (and are repulsed at all my advice about fitting in and sucking up,) the first step toward making the corporate world a better place is to understand the varied interests within the system. So read as carefully about the small business owner as you do about the oppressed worker. If you think fitting in and sucking up are the core of the problem, you need to have a very good understanding of the roots of that behavior. (So maybe you should cut out the columns you like the least and study them the most.)

For those of you who are like my brother Erik, congratulations on getting to the bottom of this column. It’s the first step toward a life of broad reading and broad knowledge, which will enable you to be the kind of leader who changes peoples’ lives.

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4 worst mistakes of a first-time manager

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First-time managers are generally nightmares to work for. They are people who got promoted by doing a non-management job well, and in fact they probably have little experience in management. Here are four of the mistakes that will undermine a new manager the fastest.

1. Focusing on tasks instead of people.
Before you were a manager, your number one job was to accomplish tasks. You were someone with skills to get something done. Maybe media buying, or programming, or selling. Now your number one job is to help other people to accomplish the tasks in an outstanding way.

Sure, you’ll have tasks, too. As a manager you’ll have weekly reports, budgets, planning. But your tasks are secondary to helping other people to do their tasks. Your job as manager is to get the best work from the people you manage. The measure of how well you’re doing as a manager is how well each individual on your team performs.

Ideally, you should be able to show each person you manage how to see themselves differently so that they are able to produce at a higher level than they ever imagined. For one person this will mean you need to teach organization skills. For another person, you will help her discover what she loves to do and then set her up doing it for you. Each person wants something, and you need to find out what that is. Then help them get it.

In return, your employees will do great work for you. This level of management is superior to task-management; helping people perform at their best impacts the quality of your team’s work as opposed to just getting the work done.

2. Being slow to transition.
Moving into any new position requires that you get rid of the stuff from your old position. This means delegating. It means getting over the idea that you were indispensable on any of your old teams. You can’t do you new job well if you’re still doing your old job.

Delegating your old job should take three days. You find people who are taking a step up when they accept pieces of your old job so that they are excited. You give them an explanation of how to do it and tell them where to go when they have questions.

You are going to tell me that one day is not enough, that you have a very complicated job. But think of it this way: If you died today, your job would be delegated in a couple of days.

Delegating is not enough, though. You have to stop caring. If you are no longer on a project because you got a promotion, then you have to stop obsessing about how the project is doing.
Remember how quickly the girl who dumped you hooked up with her next-door neighbor? You need to move that fast, too.

3. Forgetting to manage up.
Managing up means steering your team to hit goals that the people above you care about. Figure out what matters to your boss, and your boss’s boss, and make that stuff matter to you, too, because you can only impress your boss with your management skill if you are accomplishing things she cares about.

And be loud about your accomplishments. Set measurable goals for yourself and let people above you know that you’re meeting them.

Do this it right off the bat. People’s perceptions of you as a manager will be made during your very first actions. That saying, “People judge you in the first two minutes they meet you,” is true for management, too. So give people reason right away to think you’re doing a good job.

4. Talking more than listening.
My sister-in-law, Rachel, has been a manager for a while. But she just accepted a position where she is managing three times the number of people she had been managing. Her first step was to go on a sort of listening tour of the organization. She had lunch with people to find out what matters to them, she sat in on groups and even visited some people at home, all in the name of figuring out what matters to whom, and how she should set up goals for herself.

Consider your own listening tour as soon as you start in a new position. After all, there’s no way to figure out what people want without getting them talking. And the most annoying thing about any manager — new or seasoned — is when they just won’t shut up.

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