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Welcome back to one of the last weeks of 2024.

That’s right, another year in the gutter, another reason to feel impending doom.

As we all now feel older and gradually less relevant, it’s time to talk about something that will take your breath away even more. Managers.

That’s right, today we’re talking about business. We’re doing this for 2 reasons:

• One: I’ve hired hundreds of people over the past 14 years and only a handful of them became managers. Most are experts in their field now, but very few of them ended up coordinating teams. That’s because being a manager is a totally different skillset

• Two: we’re going to talk about how we got Morning Brew as a client at Blindspot - and if you don’t know what that is, you’re about to find out because of today’s sponsor, you guessed it - Morning Brew!

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Back to our usual programming. Today’s brain conundrum is:

While I admit this is more historical fun fact rather than lateral thinking exercise, it is very much in line with today’s topic, so go ahead and take a jab at it.

How Managers Manage Managerially

Most of you have heard about the School of Hard Knocks and some of you have even graduated from it, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading a newsletter about lateral thinking when normal thinking is hard enough as it is.

Well, the best school for managers has something in common with the school of hard knocks - it doesn’t exist.

What does exist though, is learning by doing. Almost every single good manager I know became a great manager by looking for a way to fix issues permanently.

Another thing you’ll learn pretty fast is that telling people what the answer is almost always leads to disappointing results.

In order for them to truly internalize the answer, they can’t be spoon fed, but instead need to reach the same conclusions by themselves.

While most people look for an easy fix (like telling people the answer), a manager will take the L (I’m still traumatized by the article about brain-rot) in the short term in order to fix an important issue in the long term.

The most common misconceptions about managers are:

• They need to know the subject matter better than the expert

  They don’t, that’s why you have specialists on board

• They need to be liked by everybody or at least top management

  Only if they’re ladder climbing in the corporate world, which is usually a signal they would suck in a smaller business or startup

• All a manager does is forward emails and delegate tasks

  That’s not true, but even if it was, I’d KILL to have more managers who do those 2 things efficiently

How to tell if someone’s a good manager:

• They won’t give praise when someone goes overboard to finish a non-critical task or project

  They know the extra energy they spent on this will come back to bite them in the ass on a larger and more important project

• They care about the outcome, but also how we got there

  Despite the busy-ness culture, a good manager knows a team has finite resources and that it doesn’t make sense to spend it all in one short sprint

• They’re extremely data-driven and will always ask for numbers, insights and context before making a decision

  Many people think a good manager has great instincts, but those instincts are developed over years of parsing data and understanding the context of most situations

That being said, good managers have another skill that I’m extremely fond of: they summarize extremely well.

Here are some of my thoughts on the art of summarization.

Even if you think being a manager is bullshit and you’d never go for such a role, take some time and try your hand at improving how you summarize.

I guarantee it’ll have a positive impact in your life, business & career.

It’s an extremely undervalued skill.

You’ll realize its importance once you achieve it and then you’ll hate yourself for years for not learning it sooner. At least that’s what a friend once told me, it definitely didn’t happen to me.

I wasn’t going to leave you hanging.

The way we got Morning Brew as a client was to not give them the answer and show instead of tell.

We are truly fans of their business and content, so we started by offering them a billboard to celebrate a milestone for one of their education programs ran by Kyle Hagge, who’s now a good friend and still at Morning Brew!

That led to a huge wave of excitement within their team, which naturally led to the question: what if we run more billboard ads?

That’s when they got to the answer: they can use Blindspot to run ads on digital billboards for new shows and content and then use their own social audience to amplify the impact of the ad even further.

Here’s one of my favorite examples.

This is why it’s important to not rush to the answer - often times it’s way more impactful when you just point people in the right direction and let nature take its course.

Speaking of answers: