Ask five people what “management” means and you’ll probably get five different answers. Ask one person what management means at five stages of his or her career and you’ll get five different answers. While there certainly could be a “wrong” answer, there really is no one right answer because context is key.

Webster defines “manager” as “someone who is in charge of a business, department, etc.” (no specific call-out for the management/supervision of people). It defines “management” as “the act or skill of controlling and making decisions about a business, department [or] … team, etc.; judicious use of means to accomplish an end” (which could include the concept of people). The direct route to the “people” aspect of managing comes through from Webster’s “leadership” definition: the power or ability to lead other people.

Earlier in my career, a boss summarized his philosophy on the topic by telling me, “managers manage things, leaders lead people.” Of course, these days, there are volumes of books and articles out there that thoroughly dissect the differences between management and leadership that support that philosophy. I would argue, however, that without the ability to exercise leadership (at the functional level or the human level), your efforts to manage anything will be ineffective, regardless of what you call it. Likewise, as a leader, you might have a natural ability to draw followers and unify them around an idea, but if you fail to manage (control the process and make decisions), the leadership alone will not be an effective means to reach the goals. 

“Everyone provides leadership for those responsibilities that have been assigned to them,” says Merlin Ricklefs in The Basics of Leadership. “For the highest-performing organizations, even the lowest-ranked staff...must assume leadership and attention to detail for their responsibilities in a manner similar to the most senior and powerful.”

So if management can mean different things to different people and look different at varying stages of your career, and the idea of being a leader is a part of learning to be a manager, not two different things, it’s no wonder that new managers have such a difficult time transitioning into management and learning what it takes to be successful.

“The experience of a first-time supervisor or manager is often one of the most trying in their career,” says Carter McNamara, author of the Field Guide to Leadership and Supervision. “They rarely have adequate training for the new management role — they were promoted because of their technical expertise, not because of their managerial expertise…. They must represent upper management to their subordinates, and their subordinates to upper management. They’re stuck in the middle. They can feel very alone.” 

Carol A. Walker of Harvard Business Review’s Saving Your Rookie Managers From Themselves points out, “Very often, [new managers] fail to grasp how their roles have changed — that their jobs are no longer about personal achievement but instead about enabling others to achieve….Even the best employees can have trouble adjusting to these new realities.” 

New managers have a lot to learn — all managers have a lot to do. As Calvin Coolidge aptly said, “We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.” So don’t let the overwhelming volume of unknowns stop you from jumping in and moving forward. But where should the new manager start?

Whether you are responsible for managing projects, departments, people or an entire business, experts seem to consistently arrive at the same Step One: Manager, manage thyself!

No matter what the different types of management roles you end up taking on, the common denominator among the things you’ll always be expected to have under control is YOU. Often, effective self-management will trump technical competence and subject-matter expertise of the things that earned that management promotion to begin with, but if you managed to rise to management without it, it needs to be your number-one priority to learn and recognize that self-management is never something you are “finished” learning. 

“Self-management should be the manager’s number-one priority,” says consultant and executive management coach Lisa Baker. “It is important for a manager to understand how his capability for self-management impacts either positively or negatively on his abilities to manage his role, function and build relationships.”

Without effective self-management, you will find it difficult to assess and manage your own workload well enough to effectively delegate the right work to your team, which could lead them to feel micromanaged or that you’re not empowering or developing them. Without effective self-management, you could lose credibility and your team’s respect as it will be difficult for them to take seriously any instruction, direction, leadership or (heaven forbid) correction from someone who can’t apply the same principles to his or her own initiatives or work habits.

Founder/CEO of FacileThings and personal productivity expert Francisco Sáez says, “Although many people only relate self-management to time management, it is actually a much broader concept.”

Taken from Sáez’s Self-Management Fundamentals, here are a few things that need to be on your self-management checklist:

• Know yourself — your values, your strengths, your weaknesses, your personal desires. Without an honest assessment of these things, it will be difficult to give real purpose and meaning to your work.
• Develop your proactivity. Adopt a positive attitude in doing what it takes have the life/job/career you want. 
• Learn to take on decisionmaking for all the things that concern you. Even if the decision is to do nothing, it was within your control, not anyone else’s, to arrive at the actions or outcomes that affect you.
• Learn to manage stress and conflict in order to achieve the emotional stability necessary to function well in all areas of life, not just on the job.
• Manage your time better — not only doing more, but enjoying your time more. Time is limited, but it can be of higher quality. This will often require learning to say NO.
• Develop and maintain the self-motivation to get things done and avoid procrastination. As Steve Jobs once said, “Perseverance is about half of what separates success from failure.”
• Know how to keep focused on what you’re doing and filter out the distraction of unimportant “urgencies” that derail you from reaching your goal.
• Create the discipline necessary to acquire more knowledge, to improve your relationships with others, and continually develop, grow and improve yourself. 

Self-management and personal development have to be things you choose and want for yourself. It’s your responsibility to seek these ideals. As Winston Churchill said, “You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.” You have to find within yourself the desire to develop effective self-management skills. If it is prescribed to you as a solution to a problem you’re not yet convinced you have, there will be a disconnect between the learning the concepts and actually applying them.

Unfortunately, many managers are not able to identify poor self-management as the cause of their unbearable stress and blame external factors for their problems.  However, applying these few tips should help lead you through a more successful and rewarding management journey. 

Lauren Yost is NRPA’s Vice President of Operations.