How to Be the Best Boss

The secrets to leading your employees well

Stepping into a management role at work can be exhilarating and exhausting. Most of us spend much of our careers just figuring out how we personally work best: identifying and utilizing our unique God-given strengths, skills, communication styles, and personality.

As a manager, though, it’s not enough to be good at getting your own work done. You have to take a lot of other people into account as well. And guess what? They’re all perfectly unique too, and that means they may need very different things from you. It can be exciting to try to figure people out, and invigorating to try to help them reach their goals. Nevertheless, it can also be draining to try to motivate a disengaged employee, or downright frustrating to see someone’s mistakes or bad attitude dragging your whole team down.

As a manager, you are uniquely able to impact the lives of the employees who report to you.

One way or another, I’ve been learning how to manage people for most of my life. My siblings will probably tell you I started organizing and directing them right out of the cradle. By the time I was 16 I was managing summer harvesting crews on the family orchard. In my 20s, I spent years studying management in business school, and since then I’ve worked with countless and varied teams of people. At CBRE (Commercial Real Estate Services) a decade ago, I led a team of thousands in directing one of the company’s major multi-million dollar lines of business. At 4word, I work intensely with a few full-time employees and a small army of freelancers and volunteers.

I find that with every new team and new situation, there’s more to learn about how to encourage people to best work together to accomplish our goals. As a manager, you are uniquely able to impact the lives of the employees who report to you. This power is a gift, and like all gifts, you should approach it from the perspective of God’s grace: “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms” (1 Peter 4:10, NIV).

Know Your Team

No matter what your team looks like, there’s nothing more important as a manager than to know your employees. It’s critical to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and motivators, as well as their work and communication styles. This knowledge will help you to motivate, encourage, and correct course more effectively, and it will make your employees feel known, respected, and engaged in their work.