How to Be a Good Manager: 5 Weekly Practices That Grow Your Team

A good manager focuses on the team instead of themselves. According to Gene Hammett, founder of Core Elevation, good managers create more most valuable players instead of trying to be the MVP, take full ownership of problems, give the team the credit, and keep building skills like tough conversations, one belt at a time.

So if you want to know how to be a good manager, skip the list of 25 tips. You need five practices you run every week and five skills you earn level by level.

Focus on the Team Instead of Yourself

Almost every manager I’ve coached starts in the same spot. They got the job because they were great at the work, so they keep trying to be great at the work, and they cannot figure out why the team is not keeping up.

Here’s the line I use to show them what has to change.

“A bad manager will focus on themselves, and the good manager will focus on the work and their team.”

Self-focus is sneaky. A bad manager wants to be the one who closes the big deal, fixes the broken process and saves the day in front of the boss, and every one of those moments feels like good work while it is happening.

“They’re looking to be the most valuable player, whereas a good manager is really looking to create more most valuable players for the team.”

I call that “the MVP trap.” You keep winning the game yourself, and your people never get a chance to play.

I know the trap from the inside. Years ago I worked with a group of employees who waited for me to signal their every move, and it ended up saving me no time at all.

Over the years on Growth Think Tank, I’ve sat down with well over a thousand leaders of fast-growth companies, and the strongest ones talk about their people long before they talk about themselves.

The stakes go well past your own reputation. Gallup has found that 70 percent of the difference in engagement between one team and another comes down to the manager. So how you show up shapes how much your people care about the work.

Make the Shift From Doer to Manager

The hardest part of the job is letting go of the scorecard you used to win on. Your old wins came from your own hands, and your new wins come from other people’s.

Look at that right-hand column for a second. Which row is hardest for you?

For most managers I talk to, it is the first one. Your team’s results feel slower and messier than your own, so you reach back in and do the work, and the team learns to wait for you again.

What Separates a Good Manager From a Bad One?

The gap shows up in small, daily choices. Here’s how the two look side by side.

If you are asking about the top weaknesses of a manager, they sit in the first rows of that table. Self-focus, blame and avoided conversations do the most damage.

If the left column stings a little, good. Most managers I’ve worked with have lived in that column at some point (me included), and you can read the full list of signs of a bad manager to see where those habits start.

Run These 5 Practices Every Week

Here’s the framework I use with managers. Five practices, every week, however busy it gets.

Your own output does not count the way it used to. What counts now is how many people on your team can do what you used to do, and then some.

Years ago a coach asked me when my team would ever learn to solve problems if I kept solving every one of them myself. That question hit me like a ton of bricks.

Try these this week:

• ●Hand one problem you’d normally solve to someone on your team, and let them own the answer.
• ●Push one decision down a level. Say what outcome you need and let them pick the path.
• ●When someone brings you a problem, ask what they think you should do before you say a word.
• ●Spot the person who is ready for a stretch and give them one.

Letting go will feel risky at first. Someone will stumble, and you will want to jump in and save it.

Hold off. Ask what they learned and what they’d try next, and let them take another swing, because that stumble is where an MVP gets made.

Extreme ownership means a problem on your team is your problem. You do not tell your boss that your people dropped the ball; you own the miss, then you fix it with the team.

Credit flows the other way. When the team wins, you name the people who did the work, out loud, where others can hear it.

“When a good manager gives the team credit, they deserve some of that credit themselves. They just don’t have to ask for it.”

You’ve probably heard “give your team the credit” before. But are you doing it every week, by name, in front of the people who matter to them?

In other words, the blame stops with you and the credit passes through you.

Keep the words straight here, too. A task can be assigned to you and your results can be measured, but ownership is internalized: you care about the outcome when nobody is checking.

Tough conversations come with the job. The feedback you hold back today turns into the performance problem you will be managing six months from now.

“A good manager is willing to have the tough conversations and take the time to improve that skill set, to have more effective tough conversations.”

I’m guilty here too. I’ve sat on a conversation for weeks, telling myself the timing wasn’t right, when the truth was I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable.

What if the conversation you’re dreading is the one your team member has been waiting for?

Here’s how to practice:

• ●Write down the one conversation you’ve been putting off.
• ●Have it this week, in private and early.
• ●Say what you saw, why it matters, and then ask for their side.
• ●Afterward, note one thing you’d do differently next time.

You do not need a perfect script to start. Something as simple as “I want to talk about the last two deadlines, and I want to hear what’s going on for you” opens the door.

So many managers told Amanda and me this was the skill they dodged most that we wrote a whole book on it, How to Have Tough Conversations. You can find the book and free resources at the book’s companion site. For a step-by-step walk through the talk itself, use our tough conversations guide before your next one.

Good managers don’t wing it. They run two meetings every week and protect them when the calendar gets crowded.

• ●A weekly one-on-one with each person. Make it about their growth as well as the work. Ask what they want to get better at, where they’re stuck and which decision they’d like to make without you.
• ●A team meeting with a clear agenda. Send the agenda ahead so people show up ready to decide. Cover what you are focused on, what’s in the way and who owns each next step.

You might be thinking you cannot fit a one-on-one with eight people into a week that’s already full. You cannot afford to skip them, because those 30 minutes are where you find the problems while they’re still small.

If you’re new to the role, my 30-60-90 day plan for people new to managing shows how to set up both meetings in your first months.

The fifth practice holds the other four together. Each week, pick one leadership skill and work on it on purpose, the same way you’d drill one move in the gym.

The next section shows you how.

Earn the Next Belt in Each Leadership Skill

I’m a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Like every black belt before me, I started as a white belt, and the people just a few months ahead of me crushed me again and again.

Earning that belt took me well over a decade. Nobody skipped a level, and nobody was born good at it.

“A good manager is willing to accept and understand when they are a white belt, and then move through the different levels or belts, if you will, of each of the skill sets.”

Leadership works the same way. You admit where you’re a beginner, then you move through the levels one skill at a time, and your confidence comes from skill you earned.

Tough conversations get easier for the same reason a hard roll on the mat gets easier. You have practiced the levels, so you have been there before.

The five skills I work on with every manager are empowerment, accountability, coaching, communication (tough conversations) and time. Here’s an example of what the early belts and the later belts can look like.

Grab a pen and paper and give this five minutes right now. Write the five skills down the left side, give yourself an honest belt in each, and circle the lowest one.

Curious how the five skills stack as you grow? Climb the manager-to-leader skill ladder one rung at a time.

Start With Tough Conversations

If you can only work on one skill this quarter, pick tough conversations. Every other skill runs through them.

• ●You cannot hold someone accountable if you will not talk about the miss.
• ●You cannot empower someone if you cannot tell them their approach is not working.
• ●Coaching without honest feedback turns into cheerleading.

After that, ask your team which skill they’d most like you to work on. Their answer is usually your next belt.

Keep Coaching Separate From Telling

Coaching gets confused with telling all the time. Telling hands someone the answer, directing gives them a goal to pursue, and coaching asks the questions that help them find the path themselves.

Try questions like these in your next one-on-one:

• ●What have you already tried?
• ●What would you do if I weren’t here?
• ●What’s the first step you could take today?

When you catch yourself handing over the answer, stop and ask one more question. Then wait.

Expect Real Change to Take About a Year

I won’t sell you a 30-day fix. Real change takes cycles, and each cycle teaches you something the last one couldn’t.

A cycle looks like this:

1. 1Pick one skill.
2. 2Practice it in real situations for a few weeks.
3. 3Get feedback from your team, your boss or a coach.
4. 4Adjust, then start the next cycle.

From what I’ve seen, a manager who is struggling today can be leading well a year from now, as long as someone is coaching them along the way. I watched one manager do exactly that, going from simply working harder to leading a team of 25 people, and I told his story in my guide to manager effectiveness.

So do not judge yourself by how you feel in month two. Judge yourself by whether your people are growing.

If you are still in your first months, these new manager tips cover the hard start.

Count the Cost of Staying the Same

Managers who never make the shift keep working harder and doing the work themselves. Their teams look fine, but people don’t grow, top performers get frustrated, and the company can’t scale past the manager’s own capacity.

The research points the same way:

• ●In a SHRM survey, 84 percent of U.S. workers said managers without good people training add a lot of needless work and stress to their jobs.
• ●Gallup’s latest global workplace report found that manager engagement worldwide slid to 22 percent in 2025, down from 27 percent the year before.
• ●Gallup also found that employees led by highly engaged managers are 59 percent more likely to be engaged than those led by actively disengaged managers.

So the habits in this article help your people, and they help you too. Which would you rather be a year from now, the tired manager doing everyone’s work or the one whose team keeps getting stronger?

Share This Framework With Your CEO or HR Leader

If you are a manager, share this with your CEO or HR leader. Ask which of the five practices they see you doing well and which one they’d want you to work on next.

If you are the founder or HR leader, have that conversation with every manager on your team. Managers rarely build these habits alone, which is why we offer one-on-one manager coaching for the people you’re counting on to lead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are the questions managers ask me most about getting better at the job.

Start at White Belt This Week

We started with one quote: bad managers focus on themselves, and good managers focus on the work and the team. Every practice in this article comes back to that one choice.

So pick one practice from the five and put it on your calendar for this week. Maybe it’s the tough conversation you’ve been dodging, or the first real one-on-one with someone you’ve been too busy to sit with.

Which belt are you wearing today in each of the five skills? Which one would your team say you need most? Ready?

Lead with courage.