How Did I Not See This Coming?

Book excerpt: Julie’s having a very bad day. She’s a new manager, and her top performer has resigned to escape her, and her own manager is looking on with a skeptical eye. . . . This is the story of her turnaround. Being a first-time manager is a tough job. If you were Julie, what would you do? Wouldn’t anyone, given the choice of taking on a leadership role (with a raise), or staying put, have done the same? But no one prepared her for developing co-workers, her former peers, while producing as before and leading the team. Now she’s in over her head. Author Katy Tynan understands. In her new book, How Did I Not See This Coming? A Manager’s Guide to Avoiding Total Disaster, Tynan unlocks the truths about management, showing that first-time managers are basically on a journey without a map. It’s not that employers aren’t investing in their new managers, she says, or that the people in leadership don’t care, but they are no longer close to the raw experience of being a new manager. What’s more, most management books are written by experts who lack the memory of first-time failure. In How Did I Not See This Coming?, Tynan tells the fictional story of Julie, a onetime star producer, to illustrate how a new manager can successfully make the shift from a role without leadership responsibilities to one with them. Along the way, Tynan offers the five basic truths about management—starting with recognizing team values and strengths—truths that can be learned by anyone. You, too, can be the manager everyone’s talking about—in a good way—because you’re the one who figured it out.