It's 2015. I’m two weeks into my new job when I get an email from the CEO late one evening. “Team emergency.” 

I’m scared to even open it. 

I'm the new guy, on a work visa in a new country. 

I’m still trying to figure out everybody's role and waiting for someone to send me the damn org chart!

But I muster up the courage to open it. The CEO has fired the head of marketing and wants to talk with me first thing tomorrow. 

I'm thinking, This is not good.

When you're in a new job, big changes in the company can quickly change the expectations of your work. 

So the next morning, we meet at 8:15, and he asks me if I know how to be a manager. 

I blurt out, 'Yeah, of course,' with a confidence I didn't deserve.

Although I'd worked in a bunch of jobs where I'd check newer people's work or answer questions, that wasn't managing people, which to me means being 100% responsible for their success.

Hiring them, training them, caring for their wellbeing, their performance, their career path—all that stuff.

The honest truth is that I didn't deserve to be a manager yet, and I cringe at how many people can be promoted into jobs they're not ready for, where they do more harm than good. 

In my case, it would've been better for the company to fire me than to put me in charge of a team.

I wasn't ready. I sucked at it.

• I wasn’t structured in goal-setting
• I didn’t know how to run 1-on-1 meetings
• I was too scared to challenge people and help them grow

I didn't know what I was doing. I may as well have been eating an orange like an apple — I was clueless.

But then I stumbled upon a set of management tools that changed the game for me, and now I make anyone I work with learn about them too.

But here's the thing. The course material must be hundreds of hours long. So I want to give you the shortcuts and thankfully there are just two big concepts that really moved the needle on managing people for me. 

And there’s one question you should ask someone before you make them a leader or manager at your company.

First, let me tell you how I got it so wrong.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Back in 2015, I was at level one on the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is a psychological thing where people overestimate their competence. 

It's like being in a fog of unawareness, not even realising how much you have to learn.

The Dunning-Kruger concept has four levels of competence:

1. Unconscious Incompetence: This is when you are at the peak of Mount Stupidity because, from up here, the view is clear, and your confidence is high.
2. Conscious Incompetence: This is when you realise you don't know anything and are in the Valley of Despair.
3. Conscious Competence: This is when you can try hard and get results.
4. Unconscious Competence: This is when you’re good without even thinking about it.

So, back to me at level one, suddenly being put in charge of the five-person marketing team two weeks into a new role, I look back on those days and think:

Man, what was I thinking? 

But the thing is, I wasn't thinking. 

I was at level one. I was out of my depth and didn’t even know that I sucked.

One of the things that is painful to remember is giving my team work to do without even explaining the vision or purpose of the projects. 

I didn't even realise until it hit me the 10th time someone asked, "Why are we doing this?" and realising that my lack of tying the work to the bigger goal left the team without a sense of ownership. 

This made the work feel less meaningful and disconnected from why we were really there.

This continued for a few weeks until one day I was listening to a podcast where a guest shared how he became a good manager through a program called The Effective Manager. It’s a management program by an ex-army guy named Mark Hortsman that covers all the super-tactical stuff on how to manage people.

I was like, Huh, that sounds cool. I've always been one for self-development and knew I could do a better job. Let me check it out.

These tools on being an effective manager blew my mind. Each episode was like drinking management lessons from a fire hose. 

But it hurt, because one of the most painful things about learning stuff is realising how much of a dummy you were before.

I was now at level two of the Dunning-Kruger hierarchy. I was becoming aware of how much I didn’t know.

I was embarrassed.

It makes me cringe thinking back to some of the things I said to my team. They would’ve seen I was out of my depth. I imagined the conversations they had about me behind my back, about how I was being a dick.

So I binged all the lessons and started applying the stuff as quickly as I could.

Okay, now I told you I’d share two big ideas you can implement straight away. Here they are:

1. The Role of the Manager:

If you had asked level-one Andy, I would have said the role of a manager is to check their work for mistakes and keep people happy. 

But the truth is that managers have two goals:

1. Achieve results (not make people happy).
2. Retain and grow your people.

Achieving results is obviously important, but I think a huge challenge that I faced was not having super clear metrics and KPIs and relying on squishy targets. 

As soon as I read this book, I made sure everyone had one number they were responsible for, which they owned—even if they weren't always happy about it.

But don't get me wrong; I care deeply about the people I work with, and I think this blends into the second goal of the manager: retain and grow your people. 

The takeaway here is retention is killer. Managers can't afford to lose their people because it takes so much time to attract, hire, onboard, and ramp up good employees.

When you lose a good person after a few months or even a year, replacing them is a painful exercise.

This concept of understanding the manager’s goals really helped me get the strategy right in supporting that marketing team. 

I made sure that everyone saw a future for themselves at the company, but I still didn't have the tactics on how to manage people effectively.

2. The Four Behaviours of Managers

If you look at the materials, it's actually referred to as "The Trinity." I think they added the fourth behaviour after "The Trinity" became well known. 

But anyway, the four critical behaviours really helped me think about how I want to interact with people who work for me and how I can help them. 

It's not the tasks or spreadsheets or the Kanban boards that deliver results; it's the actual people doing the work. 

Specifically, their actions and behaviour.

What this means is that your behaviour and that of your people are what ultimately drive results. 

And here's the good part: if you can get these four key behaviours down, I found that it covers 80% of being a good manager. 

The behaviours are:

1. Know your people: Stuff like what they’re good at and what they need to improve.
2. Give feedback: This means giving them feedback—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
3. Ask for more: You want to be constantly pushing people to achieve more, be more efficient, have more impact—all that stuff.
4. Push work down: This one is about delegating work to others. It's so important to help the organisation move forward.

Learning and being able to apply these behaviours was immediately super helpful for me. 

For example, there was a young woman running some of our marketing programs. In seeing her work up close, I could tell she needed to improve her skills with numbers and project management. 

So I told her, “If we want to move the needle in your career, we have to improve these skills.” And it wasn’t just a one-off. We kept talking about how she could develop her skills and what courses she could take. I’d be planning the night before our one-on-ones what I could say and do to best support her.

This was really me working at level three, forcing myself to practise the stuff I had learned.

In the process, getting better at it from the reps and sets.

All together - knowing my people, seeing their strengths, and helping them move past their weaknesses - marked a major turning point in my career. 

I was way more effective in supporting people at the company and became the go-to guy for all things HR and people operations. 

Building new onboarding systems and new manager programs to help people get this stuff right was now second nature to me.

I didn't realise it at the time, but now I see this was me getting to level four.

Now there are millions of different businesses that depend on people, so these lessons might not be relevant to your business or work.

But for me, the real meaning behind these concepts was learning how to help people be the best version of themselves.

Business results are certainly important, but decades from now, I'm convinced that the impact you had on someone's personal growth will be far more significant than any specific feedback on an Excel shortcut or a meeting presentation.

When considering someone for a leadership or managerial role, I’ve learned not to ask if they know how to manage. 

That question puts them at level one of the Dunning-Kruger effect—they might not even recognize what successful management looks like.

Instead, I’ve found the better question is… 

“Do you understand what it takes to be an effective manager?” 

This prompts immediate consideration of what true success in management entails.

You might know that anecdote between a CEO and a CFO discussing a budget for training and people development.

The CFO asks, “What if we invest in our people and they leave?” 

The CEO replies, “What if we don’t invest in them and they stay?” 

The message is that you need to invest in your people to enhance both their competence and their confidence. 

Understanding your team’s strengths and areas for improvement helps everyone rise above the proverbial Mount Stupidity.

I hope this helps you as much as it helped me.