Tania Luna - The Leader Lab: Core Skills to Become a Great Manager, Faster

Tania Luna

LeeAnn Renninger, PhD

Copyright 2021 by Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Luna, Tania, author. | Renninger, LeeAnn, author.

Title: The leader lab : core skills to become a great manager faster / Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger, PhD.

Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, [2021] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021031035 (print) | LCCN 2021031036 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119793311 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781119793328 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781119793335 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Management. | Executives. | Leadership

Classification: LCC HD31.2 .L86 2021 (print) | LCC HD31.2 (ebook) | DDC 658dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031035

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031036

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Image: Valeriya_Dor/Shutterstock

This book is dedicated to our Labmates: the brilliant, playful, strange, and passionate catalysts at LifeLabs Learning who help people master life's most useful skills every day.

Let's face it: great managers are rare, and becoming a great manager can take many (difficult) years. But what if there were a way to simplify the complexity of leadership, and become a great manager faster? There is a way to do just that, and we've written this book to show you how. The skills we'll share with you aren't hard, but they do require deliberate practice. As you master each skill, you'll notice your life getting easier, and you'll see yourself making a bigger difference in the world, every day. But first let's talk about why managers matter.

Here's the bad news: 88% of people say they are relieved when their manager is out sick (Leone ). If you've ever had a bad manager, you've experienced firsthand how it can turn joyful work into daily dread.

There. Now that that's out of the way, let's spend the rest of this book together dwelling on the good news. Great managers make work and life better. They help teams achieve amazing results. They help individuals do their life's best work. We (Tania and LeeAnn) have seen this time and time again thanks to the work we do through our company, LifeLabs Learning, where we train hundreds of thousands of employees at innovative companies around the world, including Google, Warby Parker, the New York Times, Yale, TED, Sony Music, and over 1,000 others.

Our workshop participants told us countless stories of managers who changed their lives. There was Marta, whose team members said she helped them bring their real selves to work for the first time in their careers. There was John, who celebrated every milestone his team reached with such consistency that people said it taught them to be better parents. There was Bernardo, who helped lead a company from near extinction to success. There was Niko, who helped her team members keep updating their rsums so they could see how much they'd grown. And there were so many others. We saw that great managers had infinite ripple effects at work and in life, so we made it our mission to help more people become great managers faster.

Sure, folks can learn on the job, but experience is a slow and confusing teacher. We can't afford to sit around and wait for leadership skills to kick in. There are too many costs and too many people at stake.

Can someone really learn to be a better manager? You bet. Just as in any profession, from medicine to music, some people find some skills easier than others. We don't recommend that everyone be a manager, just as we don't recommend that everyone be a ballet dancer. But everyone can become a better manager faster by applying the lessons in this book.

How do we know? When we follow up with managers we've trained at LifeLabs Learning three months and one year later, over 90% say they are still applying the skills they've learned and are better managers as a result. Our clients report an increase in manager effectiveness, employee engagement, and company productivity. Our favorite part? Our workshop participants tell us that becoming better managers has also helped them become better versions of themselves.

Before we get into the skills of great managers, let's align on what a manager is in today's workplace. The etymology of the word manager is actually pretty cringeworthy. It comes from the term to handle, especially tools or horses. The dehumanizing implication is that people are resources to be managed. This way of thinking created efficiencies when craftspeople became factory workers, and managers had to ensure uniformity and predictability. Thinking was the manager's role, while doing was the responsibility of the workers.

As you know, things are different now. Given the growing rate of change and competition, companies today rely on everyone collaborating, communicating, learning, and innovating. Unlike the original managers who had to limit people's thinking, today's managers have to help people think faster and better. The best managers no longer manage people. They manage resources, processes, time, priorities, and even themselves. They