So one of your team members is driving you nuts? Welcome to the club! Haven’t we all at some point had to deal with that team member – you know, that one with the negative attitude who always comes in late, refuses to take on extra work, spends hours on personal calls or constantly reports sick?

Or that veteran employee who really knows his job but just doesn’t do his job? Or that super-talented individual who consistently queries or undermines every decision you make? What is even more puzzling is that an approach that gets the best out of some team members and that works exceedingly well, seems to be either lost on others or drives them up the wall! Management clearly doesn’t seem like much fun.

Becoming a manager does not come naturally – especially for the star performer who is now expected to manage his or her peers. The transition from talented worker to competent manager can be a long and – at the risk of abusing some South African metaphors – pothole-filled road full of dead-ends, detours and overturned taxis. New managers often find the people management part of their jobs the most stressful challenge of their new roles. Where they were rewarded in the past for solving problems and completing tasks on their own, they now have to empower and motivate their team members to solve the problems and complete the tasks in their stead. They are not part of the ‘gang’ anymore; they are now part of ‘them’ (the enemy) – and that doesn’t sound like much fun either.

So does management ever become fun? It does – usually with experience. Like with any endeavour, practice makes perfect. Practice, by definition, is ‘a method of learning and of acquiring experience’. Playing a musical instrument such as a trumpet or violin will be painful in the beginning – even more so for the tormented audience – and only becomes fun after a certain level of proficiency has been attained. The bad and the good news is that proficiency in a particular skill is determined more by frequent and focused practice than by being endowed with a special talent. To quote Prof. Anders Ericsson, Department of Psychology, Florida State University: ‘The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain’.

Practicing and developing your managerial skills will certainly help to take the pain out of management. The more adept you become with balancing the technical and managerial aspects of the job, the easier it will become, until you get to a point where it becomes part of what you are, a point when you actually begin to enjoy it. Learning and acquiring experience can of course be accelerated – some trumpet lessons by a music teacher will do wonders for your technique and motivation. Likewise, attending a training course on how to build relationships, resolve conflict, manage individual performance or getting commitment from the team will make the transition much easier than learning by trial-and-error. And the rewards of getting it right are high – the thrills of getting a team to deliver the goods at a scale larger than you can do alone can be both exhilarating and intoxicating – and fun!

So there you go: Management – she will be fun when you are good at it!

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