You may have reached a point in your career where you’ve started to seriously contemplate becoming a manager. Perhaps individual work doesn’t satisfy you just as much anymore or you’d like to face new potential challenges ahead.
Whatever your reasons are right now, it’s important to know that a managerial position isn’t for everyone and that also shows in the higher pay grade. It’s challenging, but a very rewarding new professional step, but if taken for the wrong reasons, it can end up exhausting and frustrating you. This is why we’ve put together a list of motivations that can actually propel you forward towards a truly fulfilling manager career:
1. You Get Motivated by Working With and Helping People
A manager holds tremendous responsibility when it comes to the team it has under its guidance. As a manager, you’ll be the one to set the example for the team in terms of work ethic and behavior. If you are a person of integrity and always keep your word on what you promised you’d accomplish, your team will become more inspired to adopt the same values.
What’s more, you’ll also need to provide your team with a direction – you will have the necessary vision to push things forward and implement new solutions. The team will always count on you to be more knowledgeable than they are, as well as more resilient and innovative when facing challenges.
Having said this, becoming an efficient manager is nearly impossible if you lack this joy in helping and collaborating with people. To this end, it makes a world of difference if you are the type of person that actually draws their energy from working directly with people. As a manager, you will need all the energy you can get, so it pays to have self-generating resources.
Related: Uncovering the Psychologists’ Theories of Motivation: What Drives Human Behavior?
2. You Are a Life-Long Learner
Becoming a manager requires a willingness to constantly reinvent yourself and always learn more. This need comes on two different levels, both just as important.
The first one is tightly connected with the complexity of human beings and how you can never really say you have your team members all figured out. This is why as a manager, you’ll need to read extensively in order to develop these soft skills, work on building the best possible version of yourself and understand the endless complexities of human nature.
The second aspect of the need to constantly reinvent yourself as a manager regards the technical aspects of your job. Seeing how you are needed as the guiding light of the team, always ready with viable solutions, you will be required to know the specifics of your industry in-depth, so you won’t be taken by surprise and feel powerless when a challenge comes your way.
3. You Are Ready to Ditch the Individual Worker Mindset
When you’re coordinating your team as a manager, it is no longer about yourself. Your need for gratification and acknowledgment will need to come second after the need to do everything you can in your team’s best interest. Since you’re dealing with an entire team of people who all work together to achieve the same goals, your best efforts will go into finding ways how to improve the team’s productivity and results.
For example, if you are a bank branch manager, you want to increase the productivity of your lending employees.
You will need to give your attention both to your team, as a whole, and to each individual member. Every single person in the team has a different motivation behind their daily work, possibly different values, and varying concerns and worries. This is where you come in as a manager to bring unity and a common vision to your team, while also dealing with its setbacks in a productive and growth-oriented way.
In the end, becoming a manager may be the most important shift in your career, since working directly with people always pushes you to improve and grow exponentially. All you need to do is to honestly analyze yourself and find out what the reasons behind this career choice are. Self-knowledge is the first step in making the right decisions and this situation makes no exception to the rule.
