I'm a manager, now what?

I walked out of my soon to be bosses office on Friday reeling from our five minute conversation. All the tension, apathy, and funkiness of the last couple months was gone. It's been replaced by a chaotic mix of emotions that I'm only beginning to get a handle on. That management position that I talked myself into pursuing is mine. I'll have a group of people reporting to me in a few weeks. The reality and gravity of that statement is still sinking in. It's so much easier to plot and plan about what I would do as a leader when that's just a concept. Now I legitimately have to start making some plans for how I want to approach this role.

My first inclination is to get all crazy and try to throw everything that I've been thinking about over the last couple of years out on the table. I feel like I'll be expected to be different, but I need to remember that the way I've been working is what got me in a position to be a manager in the first place. A totally renovation of my work persona will fail. I need to stay true to myself. Rather than trying to introduce a dozen new ideas to my still to be decided team all at once, I need to pick the thing that I need to implement in order to get my team to start thinking about their job just a little differently. I need to keep this thing contained so I have a chance to grow as a leader rather than trying to do too much at once.

Focusing on a few important things rather than just going after everything all at once has been on my mind quite a bit in the last month or so. I've been looking at my life and recognizing that I'm too diffuse. I do a decent job on a variety of things rather than doing an outstanding job on just a few things. I need to really think about my new role and how that job fits into the larger organization, figure out what kind of things I would like to do with my team, suggest an organization that will allow me to do those things, and develop a plan to ensure that I get the people that I want. I'll have to spend too much time on my class to devote the right kind of energy on that task. (You could say that writing this post is a waste of time as well, but I typically use these posts as a way to clarify my thinking. Getting my thoughts into a form where a few other people can read them forces me to clarify plans that are ephemeral when they're trapped in my head. This is a useful function so I don't consider the blog a waste of time.)

I'm working on redirecting the emotional energy that I spend on frivolous things like fantasy football to the really meaningful parts of my life where I actually have a tremendous amount of influence on how things turn out. I'm working hard at solidifying my relationship with my wife. It has suffered from my pursuit of activities that satisfied a deep but unhealthy emotional need. Everything in my life starts with her. She deserves the best that I can give her. Everything else can wait. And that's why I'm going to cut this post short (and not add links) so I can get to bed.