A Week in the Life of a Manager

Every professional, throughout their career, will encounter both learning and development needs. These needs are typically fulfilled by a combination of on-the-job learning and formal training. Yet, as you begin, and even while you continue your journey as a manager, you will undoubtedly encounter situations where you will need to learn in order to grow and operate effectively.

It's important for you to think of this need to keep learning in certain situations, not as a weakness, or as a sign that you lack skills, but as a positive thing, because it is simply a fact of modern professional life for everyone.

The technologies that we use in our daily lives today are advancing and evolving faster than they have ever done before. This has a profound effect on the software business itself and everything it touches, including the people, both developers and managers, who use it.

The gaps in your skillset, knowledge, mindset, and ways of thinking and working need to be identified and plugged. Moreover, the self-awareness to understand the need to address these gaps is vital if you are going to be an effective manager.

Whether you have the responsibility and privilege of managing people or not, you will still need to be self-aware enough to identify the areas where you can perform better. This could include areas such as technical knowledge as well as softer skills like communication, stakeholder management, and negotiation.

If you're fortunate enough to have funding for formal training, then the type of training tends to split into two main camps: technical skills and soft skills. Curiously, there are very few training courses that combine both skill sets. This might be because the idea is simply too ambitious and not marketable in today's time-poor environment and competitive training business.

A simple fact of modern professional life is that most individuals and organizations tend to prefer structured training that's focused on a specific area, which is understandable.

This brings us to the focus of this chapter: an exploration of what a week as a manager can look like. Along the way, you'll see how much learning needs to take place every week for a manager.

During this tour of a manager's typical week, we'll look at the 70/20/10 blended learning model and the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, and we'll explore the development process. Our main focus will be on the Weekly Project Template, where we will walk through what an average Monday to Friday as a manager can look like.