When someone comes up into management hopefully they get some training and instruction when taking the job.  

Hopefully.

This provides them with the nuts and bolts on what to do and when to do it.

But there is one thing that all the training in the world can’t give a new manager.

That one thing is experience.

Experience is its own teacher – it’s the school of life.

The school of life is one big long lab-session and we’re the students and the subject being taken apart and put back together time and time again.  

 When the school of life is done with us, the diploma we get is called wisdom.

This wisdom is really what makes this job of managing not only bearable but satisfying and nurturing in a lot of different ways.

It’s the wisdom that the people we manage are in their own classroom of life learning. That we can be of service to them. That we can help them grow as a team member or even help them when we uphold clear expectations.

Wisdom that when we are a true positive force, managing toward the best outcomes for the co-op and the whole team, we can end up with negative push back (sometimes a lot) by some and not a molecule of it needs to be taken personally.

Wisdom that serving in a position of authority is not a selfish, self-promoting thing.  It’s a path of taking responsibility for the future and an awareness of the necessity to tell the truth and act on it.

And overall, it’s the wisdom that someone has to do this and that someone is me.

Good for you.

In all the training I do, I wish there was a way for me to provide a hack or shortcut to cultivate wisdom.  I wish it could be that simple.

It’s not.

What I can say in a training is this – wisdom is its own reward and the only way to get it is to hang in there.

Being a new manager can sometimes feel like an uncertain, dark, confining path of toil, yet the growing wisdom is there like the feeling of sunlight and a deep breathing of fresh air.

Wisdom doesn’t wait for us because we took a training, it waits for us because we have a willingness to grow.

Good for you… and that’s good for us all.