I Became a Manager and Immediately Started Doing It Wrong

Nobody hands you a manual for becoming a manager. You just… become one. And then you figure it out.

That's roughly how it went for me. I stepped into a management role at ActionCOACH KC and quickly learned that coordinating projects and coordinating people are completely different skills. The thing I was best at — just doing the task myself — was suddenly the thing holding me back. So I white-knuckled it for a while and hoped nobody noticed.

Here's the part that's a little embarrassing: I work for ActionCOACH KC, a business coaching firm. The manual existed the whole time. I just hadn't picked it up.

When I actually started working through ActionCOACH's management framework, everything changed. Not because it's magic — because it made me stop improvising. It gave me a structure for training someone instead of doing it for them and hoping it stuck. It turned "why isn't this getting done right?" into an actual answerable question. Most of what felt like a me problem turned out to be a no system problem.

Once the framework was in place, AI became the accelerant. I'm not a developer, but I've taught myself enough to build custom tools that connect our systems — CRM, task management, pipeline reporting — straight into AI. Less busywork, fewer things slipping through the cracks. It was like magic! But I'll be honest: AI only helped after I knew what good looked like. Automating a broken process just gets you broken results faster.

If you're new to managing people and feeling like you're making it up as you go: you're not behind. You're just in the part nobody warns you about. And you probably don't need to invent the answer — you need to go find it.

So tell me — what's the one task you're still doing yourself that you know you should be handing off? Drop it in the comments. I'll go first: for the longest time it was event follow-up. I was convinced no one could do it "right." Turns out they could — I just hadn't written down what "right" meant.

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I Became a Manager and Immediately Started Doing It Wrong