I remember my first “bosses day” as a new manager.  This was back in the days when most people still worked in offices and we celebrated everything incessantly with balloons and a cake (just like on the show The Office, except without a dysfunctional party planning committee).  I arrived to my office with a card and maybe a ballon on my desk (honestly I can’t remember).  But what I do recall is how I felt…  I felt guilty.  Like, I don’t deserve this attention.  Most days I felt like I was just trying to keep my head above water.  What could I possibly be doing right?  

It turns out, I was trying, and growing, and my team saw it long before I did.  So they showed their appreciation with a small gesture.  Let’s face it, I was always a much better coach than manager.  The one thing I felt confident in was that my people were going to grow.  I modeled it, they lived it, and our work benefited from it as a result.  I was big on creating the space and autonomy for the team to do their thing because I believed in their capacity.  

It took me a while to learn that I needed to do more than coach, I also needed to manage expectations, performance, all the things.  But it started with my belief in them as leaders.  Honestly, that’s why I became a manager in the first place, to develop leaders.

And here’s the part I’ve learned over nearly two decades of doing this work.  I’m convinced the heartbeat of our most successful managers is that they believe in the capacity of their people and just want to develop more leaders.  That commitment always starts with developing themselves.  

No elite athlete trains without a coach.
No performer improves without feedback.
So why—why—do we expect managers to do it alone?

That question is why ManagerEQ exists in the first place. Years of change management work made the truth painfully clear: strategies fail when managers fail.  And managers fail, when we don’t support them.

We built ManagerEQ because we knew the problem from every angle: education, operations, leadership development, and tech.  We’ve lived the challenges firsthand.
And we wanted to create the support we all wished we’d had as new managers.

Now we’re here with something we’ve been dreaming about for years.  In less than a week, our beta app will be live. And for the first time, you can become a Founding Member of a community of managers who are choosing to grow on purpose.

If you’re the kind of person who likes trying things early…
who likes offering feedback that makes a product better…
who leads teams and wants to lead them well…
then this is for you.

The future of work runs on better managers.  And you’re about to be one of them.

You can join the 21-Day Challenge as a Founding Member Here.