8. What have been your biggest mistakes thus far?

Could you have avoided them? If so, how? Welcome to the fi rst “Develop Your Career Potential”

activity! These assignments have one purpose: to help you develop your present and future capabilities as a manager.

What you will learn through these assignments is not traditional “book learning” based on memorization and regurgitation, but practical knowledge and skills that help managers perform their jobs better. Lessons from some of the assignments—for example, goal setting—can be used for immediate benefi t. Other lessons will obviously take time to accomplish, but you can still benefi t now by making specifi c plans for future improvement.

Step 1: Interview two practicing managers. In her book Becoming a Manager: Mastery of a New Identity, Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill conducted extensive interviews with 19 people in their fi rst year as managers.85 To learn fi rsthand what it’s like to be a manager, interview two managers that you know, asking them some of the same questions, listed below, that Hill asked her managers. Be sure to interview managers with different levels of experience. Interview one person with at least fi ve years’ experience as a manager and then interview another person with no more than two years’ experience as a manager.