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As you go through life, you will increasingly find that you need to manage people. A parent has to manage their family; a supervisor or team leader has to manage a small team; an entrepreneur may have to manage staff, customers and suppliers.

Early in my career I took responsibility for managing people. I managed up to 250 highly trained professionals who worked as a tightknit team. It didn’t matter that I was the youngest person in the team! For over 20 years I’ve been working with individuals and organizations to help them improve their management of people. This has ranged from military personnel to entrepreneurs, from charities to government departments. I’ve learned many secrets and tricks over these years. Some I’ve discovered for myself, but many I’ve learned from others. Humans are wonderfully inventive!

This book aims to help you improve your skills at managing people – to help you find ways in which everybody benefits. It contains 50 secrets, grouped into seven themed chapters.

• Build on a strong foundation. You must understand what type of leader or manager you want to be. Your employer may give guidelines, but you must exert control over your day-to-day behaviour.

• Create a great team. This shows how to choose the right people and quickly build a functioning team.

• Set goals and targets. By setting people effective targets and goals, you can monitor progress and offer appropriate rewards.

• Motivate yourself and your people. Implementing ways to motivate people is ultimately much easier than having to cajole and constantly monitor unmotivated people.

• Manage good performance. You need to recognize good performance – reward it, develop it, perpetuate it and spread it to others. Otherwise you will lose your good performers and be left only with the poor ones.

• Manage poor performance. Some managers find ways of managing around poor performance without tackling the poor performance itself. However, this encourages more poor performance, from both the original perpetrator and everyone else. Know how to tackle the problems head on.

• Develop your people. Though often overlooked by managers, another fundamental task is developing people. You need to improve the less able, stretch and reward the able, plan succession for the future and mentor your people’s changing needs.

Managing people is a hugely complex area in which you never stop learning. The secrets contained in this book will help you make massive strides towards succeeding in this fascinating role.

Knowing how to manage people well is one of the most important skills in life.