What Makes A Great Manager

The first step to becoming a really great manager is simply common sense; but common sense is not very common.
This article suggests some common-sense ideas on the subject of great management. The major problem when you start to manage is that you do not actually think about management issues because you do not recognize them.
 Put simply, things normally go wrong not because you are stupid but only because you have never thought about it.
Management is about pausing to ask yourself the right questions so that your common sense can provide the answers.
When you gain managerial responsibility, your first option is the easy option: do what is expected of you. You are new at the job, so people will understand. You can learn (slowly) by your mistakes and probably you will try to devote as much time as possible to the rest of your work (which is what your were good at anyway).
 Those extra little "management" problems are just common sense, so try to deal with them when they come up.
Your second option is far more exciting: find an empty telephone box, put on a cape and bright-red underpants, and become a Super Manager.
When you become a manager, you gain control over your own work; not all of it, but some of it.
You can change things. You can do things differently.
You actually have the authority to make a huge impact upon the way in which your staff work. You can shape your own work environment.
In a large company, your options may be limited by the existing corporate culture - and my advice to you is to act like a crab: face directly into the main thrust of corporate policy, and make changes sideways. You do not want to fight the system, but rather to work better within it.
 In a small company, your options are possibly much wider (since custom is often less rigid) and the impact that you and your team has upon the company's success is proportionately much greater.Thus once you start working well, this will be quickly recognized and nothing gains faster approval than success. But wherever you work, do not be put off by the surprise colleagues will show when you first get serious about managing well.
Starting a revolution
The idea of starting alone, however, may be daunting to you; you may not see yourself as a David against the Goliath of other peoples' (low) expectations.
The bad news is that you will meet resistance to change.
Your salvation lies in convincing your team (who are most effected) that what you are doing can only do them good, and in convincing everyone else that it can do them no harm.
The good news is that soon others might follow you.  There is precedent for this.  For instance, when a British firm called Unipart wanted to introduce Japanese methods (Honda's to be precise) into their Oxford plan (The Economist - 11th April 1992 - page 89) they sent a small team to Japan to learn what exactly this meant.On their return, they were mocked by their workmates who saw them as management pawns.
So instead they were formed into their own team and sent to work in a corner of the plant where they applied their new knowledge in isolation.
Slowly, but surely, their example (and missionary zeal) spread through the factory and changes followed. Now Unipart opened a new factory and the general manger of the first factory attributes the success to "releasing talent already on the shop floor".
Of course one can always find case studies to support any management idea, but it does exemplify the potential of a small cell of dedicated zealots - led by you. All The Best.