Managing Managers: Lead Leaders, Scale a Team, 320+ Tools

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

The day your direct reports became managers, your job changed and nobody told you. The title stayed the same, so it is easy to assume the work did too. It did not. You have stopped managing work and started managing judgement. Here are 321 tools for that job: 208 ready-to-use question lists, templates, procedures and matrices, 88 models and methods, 23 services and apps shown on screen and 2 working files.

Open a lecture, take the tool, use it in your next one-to-one with a manager.

What the second layer changes

You no longer see the thing being produced. You see a manager’s account of it, filtered through what they think you want to hear. You cannot fix a problem directly without undermining the person whose problem it is, so every intervention costs something. A manager who is struggling hides it better than a specialist would. And when you finally promote someone, their old role is empty and there was no plan for that. The skills that made you a good manager of specialists are not enough here, and some of them are in the way.

What changes after this course

You develop your managers and stop doing their work for them. You know how to answer when a manager brings you a problem from their team. Your one-to-ones are about their people and their judgement. Feedback, pay and promotion are decided by rules your managers understand. And when someone moves up, there is a person ready for the empty role.

What is inside: 321 tools, counted lecture by lecture

You do not have to take this number on trust. Open any lecture and read its description: every tool inside is listed there by name.

• 43 downloadable resources: the lecture presentations plus 2 standalone working files, the Second-Line Reply Card and a personal energy assessment
• 208 ready-to-use tools inside the presentations:
• 61 question lists and scripts: Google manager feedback survey, one-on-one meeting discussions, manager development planning, five dysfunctions team assessment
• 57 templates and sample documents: one-on-one meeting agenda, succession planning, individual development plan, OKR goal cascading
• 31 step-by-step procedures and workflows: SBI feedback, monkey management, Delegation Poker, team development
• 25 scorecards, rubrics and matrices: people management competency levels, RACI responsibility matrix, leadership potential assessment criteria, succession readiness heatmap
• 22 checklists: micromanagement self-assessment, bad strategy diagnosis, coaching preparation, succession plan audit
• 6 other working tools: monetary reward decision tree, personal histories team exercise, team effectiveness feedback exercise, feedback gap interview worksheet
• 3 ready AI prompts: job advertisement rewriting, one-on-one business case, competency profile generation
• 3 formulas and metric sets: median salary calculation, employee retention metrics, succession planning KPIs
• 88 models and methods explained with examples: situational leadership, Goleman’s six leadership styles, Tuckman’s team development, OKR goal setting
• 23 services and apps shown on screen, from a quick look to a detailed demo: 15Five, PeopleForce, Bonusly, Slack, Asana, Trello, Miro, Zapier and others

Where the tools are

• Start here (1 tool). The Second-Line Reply Card.
• Growing other managers (3 sections, 95 tools). Competencies, strategy, delegation, team building, coaching, communication and the leader inside HR systems.
• The craft your managers need (4 sections, 112 tools). Team, training, choosing a deputy, motivation, pay, bonuses, retention, OKR and control.
• Delegation (2 sections, 41 tools). Barriers, the process, delegating to develop people and to free your own capacity.
• One-to-ones with managers (2 sections, 46 tools). Format, types, the relationship, coaching and rollout across a layer.
• Feedback (2 sections, 40 tools). What blocks it, the six-step model, feedback loops and recognition.
• Succession (2 sections, 35 tools). Key roles, assessing talent, developing the bench and keeping it alive.

Who is teaching

I am Mike, the #1 HR instructor on Udemy, with 1,800,000+ course enrollments from 170,000 students, and the author of about 200 books on Amazon. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn and worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank across 20 years in HR. I hold PHRi, SHRM-CP and HCI sHRBP certifications and represent HRCI in Eastern Europe. I am also a founder and lead the strategy of my own academy.

I learned to delegate when my team grew from 10 to 20 people and I was given a whole department on top. Many tasks came to me, and I physically could not do them all. I had no way out, so I learned, and I would say that only then did I become a manager and not a coordinator of my employees. Later I saw the practice pass down a layer. One of my employees grew and we hired an assistant for her. The first thing she did, in the first hours, was to put a regular one-to-one with the assistant into the calendar: she had such meetings herself and found them useful. That is how you know a habit has taken root, when your people carry it further on their own.

How to use the course

Start with the first lecture and its Second-Line Reply Card. Then take the block on growing other managers, and after it the block where your layer is weakest: delegation, one-to-ones, feedback or succession. Section and lecture titles show how many tools are inside, and each lecture description lists them by name.

What is included

• 44 lectures across 16 sections, 22.5 hours
• 43 downloadable resources: lecture presentations and 2 working files
• 321 tools across the lessons, including 23 services and apps shown on screen
• Lifetime access to all materials
• Active instructor support in the Q&A section
• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

Where to start

Think of the last time a manager brought you a problem from their team and you solved it yourself. Open the first lecture, take the Second-Line Reply Card and write down what you would say next time, so that the problem stays with its owner. Enrol now and start your first lesson today.

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