The role of a manager is more than just the next step in one’s career. It is a new profession that requires additional knowledge. Just yesterday, you were responsible only for yourself, but today you are accountable for the results of the entire team. A promotion requires mastering the functions of control and feedback, improving planning and delegating skills, learning how to teach others, and building relationships within a team. This is especially true in fast-growing companies, where change is a constant part of the process, and the effectiveness of the manager determines the final result for a team and its compliance with the company’s business goals.
Oksana Izmailova, CHRO of the PIN-UP Global international holding company, talks about the mistakes that managers make most often, as well as what qualities a leader should have in order to successfully form an effective team.
This interview contains tips, examples and reflections that will be useful for both beginners and experienced managers. Without theory, but only the things that really work in practice.
What does it mean to you to be a leader?
“It is a very versatile question and the answer consists of many components.
“For me, leadership is, first and foremost, responsibility. Not only for myself and my work, but also for the team, for the overall result, for achieving business goals. When you become a leader, you become responsible for a much larger number of tasks, which brings with it the need to properly distribute the workload, to delegate, to understand the people you work with.
“A leader is a person who really cares about what’s going on. He takes notice if someone is burned out or facing personal difficulties, and doesn’t stand aside. In these moments, it is important not just to organise the process, but to ask the question in time: “How can I help?”
“Leadership is always about being proactive. When you are ready to help and prompt, to point out shortcomings and offer solutions on how to improve the result. In general, I would say that it is an understanding that we are all sailing in the same boat and moving in the same direction.
“Leadership is also about being demanding, first of all to yourself. Constant self-reflection, honest questions to yourself: “am I doing the right thing, am I doing everything up to my best?” It’s about the desire to become better and work on yourself, to give advice to the team, share experience and help them move forward.”
What mistakes do managers make most often?
“One of the most common mistakes is choosing an ineffective model of team interaction. The first one I have faced most often is the adult-child model. When the leader wants to be “kind”, avoid unpopular decisions and, in fact, be good for everyone. As a result, this leads to professionals shifting responsibility to their managers and the company. For example, responsibility for their motivation, emotional well-being and work stability. In this model, it’s the manager or company who’s blamed for mistakes, not the specialist who made them — because they weren’t motivated enough or didn’t receive sufficient support.
“This approach often leads to managers avoiding constructive feedback. But feedback is one of the most important managerial functions, as it directly impacts the growth and development of team members. A relationship model based on the adult–child principle also results in employees offloading some of their work onto the manager, knowing they’ll “fix” it. Just like schoolchildren asking their parents for help with homework, knowing dad will solve the maths problem.
“The second extreme is the friend-friend model. Here, the manager does not want to be strict, fire, penalise or evaluate work critically because “we are friends”. A boss might say, “This isn’t good enough — you need to redo it.” But a friend can’t say that. Accordingly, in this model, the control function collapses, demandingness decreases, and as a result, deadlines and quality suffer.
“But there is the other extreme. Let’s call it the Detachment model. When the manager keeps at a distance and communicates with the team only on working issues. This approach excludes understanding that the performance of a person can be influenced by external circumstances — family, emotional, personal. And if you don’t see it, you can’t give the right support or correctly assess the causes of failure.
“Each of these models loses the most important thing — balance. The manager is either too involved or withdrawn. But efficient work is built on adult partnership and mutual responsibility.”
Then what management model is the most effective?
“I always say that there is no ideal model. But there is something worth striving for — the adult-to-adult model. It means that there is respect, mutual responsibility and adequate distance in the relationship between the manager and the team.
“It is important to know your specialists, to understand how they live and where difficulties may arise. But at the same time you should not lose the managerial function: to set tasks, give constructive feedback, and control the result. This is about the balance between the human approach and the interests of the business.
“A good manager knows how to take care of the team, but he is also not afraid to make unpopular decisions. And his employees in return take responsibility for their work and motivation, not shifting everything to the company or the manager. This approach builds mature teams that are able to produce sustainable results.”
What qualities do you consider the most important for a manager?
“First and foremost for me are professionalism and systematic approach. The ability to understand an issue deeply and comprehensively, to build a working process from scratch, and then to improve it — this is key. We do not just support processes in our holding, we create and scale them. And that’s why a manager must be not only a strong specialist, but also a true architect of functions.
“I value flexibility, being proactive, the ability to take feedback and improve the result. The ability to delegate without losing control. Loving the work is also important. When a person respects the work, both their own and others, you can feel it in the smallest things: deadlines, quality, attitude to the team. I always look for these qualities in people, they are inherent in my deputies and they are also my requirements for myself.
“And, of course, our manager should be able to work at a high pace, switch between tasks and not lose focus. Ultimately, such a manager can create a systematic, scalable and well-controlled function. This is especially important when the team is large. For example, I have more than 200 people in my HR function. It is only through a systematic approach and attention to detail that such a scale can be managed effectively.”
Tell us about the mistakes you have made?
“There is no escape from mistakes — they happen whenever there is experimentation and high speed of work. But it is important to identify them quickly, correct them and take them into account in the future, so as not to repeat them. One case is particularly memorable. We had an important position open and I was in a big hurry to close it. I received a recommendation for a strong specialist, and he really had good cases. But I noticed right away that we didn’t have the same values and that he had a rather complex character.
“But instead of listening to myself, I put this feeling on the back of the mind saying “he was recommended to me”. As a result — a quick offer, quick entry into the team… and already within the trial period it became clear that working together was impossible. We stopped working together, but it left a bad feeling.
“Why was it a mistake? Because I should not substitute my managerial opinion with other people’s recommendations.
“Sometimes, out of inertia, I am drawn to “train” a person instead of immediately looking for someone who already knows how to do it. But the manager has to make decisions that help the business, not create new difficulties.”
And what management mistakes do you most often notice in others?
“At the top of the list are basic but critically important things: poor planning, poor tasking, lack of systematic organisation of the team’s work and, especially, an unstructured control function.
“Control is the most difficult element. It is often perceived as distrust or as a path to punishment. That is why many managers avoid it, try to soften it. But without control, it is impossible to improve the result. This is not about micromanagement. It is about predictability, saving resources, and transparency of processes.
“I often ask at interviews: “How do you structure control?”. And if the answer is “The main thing is that there should be no micromanagement”, I realise that the person most likely has problems with control. This means that there may be blind spots in his or her work that will negatively impact the outcome.
“Another common misstep is a lack of operational depth. For example, a manager wants to appoint an employee as a team leader. I ask: what steps have you already thought of for this? But he hasn’t even formulated the functionality, thought about the adaptation plan, or discussed development. He just decided: “I’ll call Natalia a teamleader and that’s it.” But it doesn’t work like that. The title of a position does not make a person a manager. It requires a whole system: selection, a training plan, clear KPIs. And if a manager is not ready to pass this way, it means that the decision is not fully matured yet.”
The final question is how to build control so as not to strangle the initiative?
“Again, control is not about total supervision, it is about predictability of the result. A well-built control system helps to identify mistakes in time, improve processes and achieve more with less effort. It’s about caring about the outcome of work, not mistrust.
“It’s important to communicate this to the team. Control is not about not trusting, but wanting to help make things better. At the same time, it is necessary to keep a balance: not to become a micromanager, but also not to let go of processes completely. Tuned control saves resources, reduces stress and makes goals more achievable.
“I always advise: start simple. Check you have clear tasks, deadlines, people in charge. And then follow up with regular feedback, support, adjustments. Returning a task for revision in time is also part of caring about the result.”
Final Thoughts?
“PIN-UP Global is a holding company that grows and changes every day. We scaled by 58% last year, and this pace requires not just strong professionals, but effective managers who can create processes, adapt and support teams in change.
“We recognise that the position of manager is a new profession, and we don’t leave people to face the challenges alone. We have courses for managers, we have support from people partners, we have an environment where you can learn and grow.
“Making mistakes is normal. The main thing is to see them, correct them quickly and do better than yesterday. This is the way of a strong manager.”
