How do you learn to lead people? Straight into the deep end! Maybe you spend some time beforehand reading up on the various theories of staff leadership (Personalführung). Or you churned through the theory during your degree. Or you have a particularly generous employer who sends you on a seminar or leadership training. Theory and practice workshops are nice, but they cannot really prepare you for it.
For most of the people who take on line management responsibility (Personalverantwortung) for the first time, I think it was just another rung on their more or less planned career ladder. People responsibility as a career goal. More influence, more power, more room to shape things, finally making real decisions, and of course more money. People responsibility as an end in itself. What do you want to become after your degree? A manager, obviously!
Unfortunately the first challenge begins with the fact that people responsibility also means leading people, and not merely administering, terrorizing them, or simply having the others work for you. Good leadership means engaging with people and recognizing their different weaknesses and strengths in order to get the optimum out of a team in the long run. That takes a good read on people, maybe a bit of charisma, and above all strength of character and the ability to reflect on yourself. What does not belong there is deep technical expertise and narcissistic or egoistic personality disorders. Managers who primarily reinterpret the team's successes as their own and, when something goes wrong, first look for the guilty party among their own staff are just as out of place.
The second challenge of people responsibility: it stays easy-going only as long as everything keeps running smoothly. Underperformers, problem employees and conflicts inside the team can really get on a manager's nerves. Of course you can ignore problems, keep weak employees off the desk with simple make-work tasks, hold a lot of fluffy meetings about the working atmosphere, and otherwise steer clear of every further possible conflict. The result will be that your top performers leave, and in the end the manager has exactly the staff they deserve. What you should actually do is find the right measure of praise, motivation and development – but also sanctions. Honestly, whoever has screwed up has earned being called out on it. Not in a choleric way, but factually and directly. Conversely, good employees have also earned praise and recognition. You cannot treat all employees the same; everyone needs a different leadership style. One needs more direction, another more freedom. Every person is different. Unfortunately, for many people praise is easier to hand out than holding conflict conversations or even issuing dismissals.
Back then I indirectly had the same career goal of taking on people responsibility. I jumped into the deep end. I tried to orient myself by role models and to learn from the mistakes of others. That did not always work, and I made mistakes myself. By now I have found my own style. I am very happy with the make-up of my current team.
But I have renounced the principle of people responsibility as a career goal, and with it as an end in itself. According to the Peter Principle, every employee tends to rise until they reach their own level of incompetence. The thesis Laurence J. Peter put forward does not come out of nowhere. If you are offered your first position as a manager, you should think very carefully about accepting it. In that situation you usually have no idea what it actually means in practice. If you do take the job, you should regularly reflect on whether you can really do it. The theory is simple, the practice unfortunately not necessarily.