From Marcus Buckingham’s The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success:
The chief responsibility of a great manager is not to enforce quality, or to ensure customer service, or to set standards, or to build high-performance teams.
Each of these is a valuable outcome, and great managers may well use these outcomes to measure their success. But these outcomes are the end result, not the starting point. The starting point is each employee’s talents.
The challenge: to figure out the best way to transform these talents into performance. This is the job of the great manager.
To say that again:
The [chief responsibility of a manager] is to figure out the best way to turn each employee’s talents into performance.
If you are a manager, that is the one thing you need to do.