Advice for New Managers
I think all managers remember the first moment they took on management responsibilities and overnight became responsible not only for their own workload but also for the output of their team. It is not an easy transition to make, there are plenty of mistakes you will make, the first experience may not emerge in the best circumstances, and it is rare to be given a gradual introduction with support and training. I hope this week’s post can help by providing some ideas to make this transition as easy as possible.
The reality of becoming manager usually happens in one of two ways. The first is that you are promoted up within your current team. This usually happens when the existing manager moves to a different role. It may be an interim acting-up role with the chance of being permanent if you succeed (no pressure!). Alternatively, you are the natural successor and have been quietly waiting for the opportunity that has suddenly arrived. The second is that you have moved to a different department or organization to manage a team of strangers. Neither option is necessarily better or worse than the other and each comes with its own challenges.
Starting with the promotion within a team. If you are lucky, you have team seniority and are widely seen as the manager designate. This could be the easiest of all scenarios. However, you are still thrust into a new role with a very different skillset and will feel the expectation to deliver from day one. You now find yourself leading a team of staff that just one day earlier were your peers (and probably friends). It can be an uncomfortable experience as you try to recalibrate your team relationships so that everyone can deliver in their new roles.
If you are joining a new company or division at the same time as making the jump into management, there is a clear benefit and an obvious weakness. The benefit is that you get to wipe the slate clean and can present yourself as you want to be seen, unencumbered by others memory of you in a more junior role. The weakness is that you are having to learn a new skillset whilst also navigating your new workplace. You have very little solid ground below your feet in terms of institutional knowledge, learned experience and trust.
My first experience of management was a promotion within an existing team. There were good and bad parts to this experience and most of the bad parts were down to my blind spots and the steep learning curve that management represents. I never like to go into something new unprepared, so I bought a management book for first time managers. It was a very well researched book and consisted of surveys of new managers to get their thoughts on all aspects of management. Unfortunately, learning that 23% of managers found a specific area difficult was neither interesting nor enlightening. All my training came on the job.
I wasn’t made a full manager in my first jump. When a manager vacancy opened the business chose to restructure from three teams to two teams and create two tiers of management within each team rather than promote me directly into the open position. I still reported into my previous manager and effectively managed a team within a team. For full transparency, as an ambitious guy in his twenties, I wasn’t at all happy with this situation. The two employees I would be managing were also challenging for me. If I had been able to hire my own staff, I would have hired replicas of myself. The people I was managing did not approach their work in the same way as me or with the same motivations and I felt as if we were speaking a different language. I quickly concluded that this structure wasn’t ideal and had made my first management experience harder than it needed to be. Only in hindsight and a few years after I left to join another company did I realize how lucky I had been.
My luck was mainly due to my manager at the time. Despite being very different, we got on well and trusted each other. She had a skill I had not yet got close to mastering as a manager, empathy. I would frequently lose patience trying to get my team to work in a certain way (my way). In our weekly one-to-ones I would complain about not being able to choose my team and my manager would gently steer me back to my own mistakes and offer alternative approaches. It didn’t matter what the issue was, the answer was always the same: you are the manager, and the problem is your approach and not your team. It eventually clicked and my performance as a manager significantly improved from that point onwards. I realized much later that I had been fortunate to get two years of dedicated coaching focusing on my biggest management weakness.
If we were to list the ideal attributes of a manager the most important would be the ability to forge a group of people into a team that is capable of hitting and exceeding expected targets. Breaking that down into more tangible skills could include the following: ability to set team priorities, ability to make decisions and give guidance, ability to delegate and balance workloads across the team, ability to develop and encourage personal and career growth in the team, ability to show empathy with colleagues and to ensure that assigned tasks are within their competence and if not to provide additional support, ability to hold candid appraisals and development discussions, ability to tackle negative individual behaviours, and willingness to take full ownership and responsibility for the team’s performance. It would be difficult to develop these skills overnight and some will come more easily than others.
Turning back to the challenges facing newly promoted/installed managers. If you get promoted within your existing department the first barrier and challenge is how others perceive you. If you were promoted within a peer group, then the first change is creating a new relationship with that peer group that reflects the adjusted roles and responsibilities. This is probably most difficult where you have strong friendships. Rather than distancing yourself from existing friends, it is probably less disruptive and more human to focus on inclusion and widening the opportunity for the whole team to have equal access to you as their manager within office hours. Favouritism can be avoided through the assignment of tasks based on skills, requirements and development needs. Always focus more on the wellbeing of the team and its performance rather than how others perceive you. It is one of the more enjoyable experiences watching someone visibly fill the space of their elevated role. They appear as if they have held the role for years and you realize that you are seeing them in a different light. This usually comes because they are focused and have a grip over the key parts of their role rather than any cosmetic changes to the way they present themselves at work. Because they are working in a way that is impressive, you are impressed by them.
One area to watch out for is in workplaces where the newly promoted manager moves out of the bullpen into an office. The TV series The Office (both UK and US versions) used to demonstrate the problem of a manager who wanted the best of both worlds with the status of an office, but the camaraderie of the open plan. If you are constantly out of your office trying to join in conversations and interrupting the team’s work to boost your own energy levels, it will undermine other’s perceptions of you as a manager. Managers should be present and visible, but there is a balance to be set. I worked with a newly promoted manager who frequently made this mistake, his credibility as a manager was undermined and I learnt a valuable lesson before becoming a manager myself.
If you have joined a new team as a first-time manager either at a different company or a different division, the primary objective is to build credibility quickly. If you find yourself in this position, I will level with you, life could be difficult at first. For a company to choose an external candidate with no previous management experience rather than promote from within is a sign that they are looking for a change. For whatever reason, the current team are not in the position to step-up, yet the job is more suitable for a new manager than a more seasoned manager. Someone in the team may have been passed over for promotion, which could delay the acceptance of a new manager. I have also seen situations where someone doesn’t want to be promoted but resents having a new manager with less institutional knowledge than them taking charge.
How do you build credibility quickly? It will depend on the situation, but the easiest route is to establish what skills and knowledge you bring to the table that were lacking from the team. This should be the reason you were hired in any competent recruitment process. It may take some time to break down resistance and you need quick wins and successes to build trust, but keeping the focus on areas that are not working at your new business will ensure that the team knows why you are part of the solution, and usually means you are tackling the highest priorities first.
My other tips are around setting a rhythm and routine. This will be by trial and error, but the easiest starting point would be to emulate how you have worked with your line manager. Is it a Monday morning team meeting to set objectives or is it better to meet later in the week to enable information to flow down from senior leadership meetings? Do you need regular 1:1 catch ups or are you meeting members of your team regularly to discuss progress anyway? However you organize, these are opportunities for you to find your feet and begin the process of setting a positive team culture. As a team manager it is not essential to be liked and I would advise against trying to be liked as that usually involves unnecessary compromises. That said, as a manager, I do want people to like working with me. This aspiration is far more effective because you can usually achieve it by focusing on being a good manager and treating staff fairly.
My concluding thoughts are that people management is not for everyone. You may decide after some experience you would prefer to focus on being a subject matter expert and leave team management to others and there is no shame in this. I really enjoy it and one of the reasons is that it adds depth and dimension to my job. I am forced to think about more than just completing necessary tasks and the wins are usually far more meaningful. The last few years have been enjoyably challenging as I have picked up new teams in areas where I am not even close to being a subject-matter expert and spent time leading virtual teams across different time zones to deliver on specific projects. The basics remain the same and the lessons learnt from my first management experience are as relevant as ever.
Let me know in the comments if you feel I have missed anything. Also, if you fancy sharing war stories of your first management experience, please be my guest. Next week I am going to return to the idea of what success or being successful means.