Transitioning from an individual contributor role to that of manager can be exciting but also somewhat daunting.
There will be multiple management challenges, but they can all be summed up in 3 main hurdles that you will need to overcome on the path through new manager training. Get these right and you’ll earn the respect of your team and fulfill your new responsibility to improve and sustain your team’s performance.
- Change your mindset.
As a new manager, you are now responsible not just for accomplishing your own tasks but to see that your team members accomplish their tasks. This means that, first and foremost, you must make your expectations, standards and behaviors crystal clear. Your employees cannot fulfill their roles successfully until they understand what they are to do and how their contribution fits into the team and company goals. Metrics for success must be established so you can monitor performance and create individual plans for improvement.
And if you were promoted to manager internally, you also need to figure out a way to shift from being a co-worker to managing those who used to be your peers. It can be awkward. The best advice is to recognize that at the workplace you are the manager but off work you can still be friends. The key to shifting your role successfully is to be absolutely fair and transparent with the way you handle personnel issues on your team…no favorites nor targets.
- Take time.
Be easy on yourself. Take the time to think about how your behavior as a new manager will and should change. Overall, your communications with your team need to be open and honest. Never pretend to be someone you are not. If you don’t know how to do something, ask. If you try to fake it, you will lose credibility, your most important asset as a manager.
Be thoughtful about how you spend your time. You want to be available to answer questions and concerns, but you also need to set aside chunks of time to plan team goals, strategize, manage your budget, and track progress.
Organize your time so that you can meet regularly one-on-one with your team members. This is the best way to deal with performance opportunities and breakdowns. Invest the time required to develop the personal relationships that will let you know about problems before they become too big to handle.
- Pay attention to your own development.
Learn all you can about how to lead and manage well. Take advantage of any new manager training opportunities and find a mentor who can coach you along the way.
Now get started…you can do it!
Learn more at: http://www.lsaglobal.com/new-supervisor-new-manager-training/
If you are a new manager (or even if you are an “old” manager), you should not manage by trial and error. Too much is at risk…your reputation, the trust and respect of your team, upset and turnover in the ranks, team performance and your sense of well-being.
What you really need is targeted and relevant new manager training that will teach you what you need to know to succeed in this new supervisory role—a role where others depend upon you for leadership, direction and motivation. You are no longer simply responsible for managing yourself; you are responsible for managing an entire team and for their individual and collective performance results.
Until you have the opportunity for new manager training to provide you with the foundation to succeed, make sure you don’t make the following all-too-common mistakes:
- Pretending you have all the answers.
Your team is far more likely to respect an honest “I don’t know” than your pretense at knowing more than you do. A little humility can go a long way toward building trust as a new manager. Make sure that you seek your team’s feedback, suggestions and help to create the circumstances necessary for high performance.
- Trying to do it all.
Being a new manager is the perfect time to learn how to better depend upon others. First understand your own strengths, weaknesses and aspirations. Then get to know the strengths and weaknesses of the individuals on your team. Understand what drives them and what they like to do. Then make and continually adjust assignments based upon what makes sense to you, to them, and to the team as you work toward common goals.
- Favoring friends.
As a manager in charge of others, you cannot be seen to treat any on your team with favoritism. Nothing can undercut respect faster than treating team members unfairly. Expectations for success and failure for each job should be clearly stated and transparent to all. Rewards and consequences should be applied appropriately, consistently and evenly according to the standards set by you and the team. Sure you can (and should) reward people differently based upon their performance. Just do not do it based upon anything else.
- Blaming others.
Being a new manager comes with higher expectations and greater levels of exposure than being an individual contributor. When things go awry, your team will carefully watch your reactions. Are you going to call out those who made a mistake or will you have their back? New managers work hard to see that they achieve results fast to prove they deserved the promotion. But if they lose the trust of the team, they have lost more than they know. Instead, by owning up to the mistake and working with the team to fix it, a new manager will earn the respect of their superiors as well as the loyalty of their team.
Trial and error is not a good leadership or learning strategy for new managers. Too much is at stake.
Learn more at: http://www.lsaglobal.com/new-supervisor-new-manager-training/
In any comprehensive new manager training there is a module on how to run effective meetings. Participants learn about how to create an agenda, how to facilitate so attendees stay on topic, how to handle conflict and how to establish meaningful next steps. But seldom is there focus on the value of the quick, informal meetings that can take place anywhere, any time.
From a management perspective, a lot can be accomplished in 10-15 minute sessions that occur over a coffee break or just before leaving at the end of the day. Besides helping team members get to know each other better, these informal meetings can provide opportunities to:
- Share problems and solutionsTeam members can talk about what problems they are facing and ask for help in solving them. It is an effective way to support each other and also to share lessons learned. When more than one brain works the issue, the solutions are bound to be more creative and are more quickly put into place. The problem could be as simple as learning the most effective way to transport a piece of equipment from one place to another or as complex as gaining an audience with a key stakeholder in the sales process. But when company-specific best practices are shared, everyone benefits.
- Recognize discretionary effort and successOur small team at LSA huddles now and then to share “Good News.” Everyone is called upon to participate. There are no rules about what is shared…it could be personal or professional news...a new contract signed or a home project completed. The purpose is to reinforce the important bonds that hold us together and keep us working with mutual respect toward a common goal.
- Raise issues of common concernSometimes there is a need to talk about issues that affect the entire team. It can be difficult to list them on a formal agenda that could draw too much attention. Instead, these issues are often more effectively aired first in an informal discussion. This way you can check to see if your experience is a common one. If so, you can talk about how to raise the issue to a level where it can be dealt with effectively.
When new managers understand the value of informal gatherings for team bonding, for recognition and for problem solving, they put in place a simple and effective management process that can only strengthen their team.
Learn more at: http://www.lsaglobal.com/new-supervisor-new-manager-training/
Is this the way your team members see you? Are you the new manager so afraid that they won’t do the job “right” that you peer over the cubicle walls to check on them? This is definitely not the way to build a loyal and dedicated and high performing team!
Micromanagement has a negative connotation…for good reason. It is a management style whereby the manager all too closely observes and tries to control the way subordinates do their jobs. Here is how micromanaging can hurt you and your team:
- Loss of trustIf you don’t trust your team to do their job well, they will quickly lose their trust in you as their new supervisor. A team without trust as its foundation suffers from poor performance, low morale and high turnover.
- Overly dependent employeesIf you control an employee’s output, they will quickly lose confidence in their own ability to handle the job. They begin to rely upon you as their manager to monitor and guide their every move. And they become unwilling to experiment or to try something new. Just think how this stifles innovation, limits growth and blocks continuous improvement.
- Your own burnoutYour constant need to watch over your employees will wear you out. Remember that delegating effectively is one of the critical management skills that every new leader needs to embrace. If you can’t delegate well, you end up looking over too many shoulders. You will not be able to maintain that exhausting plan for long.
How can new managers overcome the temptation to oversee every move of their team?
- Understand that you do it because you are afraid your team members can’t. Give them a chance! Back off and let them prove themselves. Likely many on the team have been doing their job successfully for a long time before you were appointed to manage them.
- Work with your team to determine which jobs really need to be done perfectly to achieve team goals. You may want to take on those few jobs yourself. Let the others go for now.
- Set up some guidelines. Explain your anxiety over handling your new role well. Work together to figure out a reasonable reporting schedule, assure your availability when there are questions, and ask what support they need from you in order to be successful.
New managers understandably have some anxiety about tackling their new role. But micromanaging is not the way to handle it. First give your team members a chance to prove themselves.
Learn more at: http://www.lsaglobal.com/new-supervisor-new-manager-training/
It is just human nature to critique, at least in our own minds, our coworkers’ behavior and productivity on the job. And, of course, we consider ourselves astute observers. No doubt we could fill the thought bubbles above with comments on each and every individual teammate.
But it is really up to the new team manager to translate opinion and observation into constructive feedback that team members can act upon to improve their performance.
The skill of giving feedback well is one of the most difficult to apply effectively…especially for new managers who as individual contributors were focused on their own performance, not the performance of others. New manager training gives guidelines for giving effective feedback but there is seldom enough practice time for the new supervisor to feel proficient. A role play is one thing; confronting a team mate with negative feedback is another. And yet, effective performance management is probably one of the most critical of all the skills new managers must acquire.
As a new manager, plan ahead and follow these effective feedback guidelines:
- Check your attitude.Your goal should be to truly help the employee perform at a higher level, not place blame or get angry. With this as your motivation, you will set the right tone and lessen the employee’s defensiveness.
- Be straightforward and specific.Explain objectively just what the performance issue is and why it concerns you. Here is an example:
“I noticed you were texting on your phone yesterday at the team meeting. It seemed you were not interested in the discussion and it set a bad example for others.”
- Give the employee a chance to respond.Ask if there were any reasons for the behavior and then listen carefully for facts and feelings. The employee may well have a good explanation. Perhaps they were waiting for an important message from their doctor or needed to respond to an urgent message from their child. Once you have the context for the behavior, you can decide how serious the problem is.
- Solve the problem together.How can the negative behavior be eliminated or improved? Work as a team to find a solution. Your role as a new manager should be to help the employee understand how their behavior affects others and plan a path forward. Constructive feedback should focus on development and be encouraged by ongoing feedback and performance coaching.
- Agree upon next steps and schedule a follow-up meeting.Here is where you need the employee’s commitment to improvement and their ownership of the plan. Get together soon and as often as needed to assess the success of the agreed-upon performance improvement plan. And, if there is little improvement and the behavior is serious, involve HR. They can help lend perspective and ensure the steps to correction are legal and well documented.
Maybe you are not as far from management as you think!
If you are a visibly contributing member to a high performance team, you likely have already adopted some of the traits that good leaders personify. You may need help in developing some important management skills such as strategic thinking, delegating tasks, working with a budget, and effective performance management, but you should be able to pick those up in a proven new manager training program. Assuming your relationships on your team were positive, here are the management skills you may already have mastered through your experience in working with a multi-faceted, cross-functional high performing team.
People skills
Many people come by these people skills naturally and are unaware that they have them. Yet these are the skills that will be most critical to your success as you take on the role of a new manager. You need to know how to:
• Communicate effectively with all types of employees and be able to adapt your style to theirs
• Establish a performance environment where questions are welcome, new ideas openly discussed and issues are raised without worry of repercussion
• Build relationships that are founded upon mutual trust and respect
• Be accountable for what you say you will do
• Show appreciation to others in a meaningful way for extra effort in times of stress or for a job well done
• Give timely and constructive feedback with the intent of helping the recipient improve
• Receive feedback and put it to good use as you, yourself, seek to continuously improve
• Deal fairly in all your team interactions
• Have empathy for employees who are struggling and offer the support they need
• Rally the troops when times are tough
That’s a long list! But if you have been consistently successful in your team relationships, you probably can check off many of the above new supervisor traits. The best new leaders often exhibit the best people skills. If you have been a valued and respected team player because you know how to work well with others, you are closer than you think to becoming a successful new manager.
Learn more at: http://www.lsaglobal.com/new-supervisor-new-manager-training/
This article is heading off in a somewhat different direction from most leadership advice on how to excel at your role as a new manager. We, too, in our new manager training, talk about how you as a new manager should interact with your team. But here we want to shift the focus to how you should take care of and present yourself.
After all, at some point, you need to stay healthy and upbeat if you want your team to follow in your footsteps. Just like a traveling parent who needs to put the oxygen mask on themselves before they put it on the child in the airplane seat next to them, you need to keep yourself from overwork and poor habits in order to care for your team and model “the way” by setting a good example.
Here are three tips on maintaining your well-being and thus setting yourself up to be the best new manager you can be:
1. Set aside some time for yourself as a new manager.
Do something that restores your energy, feeds your soul or simply gives you pleasure. Perhaps a morning walk in the park before you begin your busy day, your favorite music on the radio as you drive to work, 15 minutes of meditation to orient your mind toward things that really matter, or time at the gym or on your mountain bike. You pick what works best for you and give yourself that “gift” every day.
2. Eat healthy and get adequate sleep as a new manager.
You cannot work efficiently throughout the week unless you maintain a healthy regimen of good food and good sleep. When you are overtired, you risk making mistakes for lack of attention or making “unfriends” due to your overdose of grumpiness . This is no joke. Aside from the health problems associated with a lack of sleep, sleep deprivation was sighted as a cause for the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. The food side is also important. Poor eating habits can lead to problems with mental functioning and disturbances in mood and behavior such as fatigue, hyperactivity, irritability and apathy.
3. Ask for feedback on how you are doing as a new manager.
Don’t be afraid to ask for input on how you could handle things better. This will be the question you put to your team members over and over again as you manage performance. But when flipped, it provides insight into what your new team looks for in their leader, into what matters most to them and offers an opportunity to grow in a direction that will serve you and the team.
When you are struggling to “make it” as a new manager, don’t neglect your own physical and psychic needs. Take care of them as a daily habit and you will be in a far stronger frame of mind to tackle the ever-present challenge of managing people.
Learn more at: http://www.lsaglobal.com/new-supervisor-new-manager-training/
