6 Tips for First Time Managers

This week's post comes from the blog of Jesse Lyn Stoner of the Seapoint Center for Collaborative Leadership:

Congratulations! They’ve made you a manager of other people. Now what? Maybe you’ve had bad managers in the past and think that this is your chance to do it right. The jump from being an individual contributor to first-time manager is a dramatic and challenging one. It requires you completely change the way you see your role and how you produce results. You may have been a fantastic worker at your job. Does that mean you’ll be a fantastic manager? Not necessarily. Hopefully these tips will get you off on the right foot.

  1. Approach your new role with humility
    1. While you might THINK you know what a good manager should do, it’s really not as easy as it might look. Understand that you’re going to make mistakes. You’ll earn the respect of your team when you own up to your mistakes and ask for help now and then.
  2. Change your focus.
    1. You might have been a superstar as an individual contributor but now you have an entirely different job. Your job now is to help your team and to support them in their work. One of the hardest thing for most first-time managers to learn is delegation. It’s hard to give up control and still be accountable for the results.
  3. Learn the skills of management.
    1. Being a manager requires skills such as communication, how to give feedback (sound much like Toastmasters?), and how to delegate. Your employer may, or may not, provide any help with this. Regardless of what THEY do, YOU can still teach yourself by reading blogs and books and taking advantage of free online training. To put it bluntly, YOUR success is going to be YOUR responsibility.
  4. Acknowledge your changing relationships.
    1. One of the hardest things about becoming a manager for the first time is that your relationship with your former peers has changed. You don’t have to be cold and aloof and completely ignore them, but you can’t be buddies like you were before. You can still be friends but you have to be clear about the boundaries between friendship and work. And do NOT let your personal relationships cloud your work decisions.
  5. Understand the big picture.
    1. Remember what it was like when you were an individual contributor and your boss made decisions you couldn’t understand. Your team is going to have the same questions so it helps if YOU understand where the company is going and how your team supports the company’s mission and goals.
  6. Find a mentor.
    1. In a perfect world your new boss will help coach you. If that doesn’t happen, find someone else that you trust to advise you. Ideally it will be someone that knows your company’s culture and politics.

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