One of my most common client groups I work with are those who get promoted to their manager role after showing their effectiveness as an individual contributor (IC). Most fail to recognize that this is not a mere promotion from one level to the next but a disruption that requires the incumbents to think of their new role in an entirely new light. These tips in this blog can also apply to a manager at any level in their career progression.
After the initial excitement about the manager title wears off and the reality of the role sets in, most find it difficult to break their old habits as an IC and their willingness to embrace a new way of thinking how their job now requires them to shift their mindset in a fundamental way.
Why?
Most get into their new manager role with the assumption that they have been rewarded for their excellent work as an IC and that they must continue to build on that skill to strengthen it even further in their new role. Nothing could be further from the truth. In many ways the roles of an IC and that of a first-level manager are orthogonal. By this statement I mean that the role of a manager—any manager—is to demonstrate effective use of the resources they manage and to deliver what is expected by their management on time and with the required functionality. With this mission the manager must focus on how best to manage their resources—teams, tools, infrastructure, and time—to deliver what is required.
This new role as a manager requires the incumbent to understand the four functions of a manager: Leading, Planning, Organizing, and setting up Controls. Each of these four functions, in turn, have their own activities that subsume under them. For example, the Leading functions includes motivating, communicating, decision-making, and selecting and developing people. Each of the remaining three functions also have their own activities under them that define what the management work is under those areas.
Then there is technical work, separate from the management work defined by the above rubric. Since the technical work is familiar to the first level manager because of their past, they often gravitate to doing technical work at the expense of doing the management work as defined by the four functions described above.
So, to be effective in their new role the first-level manager must balance the attention they give to both aspects of their expected responsibility and by doing the work that ONLY they can do.
In addition, as a new manager, most make the following common mistakes:
- Prioritizing competence over warmth: New managers must recognize that they must first connect with their teams and stakeholders before they start bossing around. They must first build trust with their constituents before they exercise their competence. Building trust (EQ) followed by respect (competence or IQ) are essential ingredients for a new manager to be effective.
- Rushing to establish credibility: To show their effectiveness new managers jump into action without appreciating the full dynamic of the teams, stakeholders, and context in which they must play their role. Rushing to show your management muscle may work in the short term, but unless the teams are fully aligned with your leadership this can be a short-term win.
- Not asking for help: A new manager’s role is fraught with surprises. Assuming that you can handle all that comes your way without getting the right help can severely limit you in how you are able to marshal resources to get things done. Ask for help early before things get out of hand, when those who could have helped you will now be reluctant to do so, otherwise.
- Mistakes are inevitable: Avoidable mistakes can often go against your performance. So, if something looks beyond your grasp, seek help, and conquer an avoidable mistake.
- Optimize Vs Sub-optimize: Often, managers have a to make a choice in assigning team members to specific tasks. Certain team members have preferences in how they want to grow their career and your assigned task may interfere with that goal. Your focus is to optimize the entire team to do the task, and in the process, you have compromised one (or more) team member’s career goals. Although optimizing for best result may be a priority for you as a manager, its long-term consequences may result in team members’ unhappiness and even team attrition. So, remember that you must know how to balance them.
- Remembering your new role: Since the first-level managers are emerging out of the IC role, it is difficult for them to ignore that work. They naturally gravitate to doing IC work, even though they have team members who can now do that. The mistakes new managers (and seasoned managers, too) make is that they do technical work at the expense of their management work that only they can do. This makes them a long-term liability as undone management work comes back to bite them and their company much later.
- Manage by exception: New managers are anxious to constantly communicate to the team, stakeholders, and to their management just to show how transparent they are and how on top of everything they are. This is a mistake. It takes time away from value-added work and burdens others to pay attention to what may not be important to them in their everyday work. So, learn to manage and communicate by exception, once you have set up what is normal and what constitutes an exception.
- Delusion of success: A manager cannot know everything, so reaching out to others when you’re in the dark about something is the best way to become current with what is going on. A related pathology is making assumptions that are not tenable and now openly sharing them for fear of being labeled as lacking leadership. So, be open about what you don’t know and even more about the assumptions you make to get your mission on track. Remember, a good manager has more questions than they have answers.
- Fearful of former peers: Now that you have become the boss of your erstwhile peers you may be worried about what they may think of your decisions and how you work with them in that capacity. Once you become their manager you must quickly adopt to the new dynamic between you and your former peers and treat them accordingly. Otherwise, you may soon become a feckless manager.
- Don’t want to bother my boss: My boss knows what and how I am doing. I do not want to waste her time keeping her up-to-date with my progress. This is a big mistake, especially if suddenly there is some development and you cannot handle it, but to show that you can, you keep it away from your boss. Soon, it gets out of hand and your boss feels betrayed. Never surprise your boss.
- Saying no: A manager’s role is to manage resources. When you are constrained by your resources—and almost everyone is—you must learn when and how to say no to someone without feeling guilty about it. If you explain the reason properly it should not compromise your relationships with them.
- Having fun will ruin my image: If you constantly project an aura of seriousness and gravity about how important your job is and how everyone around you must respect your station, it can rub the wrong way with your team and your team may not give its best to the mission at hand. So, have fun and keep the professionalism required to keep that distance between you and the team to get things done.
- Criticizing good work: Most first-level managers get promoted into this role because of their stellar work as an IC. As a manager your role is not to redo someone’s (from your team) work because they did not do it the way you would have done it, but to focus on defining what is required and then accepting it when they meet those requirements. Redoing someone’s good work creates wasted effort, demoralizes the team, and takes your time away from the work you should be doing, instead.
- Managing expectations: As a new manager it is normal to underestimate a task and provide an unrealistic or untenable completion date. If this becomes a habit it creates a credibility problem for you and for you team and results in your team being branded as unreliable, for no fault of the team. Protect your own and team’s reputation by under promising and over delivering it.
If a newly-minted manager does not heed these common-sense guidelines they can soon see themselves as unfit for this role and request for being reconsidered for their previous role as an IC!
Good luck!
