First-time Manager's Survival Guide

Recently I had an opportunity to take some time off work and look back at myself and my career journey. I compiled a list of things I enjoyed throughout my professional life and made few notes to solidify my perspectives on each topic. One thing that stood out was my strive to become a good manager. As I went over my notes, I realized I've attempted various tactics and strategies to practice management, applying concepts from a book to mimicking people I benchmarked to trying out random things out of the blue. And now after many years since taking on my first role as a manager, and spending time to synthesize my experiences to a set of guiding principles... voilà!

First-Time Manager's Survival Guide: 5 things you need to be doing right now

Congratulations on landing on your first managerial role. You're probably few years into your career, and have shown rock-star track record which got you where you are today. Here are my short thoughts on how you can successfully transition from an individual contributor to a manager.

1. Stop doing your old job.

The most common path to a managerial role is by getting promoted on a job that you have proven to be good at as an individual contributor (e.g., marketing associate to marketing manager, software engineer to engineering manager). Since the promotion is a natural extension of the old role, people seem to be compelled to keep doing the work that they are good at. This is a big NO. Your new job is to guide and steward your team to perform at least as good as you, if not more. And the way to enable this is to let your team do the work, even if they are not as adept as you are, and given them enough runway to get it done. Spend your time on coaching the team instead of cranking out work products from your old job.

2. Be comfortable taking actions with limited information

'Stop doing your old job' does not mean stop making decisions. Actually you will need to make more decisions more quickly, on more critical topics. Since you are not plugged into the nitty gritty details (because you stopped doing your old job) you will find yourself lacking some context required to make a 100% informed judgement. It's ok -- don't panic. You don't need to get all worked up chasing down every detail in the spreadsheet or getting a download of everything that happened with your team. Rather, up-level your brainpower to piece together scattered information and synthesize them into a concise executive summary that can give you 80% of the answer. As long as you can internalize and get the 80% right, you can always follow-up to make up for the 20%.

3. Become a psychiatrist (figuratively)

Everybody has a certain tolerance level for stress, and as a manager you should be considerate about different types and levels of stress each of your team members have. If you are managing a team with high stress level, you may get some near-term results but you definitely won't be able get sustaining high performance. People will snap. Every now and then, you need to 'woosah' (Bad Boys 2 reference) the team to relieve them of things that are bothering them mentally. I try to do this every now and then during my 1:1s - the 'psychotherapy' sessions - listening compassionately and providing honest thoughts on topics that are being discussed. Not only I find this helpful on relieving tension and stress of the team member, but also extremely valuable in building professional and personal trust.

4. Provide air cover

Some people also call this 'sh** cover'. No need to go deep on this. If you can't protect and cover your team from external issues, your manager title is meaningless.

5. Inspire the team

Like the proverb 'you can lead the horse to the water but you can't make him drink', you can make your team work on something but you can't make them to like the work. Well... not unless you try. This is very important because individual's passion for work directly influences the culture of the team and the quality of work it produces. When you see people committing to work products and are driven to achieve them with a fire in their belly, you know you'll get better results than people who are just trying to get by (i.e., 'it's paying my bills' attitude). Daniel Pink's book Drive identifies autonomy, mastery, and purpose as three drivers of motivation, and inspiration plays a crucial role in providing individuals a purpose for things they do at work. Set ambitious and inspirational goals, rally your team against them, and celebrate wins that keep the inspiration index high.

So there you go. These were my five advices to help you survive your first management experience. What would you build on top of them to go beyond survival and thrive?

Photo: Steve Rhodes, Flickr