7 Things You Must Understand as a New Manager
I'm glad you stumbled upon my newsletter! Every two weeks, I share stories, tips, and ideas for new and aspiring managers. Learning to lead is a lifelong quest, and this is a chance to learn from my past struggles and successes.
Over the past several years, I’ve had the privilege of training dozens of managers who work in many different roles: Engineering, Accounting, Customer Service, Journalism, Research, Finance, Product Management, Marketing, etc.
I've noticed that many first-time managers struggle with the same handful of things I did when I led my first team back in 2011, which tells me these challenges are common hurdles for most new managers.
If you recently became a manager (or hope to become one soon), here are seven things you should know.
1. This job is fundamentally different than your last one.
The transition from individual contributor to manager is a HUGE transition in many ways—not least of which is that the type of work you complete changes dramatically. Corporate trainer Monica D. Livingston expresses it well:
“You used to be in charge of the work. Now you’re in charge of the people who do the work.”
That’s a big paradigm shift.?
This means all of your focus should be on how you can remove impediments for your team and get them to be their best selves at work.
2. The "distractions" ARE the job.
When I first became a manager, I was frustrated by the number of distractions that arose each day. People interrupted me about everything: conflicts they couldn't resolve themselves, problems they couldn't solve, questions they wanted to run past someone.
As I saw it, all of these interruptions kept me from doing my "important work."
But then I realized that those interruptions embodied the human elements of leadership: empathizing with team members, developing my team, and solving problems. I gradually learned that those distractions ARE the job . That realization gradually freed me from the stress and shame I had previously felt for not having enough time to do my own work.
As a manager, you’re the lubricant for all of the gears spinning in the team’s machinery. Your job is to remove friction—to help your team move faster, communicate better, feel more engaged, and accomplish more.
Your job is them. This is what leadership looks like.
3. Your team's success is determined by how well you can give feedback.
No team can be successful if they don't know whether their work is meeting the mark. This means that—whether you like it or not—you will need to give people a lot of feedback in this new role.
Team members will look to you for affirmation that they've done well and ideas for how to improve. If you hesitate to provide feedback (both positive and constructive), then any bad work will become worse and any good work will go unrecognized.
Feedback is a massive aspect of your new role.
4. You're not an impostor—even if you feel like one.
I've felt like a fraud many times in my career, and that feeling is often most poignant whenever I've stepped into a new management role. It's easy to look around you at the other managers and think, "All of these people know what they're doing, but I don't. Who am I fooling? I don't deserve this."
But rest assured: MANY new managers feel just like that.
That discomfort comes from the fact that you want to do a good job and you've never done something like this before. As you get more days and weeks under your belt, you'll begin to feel more comfortable. So don't freak out and don't doubt yourself. You belong in this role, and you'll figure it out.
“Realize that nobody knows what they’re doing…Nobody knows exactly what is going on. There are a ton of people who will tell you they know the answers. These people are liars. The world we live in is the result of a lot of brave people tinkering, failing, and succeeding once in?awhile.” -Kyle Eschenroeder?
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5. You don't have to pretend you know everything.
It's a common misconception that you should "fake it til you make it" to prove you belong in this new role. I think that's bullshit. Team members can sniff out a faker, and there's a difference between exhibiting some confidence (good thing) versus trying to fool people into thinking you know more than you do (bad thing).
I've found that it's often best to lead from a perspective of confident humility .
Confident?humility is having the modesty to understand whether you’re the best person to make?a?decision.?It means?learning?from others when they’re the expert and acting with?boldness?when you’re the expert.
“The first rule is not to fake anything.?You have to be humble,?and you can’t pretend to be someone you’re not or to know something you don’t.?You’re also in a position of leadership, though,?so you can’t let humility prevent you from leading.?It’s?a fine line, and something I preach today.?You have to?ask the questions you need to ask,?admit without apology what you don’t understand,?and do the work to learn what you need to learn as quickly as you can.?There’s nothing less confidence-inspiring than a person faking a knowledge they don’t possess.?True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.” -Bob Iger
If you respect your team’s knowledge and abilities, they’ll also come to respect yours. There’s no need to fake anything. Employees want to follow someone who exhibits confidence, and they want to emulate someone who exhibits humility.?
Confidence generates followers; humility generates disciples. You’ll need both to become a successful leader.
6. You need to relinquish some control.
The transition from individual contributor to manager is especially difficult once you realize that becoming a manager often means relinquishing control of tasks, projects, processes, and decisions that used to be yours. That can be painful.?
If you feel yourself trying to hoard familiar tasks, you’re not alone. Almost every manager feels the same urge. But the only way to fully step into your new role is to fully step out of the old one, which includes selectively delegating tasks to others around you.
Delegation—when done correctly—is a superpower. It frees up time for you, develops new capabilities in your team, and helps you focus on more strategic initiatives that will help the business. Start developing the skill of delegation.
"Delegating is extremely inefficient initially and extremely efficient eventually. It involves more up-front work from you to develop employees' abilities so they can produce quality work at scale." -Claire Hughes Johnson
7. You can't wait until you have 100% of the information you want.
Managers have to make hundreds of decisions—both large and small. For the majority of those decisions (especially the big ones), you will not have perfect information. In fact, perfect information usually doesn't exist.
Here are a few examples of decisions you may encounter:
In all of these situations, you will only have a subset of the information you'd ideally like to have. So you will be tempted to wait for more information because it'll feel like you don't know enough.
But in most situations, some decision is better than no decision. Your team needs a direction, even if that direction isn't perfect. And if you try to wait until you know everything, your project will fail.
"The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing." -Seth Godin
In most situations, you'll need to become comfortable with pulling the trigger on a decision once you've reached 75-80 percent certainty. One hundred percent certainty will be too late.
If you recently transitioned into a management role, congrats! I know it's tough, but you can do this. Everyone struggles a bit when they get started, but you'll learn as you go.
Hopefully these seven tips will help expedite your learning curve a bit. ;-)
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