A Newly Minted Manager

You’ve always wanted to be a manager. You know you’re hard working, achieve results and think you can make a difference. You learn that a manager’s position is open internally and raise your hand – you want that promotion. Considering your track record, you’re a shoo-in. Congratulations, you’ve just been made a manager!

So, what next?

Your first instinct might be to dive right in, call a meeting, set objectives, and expectations, etc. But what if I told you that becoming a manager is not really a promotion, but a career change? “Career change?”, you ask me, “What do you mean? I’m still doing what I’m doing, only I have people reporting into me.” While you might remain in the same part of the organization, your job now is completely different.

Let’s take a step back. As an individual contributor, your work output was almost 100% within your control: you wrote your own code, compiled your own reports, analyzed the data yourself, or built your own presentations – whatever your job was, the final result was up to you. When you became a manager, all of that was taken away from you and put in the hands of your team. So the question is no longer, “How do I perform well?”, but “How do I ensure that my team performs well?”.

You might think, I’ll set clear expectations and guidelines, and everyone will follow them. Let me spare you the pain, this is not sufficient and will not have the effect you want. As a high performer yourself, reflect on what drives you. Is it what your boss tells you? Corporate strategy? Customer feedback? From experience, I’ve seen the most successful high performers intuitively take all the above, add a bit of personal value and vision, and blend them into something unique. As a manager, you’ll have to find a way to get your team to do the same.

In addition, once you understand that your role is about getting the best out of your team, you’ll start seeing all the skills that made you an excellent individual contributor cannot be one-for-one transferred to your new role as a manager. And that’s why becoming a manager is not a promotion, or more accurately not just a promotion, but a career change. Now if you agree that new role is not more of the same, what does a high performing manager do?

The first thing you’ll be faced with as a new manager is… management! I’m referring here to the day-to-day: assigning tasks, reporting up, approving things. While that’s part of the job, it’s the less critical part of it. The real meat of the job is what I mentioned earlier: how do you inspire your individual team members to perform? I invite you here to think of the good bosses vs. not so good ones you’ve had and reflect on why you feel that way. I’d wager a guess that the good ones will have typically drawn a clear picture of where the organization is going and how to get there, they would’ve given you space to grow and learn, given you feedback that’s timely and direct, and spent a lot of time listening to you and getting your input. There’s a term for all these behaviors: coaching. And while you might shudder at the thought because your experience with coaching was either the dreaded quarterly or annual reviews or know the word as a euphemism for bad bosses publicly criticizing their teams, the proper way of doing it is regular, two-way communication that’s focused on performance. To be absolutely clear: if you want to be a great manager, coaching and mentoring are not part of your job, they ARE the job. It’s not reports, it’s not approvals; it’s ensuring your team can deliver to their highest potential.

I will leave you with this; unlike promotions you might’ve had before, becoming a manager is a career change and, if you rise to the challenge, a change in mindset. It will be difficult because it doesn’t build much on your previous experience. It might initially feel overwhelming and reverting to the strengths and strategies that you got you here might be tempting but fight the temptation! They simply will not work here. The one idea that always grounds me when I feel I’m drowning is this: being a manager isn’t about you, it’s about your team. When they succeed, you succeed. Literally. If you use that as your guiding principle, the rest will come to you naturally.

Welcome to your new career: the messy, unpredictable, emotional, and sometimes contradictory world of managing people! Please do share your experiences in the comments, I would love to know how the transition to management went/is going for you and the key takeaways you’ve learned from it.