How to Manage for Success – A Letter to a New Manager

23rd August 2016
New Frontiers
Transformation

Congratulations, you’ve finally got there. After years of hard work, diligence and commitment, you are now a manager, and have a team of people reporting to you.

It’s a great feeling to reach this position and a recognition of just how much you are valued by your boss and by the organisation in general.

Now comes the hard part. And believe me, it is really hard. If you get it wrong (as I did with my first managerial role) it can set you back mentally, take a big chunk out of your resilience and cause a whole load of problems for everyone – you, your staff, your boss and your employer.

It certainly was for me and it took me several years to recover, to reflect on what happened and to learn from it. All this learning has gone into my new Programme – Managing for Success – Making Management Work

Will your Employer Help you make the Transition?

And yet, despite everyone knowing this is tough, because it can happen to every new manager, very few take the steps to avoid the pitfalls. And all too few employers make an effort to provide the necessary development to support people in making the transition from sole contributor to team manager.

Maybe it’s because those who succeed, do so despite the lack of training, development and coaching.

Maybe they think “If I can do this, so can everyone else. Why should it be easier for them than it was for me?”

Whilst those who fail to make the transition have no voice.

The One Vital Lesson you Need to Learn

The thing is – everything that got you to where you are now, is of no use to you in your new role – and I mean everything.

Whist in your previous role you achieved success through your own efforts, knowledge and skills, in your new role, you will only succeed by getting your staff to succeed.

And that requires unlearning a whole raft of things and then learning a whole new set of skills.

So, are you prepared to learn anew? To start from the beginning, just as you did when you first started in your career? Can you remember what you did before you become an expert?

Because you need to do all of that again!

How Do you Become a Great People Manager?

And it’s more difficult and complex this time than it was before, because this time it involves lots of other people – your staff members. People who were once your peers and who are now your subordinates, people who are suddenly colleagues. It involves new relationships, shifts in power, jealousy and politics, all of which intrude in new ways into your working day.

In fact, the biggest thing you need to learn is how to be a great people manager. How to get to the place where everyone in the company wants you to be their manager.

You will know you’ve become a great manager when other managers start to worry that their people would prefer to be working for you.

You can do it. Believe me, you absolutely can. By yourself if you have to, which takes time, is tough and lonely.

Or and ideally, with support from people who care, who have done it before and who have the skills and experience to act as guides and coaches, helping you develop your own path to being a great manager.

This is important, you don’t want help from those who believe that all you need to do is to copy the route they took. Because we are all different, we all manage teams of different people, we all do so at different times and in different places.