The Making Of A Manager: What To Do When Everyone Looks To You
As a first time manager, very few employees have any idea of where to start with their management journey. Many companies assume high performing entry level employees should be rewarded deservedly so with a promotion. With the promotion, typically comes more responsibility, and instead of being told what to do, maybe part of your role moving forward is managing one, few, or an entire team of people under you. What got you ahead in the role you were hired into for the company may be completely different from what your expectations are as a manager and leader of the organization in your newly assumed role.
Despite managers being a vital piece of an organization’s success, companies often do not invest the time or resources to train a new manager. First time managers are left to figure it out as they go and often times do not succeed. Very little time is often spent even before the promotion as to if the high performing individual would be successful as a manager or even wants to become one. A common way to frame the above is through the Peter principle, which states that a person who is competent at their job will earn a promotion to a position that requires different skills. A common example is that a highly skilled salesperson excels at their entry level sales position and thus gets promoted to a manager position, taking away from their skillset strength and replacing their day to day with a skillset they haven’t been trained on, may not have the natural ability to do, and thus far likelihood to fail themselves and those around them as a manager.
Absent your company, leadership, or others in your organization providing formalized training, tips, or advice on how to succeed as a first time manager, I felt that as a first time manager myself reading the The Making of A Manager By Julie Zhao provided some key considerations from someone who was in those same shoes.
Below are my main takeaways and applications for first time managers.
- Julie is a designer and akin to management, she draws parallels that it is a “deeply human endeavor to empower others”
- Before becoming a manager, Julie and many other people think a manager’s duties are to have meetings with reports to help them solve problems, share feedback, and figure out promotions & firings.
- After her experiences as a manager, that changes to building a team that works well together, supporting members reach their career goals, and create processes to get work done smoothly and efficiently.
- She expands that for management, your job is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.
- 5 researched conditions that increase a team’s odds of success: having a real team, a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive organizational context, and expert coaching.
- A manager’s day should be sorted into 3 main buckets: purpose, people, and process.
- Important processes to master: running effective meetings, future proofing against past mistakes, planning for tomorrow, and nurturing a healthy culture.
- Ultimate goal is not to do all the work yourself but set your team up to generate the highest multiplier effect on the collective outcome
- Finally, there is great 1:1 topics Julie mentions as probing questions that really get to how you can get the best out of people
Don’t go into management blind, learn as much as you can from the people that are in it now or have gone through it for years and have been successful.
