While there are a variety of things that should be in place support to help managers navigate successfully through the challenges, at the least, we should ensure they can access development that will support them in the role.Congratulations! You’ve been hired for or promoted to a management position for the first time in your career! This truly is an exciting day. In conclusion, it is important that we support new and first-time managers so they are better equipped to handle these challenges. Whatever our views about leadership and management development, it is still important to invest in new managers as this will boost their confidence and give them tools that will help them fare much better in the job. If truly as DDI states this is the case then most managers have left unsupported for up to four years in the job. What this means is that a lot of managers get training for the first time four years after they took the job. DDI expresses that this is a concern because on average people become managers at the age of 36. While the team members may truly know what they are doing, they still need guidance and leadership from the manager, and finally… …they’ve either been given none or not enough development to support themĪccording to DDI, a specialist leadership development consultancy, on average managers first get training at the age of 40. To avoid confrontation, the manager leaves them to ‘get on with it’ while placating himself with the often false belief that the team knows what they are doing and they will get the job done without you interfering. This can happen in teams where the new manager used to work at the same level as the team members. The other side of this is for the manager to behave in a laissez-faire way by being extremely laid back in order not to upset or disrespect team members. Tell them what to do and take away initiative from them.
That means you watch over your team members so closely. You have your standards and you can’t afford to let them slip. So, you want to make sure that people do what they are supposed to do properly. The tendency is for managers in this situation to try and do more of what they did as an individual contributor which obviously won’t work and this leads to another challenge… …they may resort to micromanaging Hence, it’s not surprising that very good employees end up being poor managers. You need skills that go beyond the technical skills that made you a good choice for ‘ employee of the month’. When you become a manager you are accountable for the output of a team and that is hard. Unfortunately, the abilities that made the person successful in their individual role are worlds apart from what they will need to succeed as a manager.Īs an individual contributor, you are doing things that only you are accountable for. What in the world does that mean? When a person becomes a manager for the first time, they were probably promoted into the role because they were really good at what they did, an excellent individual contributor.
Most employees who become managers have been promoted to their next level of incompetence. There’s a popular saying and I cannot remember exactly how it goes but here’s my version: Mixing up job role skills with management and leadership skills Here are three of the challenges that first-time managers may face. Anticipating those challenges and doing something about them helps but you’ve got to know what they are first. Being a first-time manager is not easy even if you are managing just one person, and lots of people who become managers do go on to find it difficult and face challenges that could have been avoided.