Did you just get promoted to become a manager? Congratulations! Actually, it may sound simple, but it’s definitely not easy! Transitioning from an employee to a manager is a big change. While you may be excited and ready to take on the extra responsibilities, it’s important to anticipate potential challenges over your promotion.
Common Challenges when Transitioning to a Leadership Role
As a newly appointed manager, you'll definitely encounter some obstacles during the transitioning period. Here are some common challenges that you might face.
Coaching over teaching
Leadership is about creating inspiration, influence and impact. As a leader, you're expected to coach rather than provide solutions for your team members.
Self-doubt
If you move to a managerial position, you'll definitely have self-doubts. You might overthink and have questions like “Do I have to change my working style?” or “Am I capable of leading the team?”
Delegation
You used to take on a lot of things but as a manager, your job is to make your team execute their role at the level you’ve done before or better. So you'll have to play an important role in the process of distributing and entrusting work to your team.
So, what should you do to prepare yourself for the new manager role?
Here are some tips that may help you with the transition!
1. Identify the success factors that got your promoted
Knowing that performance is so valuable, you should search for the success factors that led to your promotion. There are 3 distinct success factors that can help you identify your working values - behavioral, process and capability.
Understand your value as a person and what makes it different from everyone else. Identify your personal characteristics such as your skills and attitudes that differentiates you from average performance. It will help you pinpoint more clearly what skills you need to improve in order to be successful in your new role. You should also understand what you did differently that resulted in success. Capture that and share with your team to help them succeed. This will also help you be more objective and you’ll be able to provide the appropriate coaching for your team.
2. Think about how you want to lead
The promotion itself doesn’t make you a leader - but successful leading makes you a leader.
You should identify the dynamics of your team. There are several tools you can use to understand the characteristics of your team members - such as Enneagrams, MBTI and NEO-PI. In our previous blog post, we highlighted how Lukman Low used the Enneagram Personality test to guide how he works with individuals. Check out his story here!
Improving the effectiveness of a team is not easy, but yields valuable results in the long run. To get everyone in sync, you can do a team exercise by using the Lencioni model - The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. This will help your team to understand behavioral expectations and overcome challenges that prevent the team’s efficiency.
3. Stop doing and start delegating
There will be times where you’ll think it would be faster if you did it yourself, as opposed to assigning it to someone else. That said, you've to avoid the temptation! Not delegating hurts you on two fronts: first, it doesn’t allow your employees to develop, as you're micromanaging them. Second, it will consume your time, to the point you won’t have enough energy to do more critical tasks like strategic thinking and managing your team.
Remember, your goal isn't to do the work yourself - it's to get the work done through others. Invest your time to teach them what you know and how to get the job done. One of the tools that may help you delegate and make decisions more effectively is the RACI model - a responsibility assignment matrix in project management. This matrix may instill confidence in your team as they will get clarity over their tasks and responsibilities.
4. Be a good coach
It’s important to help your team members when they need extra support but you need to be able to give them time to learn and improve on their own. Most managers fall short in this area! They tend to teach and provide answers for their team members rather than coaching.
You should provide guidance rather than giving the answers to every challenge that your team might face. A good coach not only imparts knowledge and introduces learnings - but also makes adjustments and provides feedback based on real-time information. Guide your team in creating solutions and work together to fix mistakes. Leadership approaches like these are more beneficial and meaningful for supporting team members rather than taking on challenges for them.
One of the most popular tools for coaching is the GROW model. It is a coaching framework used in everyday leadership to unlock potential and possibilities. You should study and implement this model as it may promote confidence and self-motivation - leading to increased productivity and personal satisfaction.
5. Drive rich feedback culture
Schedule one-on-one and team meetings regularly to keep your team members up to date with their performance and productivity. By doing evaluations and feedback sessions, it will help them set improvement goals and get better at their jobs - don’t forget to provide positive feedback as well!
Providing feedback is indeed not an easy thing to do, especially if it's a negative one. But delaying giving feedback can lead to a disconnect between your team. You can practice using the Situation - Behavior - Impact (SBI) model to structure your feedback so that it's concise and nonjudgmental. By using this method, you may avoid negative responses from your team.
This will also offer you valuable insight into your effectiveness as a manager. You will be able to integrate better motivational techniques for your team and implement strategies for your own improvement.
6. Learn from your superiors
Talk to your in-house leader or mentors to discuss leadership challenges and solutions.
Observe their leadership style and learn how to perform your job above expectations. Get their advice on how to better navigate all the challenges before you. If your superiors offer mentorship for new managers, take advantage of the opportunities to develop your strengths in your role. Learn how they set goals with their teams and delegate workflow to achieve objectives.
As you learn new approaches to effective management, apply your skills at work to demonstrate your capabilities. This shows your eagerness to learn and succeed as a manager. There’s bound to be some kickback, but if you’ve given your leadership plan a serious thought, you will have a firm foundation to start!
So in conclusion,
As a manager you need to be far more open-minded. It’s not focused on just your individual goals anymore - it's about how you can inspire others to hit bigger targets. All that takes a change in your attitude. The quicker you can make that switch, the more effective manager you’ll be!
In addition, we suggest you read The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You - a book by Julie Zhuo to learn more about the process of becoming a manager!
Drop a comment in the section below if you’re going through the transition of becoming a manager! We’d love to hear your story and thoughts on this.
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