Keys to Success for New Managers: How Leadership Coaching Can Help You

Have you been promoted into your first managerial role? Maybe you’re someone that has been a manager for a while, and have been promoted to the next level. Or maybe you’re someone that desires a new challenge, and is considering stepping out of your field of expertise to begin your managerial and leadership journey. Whichever category you fall into, stepping into a new managerial role can generate many emotions from daunting and challenging, to exciting and rewarding.

As a new manager, your team rely on you for direction, guidance, and growth; while the organisation expect you and your team to hit key performance targets and safely deliver your work using more efficient and optimised approaches. Navigating this new world requires more than just the technical expertise that gets many people promoted into leadership positions. In the words of Marshall Goldsmith, ‘What got you here won’t get you there.’ This is where leadership coaching comes in.

I’ve had the privilege of coaching thousands of new leaders over the past decade, and in this blog, I’ll be sharing the major obstacles that new managers face and how leadership coaching can help navigate this new, and somewhat treacherous territory.

Developing Effective Leadership Skills: How Leadership Coaching Can Help You as a New Manager

One of the most powerful benefits of leadership coaching for new managers is that it elevates their emotional self-awareness. Many new leaders find themselves experiencing unresourceful emotions like fear, anxiety, self-doubt, confusion, frustration, stress, overwhelm, to name a few. These emotional states can often lead to poor decision-making at the very time when people are looking to you for direction. These poor decisions can then reinforce and perpetuate the unresourceful feelings that fuelled them.

Leadership coaching helps new managers to become consciously aware of the stories and meanings they are giving to what’s happening, and how these stories are triggering their unresourceful emotional reactions. Why is this valuable? Managers and leaders are paid for making decisions. The better the decisions you make, the better results you will create.

Leadership coaching guides you through a process of self-inquiry to help you not only discover your emotional triggers, it also supports you in creating a pause between a feeling and taking an action, especially in the moments that you would have been triggered to react in the past.

The benefits of investing in a leadership coach to develop emotional self-regulation are countless. I’ve worked with new managers that have learned to regulate their emotions, build deep and meaningful relationships, significantly improve their performance, and positively influence and empower their team members to be their best. One example that comes to mind was when I

coached a Mechanical Superintendent who was leading a team on commissioning a multi-billion dollar liquid natural gas facility. We set a baseline team performance measure as we initiated the coaching journey. He went from being someone that was angry and frustrated with his team members on a daily basis to leading the team from a centred emotional state. Within 6 months, he had increased the productivity performance of his team by over 400%.

Setting Realistic Goals: How Leadership Coaching Helps You Set Measurable and Achievable Goals

One of the biggest challenges new managers face is not setting clear, specific and measurable goals for their collective team and the individuals within the team. Without goals, you are like a ship in the ocean without a rudder. You are burning energy and moving aimlessly, to the dismay of all the crew onboard. You end up being directed by the currents and tides of the vast ocean.

When I got promoted to my first manager role, I felt like this rudderless ship, being directed by other people’s demands and requests of my time to achieve their priorities. Within a matter of months, I was overwhelmed by my commitments, that I lost track of what was actually important.

This is where leadership coaching comes in. Leadership coaches not only support new managers to generate clarity on their major outcomes, but they also support new managers determine the most efficient route to get there.

Without a clear path or route, a goal can feel overwhelming, triggering unresourceful emotional states. Leadership coaching helps new managers by helping them break down their bigger goals into smaller, actionable steps. In the words of Henry Ford, ‘nothing is particularly hard when you divide it into small jobs.’

Leadership coaches encourage you to think critically about the specific behaviours required to achieve your objectives and guide you in creating a roadmap that outlines the necessary stepping stones enroute to your bigger goals.

One of the major reasons why new managers don’t achieve their goals, even if they have a step-by-step roadmap in place, is because they are not emotionally connected to the outcome. In other words, it’s not important enough for them to hold themselves accountable.

This is where leadership coaching contributes one of its most powerful benefits. Great leadership coaches can help elicit powerful emotional leverage towards the attainment of a goal. In fact the best leadership coaches guide you in creating a deep connection to why you must achieve your goals, that not achieving them isn’t an option. In the words of Jim Rohn, ‘reasons come first, answers come second.’

Another critical benefit of leadership coaching in helping new managers set and achieve goals is that the leadership coach holds the manager accountable to their commitments. Your leadership coach will also provide you real time feedback on your performance. Your leadership coach will be your cheerleader and your guide to being your best.

Navigating the Challenges of the New Role: How Leadership Coaching Helps You Overcome Common Obstacles as a New Manager.

Research shows that most people make a first impression of a person within 7 seconds. As a new manager, there are many challenges to navigate in order to avoid making multiple bad impressions and potentially setting yourself up to fail.

In their transition from subject matter expertise to leading and managing a team of subject matter experts, new managers can find themselves on an exponentially steep learning curve. Leadership coaching helps new managers overcome common obstacles as they embark on their new role.

Lack of Confidence: The first and most common obstacle that new managers face is a lack of confidence. Fears of making mistakes, being wrong, feeling judged, or feeling like a failure can lead to debilitating procrastination, a desire to please others, prioritising non-critical tasks, or feeling pressured into making a quick decision without all the facts.

Leadership coaching assists new managers to build self-awareness around the disempowering stories that cause the lack of confidence and guide you to develop strategies to build confidence and to step into an empowering leadership identity.

Setting Clear Expectations: Leadership coaching also guides new managers in setting clear expectations from their first day in their role. A common obstacle new managers face is not setting clear behavioural expectations for themselves and their team members. The law of cause and effect tells us that behaviours are the ‘cause’ of business results, the ‘effect.’ If people are not clear on what’s expected, it is easy for behaviours that move you away from your goals to creep in. Leadership coaches help new managers get clear on the specific behaviours to expect from themselves and the people in their team and set out the stall from the beginning. The leadership coach will also guide you in creating leading indicators to measure and reinforce the expected behaviours necessary to consistently achieve results.

Avoiding Constructive Feedback Conversations: Without setting expectations, the next obstacle new managers face is avoiding constructive feedback conversations. If you are not clear on your outcomes, results, or goals, it is very difficult to hold people accountable to the behaviours necessary to achieve those outcomes. Leadership coaching can help you to get clear on the specific outcomes that will support business growth, and guide you in establishing the necessary behaviours that will produce consistently outstanding results. Once you have established these two elements, your leadership coach will guide you in how to deliver effective feedback conversations, and how to hold people accountable to the expected behaviours that will generate your desired results.

Your leadership coach can also support you with the third big problem new managers face, time management and prioritisation. Many new managers find themselves either micro-managing, or doing the work of the people in their team because there is a belief that ‘no one can do it as good as me.’ A desire to please people can cause you to say yes to requests that are outside your remit, and before you know it, you are overwhelmed with commitments.

Leadership coaching is a powerful resource to help you overcome the internal dialogue that can makes you overcommit and under deliver. Learning how to gracefully say no to demands of your time that fall outside your remit, and to invest your time into what is most important makes you stand out from all the other new managers out there. Leadership coaching fast tracks this learning curve so that you are investing your time in the critical few tasks that get you the biggest return every single day.

In summary, new managers face many new challenges that they will never have confronted before. Your ability to overcome these challenges quickly and effectively will position you to build a high-performing team, and deliver consistently on commitments. If you are a new manager, or considering stepping into an managerial role, leadership coaching is one of the best investments you will make to support you to success.

If you are curious about how leadership coaching can help you be successful in your new manager role, go ahead and contact me and we will discuss how leadership coaching can help you.

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