Support and Guidance for New Managers

Navigating the Transition: The Importance of Support for First-Time Managers

Before I became a teenager, I had made a decision that I wanted to be an engineer.  I loved finding out how things worked and finding solutions to problems.  I spent the next 12 years of formal education focused on achieving that goal.  When I graduated from University, I spent another 7 years mastering my engineering expertise until I was offered my first managerial role.  The feedback I received was that I was doing an excellent job technically and that now would be a good time to manage a team of subject matter experts. 

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I transitioned into this new manager role was not realising that my job was no longer about achieving personal results, but instead it was about enabling the team to achieve.  I didn’t realise that building the team was more important than inflating my ego by completing my own tasks.  

What I have realized in the years that have passed is that most rookie managers make the same mistake.  Like me, they find themselves in unfamiliar territory, they are filled with insecurities about making mistakes, or failing, and find themselves reluctant to ask for help.

As I found myself internalizing these stresses, my focus turned inward instead of on the team.  I was overwhelmed by the fear of failure that I was more focused on my own performance than I was on that of my team.  This quickly led to my team losing trust in me, and my management effectiveness.  As a result, everyone’s productivity suffered.

The mistake most organisations make is that they fail to realise the people they promote for their technical excellence is not matched by managerial or leadership excellence.  It is almost expected that the rookie manager will learn critical management and leadership skills without any training or intensive coaching.  The truth is, most new managers need help.  As senior managers don’t have the capacity to spend hours every week supporting their new managers, executive leadership coaching is a powerful service to invest in to ensure your new managers navigate the transition and build their confidence to thrive in the role. 

Building a Foundation: Essential Tools and Strategies for New Managers

The greatest mistake I see in organisations when it comes to providing support and guidance for new managers is that they fail to lay the foundations before they build the structure.  

Most organisations focus on building management and leadership nethod before they build the foundation of mindset.  The truth is that you can have all the tools, strategies, and frameworks, but if your mindset is strong, you are setting yourself up to fail.

There is a specific order and sequence of ingredients required in supporting new managers to thrive in their new roles.  They are: 

1. Mindset 
2. Meaning 
3. Method 

Mindset

After coaching over 1000 new managers, one of the most common mindset challenge new managers face is imposter syndrome, feeling like a ‘fraud,’ or a ‘phony.’  Why is this so common?  Well, only a few weeks before becoming a new manager, they were the subject matter expert.  They knew all the answers.  They were the high-performer.  They got rewarded for doing, not delegating.  Now they find themselves in unchartered territory, where the skills that got them to their new manager position are no longer viable or effective.  Fear and doubt creep in, and if they are not dealt with quickly, many new managers find themselves floundering and start looking for opportunities elsewhere.

So how can executive leadership coaching help new managers build the strong foundational mindset required for becoming a highly effective leader?

The first step is developing self-awareness of the internal dialogue that is holding them back.  New managers often find themselves in a state of stress because they are focusing on being judged by their boss, and their subordinates.  They fear making mistakes, being criticized, and ultimately feeling like a failure.  This pattern of thought are the weak foundations that lead to poor decisions and inaction, otherwise known as procrastination. 

Meaning

Executive leadership coaching can help you develop an unshakable leadership identity by redirecting your focus and attention from what you are trying to avoid to what it is that you actually want – who you want to be, how you want to show up, and how you will behave in order to positively influence your team members.  Nothing has any meaning except for the meaning we choose to give it.  That includes the meaning you give to yourself.  Leadership coaching helps you create a new, more empowering internal narrative about who you are and reinforces that narrative until you build the foundations of a confident leadership identity. 

Thriving in Your New Role: Practical Tips and Resources for New Managers

Method 

When I first moved into my new manager role, the first mistake I made was trying to do everything myself instead of delegating tasks to my team members.  My project director had given me the biggest responsibilities I’d ever had.  I had a multi-billion dollar budget, and had to deliver 70 helicopter engines to 17 different airforces and navies.  There were tight deadlines, and I had a lot of pressure from many stakeholders to produce results.  So my habitual response to the heavy responsibilities was, as the Nike advertisement suggests, ‘just do it.’  It was that strategy that got me promoted in the first place…right? 

As I reflected on that time in my life I realized that my unwillingness to delegate work came from a place of fear, first the fear of losing authority.  ‘What if I delegate important projects to my team members and they get the recognition?  Will that impact my credibility and value?

My second fear was the fear of delegating work to people, that only a few days and weeks ago were my peers.  Were they going to resent me for giving them more work?

The other fear I had was losing control.  In my mind I told myself, no one can do it as good as me.  The perfectionist was coming out.  So any time I did delegate a task, I found myself micro-managing the person doing the work.

The result for me was working excessive hours.  My physical, mental and emotional health all suffered.  As did all my most important relationships outside of work.  I had no work-life balance.

I made a decision and took action to get my own leadership coach to get help in my management journey.  After spending time working on my mindset and meaning, we moved to method.  What I quickly learned was my old patterns of behaviour were, not only having a huge negative impact on me personally, but it was also making my team members lose trust in me.  They were becoming disengaged.  They didn’t feel any sense of autonomy, and because I wasn’t giving them important projects, I was unknowingly impeding their career development and advancement.

My leadership coach helped me to get clarity on my new role as a manager.  The coaching helped me to get the self-awareness to realise that my job as a manager was fundamentally different to being an individual contributor.  It was to create a cohesive team, bring out the best in my team members, and develop them to thrive. 

It was only at this point did I realise the importance of delegating work to the team.  As I got to know the strengths of each team member, or an area they were keen to develop, I quickly knew what tasks and activities to delegate to who.  As I recognized individuals for their contributions, there was a real sense of cohesive contribution to achieving our collective goals.

After learning the benefits of delegation, the next practical strategy that I worked on with my leadership coach, as simple as it may sound, was setting clear expectations.  The ability to clearly communicate your expectations to your team members is critical.  Everyone wants to feel like they are succeeding.  Imagine each day at work was a game.  How would you know you’ve wone the game at the end of the day, when the time is up?  You will need to first know the rules of the game you’re playing in, and also have clarity on how many points you need to score to win the game.  The leader or manager must make it crystal clear on how you can win the game every day.  My observations after coaching and consulting in multiple organisations in five different continents is that lack of clarity on what is expected from team members is a pandemic that has a global grip.

What I learned is that it is almost impossible to give individuals effective feedback on their behaviours if they are not clear on what winning looks like.  Clarity on expectations can take the form of specific, measurable, time-bound goals, both collective and individual.  It can be partnering with individuals to develop a clear professional development plan.  It could be having weekly and daily meetings to agree specific outcomes for each team member. 

As Peter Drucker states, ‘you can’t improve what you don’t measure.’  So clearly communicating your team and individual key success factors and key performance indicators, visibly measuring progress against them, and having quality conversations on how to be the best players to win the game every day will set you up for accelerated success.

If you choose to partner with an executive coach to help you with your mindset, meaning, and method, you are well positioned to thrive in your new manager role.

If you would like to learn more tools and strategies on how you can develop your mindset, meaning, and method to develop an unshakable leadership identity, and to thrive in your new manager role, click on the link below to schedule a free 30-minute call with me to find out more.