6 Tips to rapidly becoming a good manager
In sales it is often the highest performing individuals who get promoted. Unfortunately, being a high performing salesperson does not immediately make you a good manager, in fact here are a couple of challenges I experienced, maybe you can relate:
New role required completely different skills and expectations, which often were not clearly identified or prioritized
My immediate supervisor was ill equipped to train me: no proven best practices, lacked skill set in training others and left me alone to figure things out
Change in my friendships with other team members now that I managed them, they acted very differently with me running the gambit of expecting friendship to involve favoritism, hostility and resentment for not receiving the promotion and very high levels of expectation of my performance
I now had to lead, coach and evaluate my team members performance AND not taking over the sales calls
A lot of late nights and weekends doing and redoing work as I struggled to figure out the expectations and new responsibilities on my own
Stress, anxiety and self doubt emerged as I navigated the murky new waters
Fear of failure or disappointing those who had faith in my abilities resulting in my promotion
That is quite a list!
My response was to just dive in and learn everything I could on my own. I rarely asked for help or guidance initially because I thought I would appear incompetent which established habitual self reliance (and a ton more work). My life became very unbalanced, I felt like I was on a never-ending treadmill running as fast and furious as I could hoping not to let any balls drop.
As a leader I was determined to support my employees in any new role to eliminate the challenges I had experienced. Arguably I may have gone too much to the other extreme on occasion, over 20 years ago one of my teams threatened to have T-Shirts made stating “I made it through a week of training with Shawna”. Thanks to great training, valuable feedback, some amazing coaches and years of experience I have found more balance in leading my teams and being a good manager.
Through the benefit of experience and training I offer you these …
6 tips to rapidly become a good manager
Have open and frequent dialogue with your supervisor about their expectations and prioritization of responsibilities and challenges you are having. This will significantly reduce your stress and ensure you are delivering on the job requirements and meeting crucial deadlines.
Ask for training. Frequently new managers, especially when they are promoted within the company, do not get the benefit of an employee new hire orientation plan. All to often it is assumed by both the supervisor and the new manager that they know all the people within the organization, are fully trained on work processes and technology used in the new roles and have an understanding of people management including; hiring, training, coaching and other HR responsibilities.
Learn to delegate. Your role and responsibilities have changed and so must the prioritization of your valuable time. You need to think more strategically about the business direction and how to execute this with your team, including resources, forecasting, scheduling, managing personnel and key stakeholder collaboration. Trying to do everything will result in many things half done or poorly completed. Take the time to focus on the most important activities and then delegate the rest, this kills two birds with one stone: great work completed and developing your team members skills and interests.
Resist taking over. You are doing your staff a huge disservice if you take over their sales call, get too involved in completing their project or fix their errors. I understand in the moment you think it might be a good learning opportunity for them to see how you do it or to quickly fix their mistakes in the interests of closing deadlines. Unfortunately, two things happen, neither good! First, they aren’t learning how to do the tasks appropriately which for repetitive tasks leads to many errors, omissions and problems. Second, despite it being tempting to fix something knowing you can resolve it in a couple of minutes versus spending 30 minutes or more to train them quickly turns into many hours of your time. You need to teach them so they can become self reliant, capable and effective.
Get a mentor who has experience doing what you are doing. Meeting regularly with your mentor can quickly advance your performance. Respect their time, come prepared with important questions and projects you are working on that you’d like their input on. A great mentor relationship often introduces you to key stakeholders and shares some of their best practices for doing the job you are in.
Get a coach. Statistically you can reduce your learning time in your role by as much as 1/3rd by having a coach help you through your new role transition. These discussions are completely confidential, they assist you identifying obstacles that are getting in your way then creating action plans to break through to new higher performance. One of the best benefits of coaching for new managers is their support in developing soft skills critical to leadership development: communication, motivation and delegating.