The New Manager’s Top Ten

Your first job as a manager is a tricky transition. Jan Campbell lists ten of the most common traps and how to avoid them.

1 Continuing with your old skills and role
You’re familiar with how to do your old job, but a manager’s job is different. Spend that energy instead on thinking through what the new role involves and what new skills it may need.

2 Trying to be everyone’s mate – You can’t
Now that you have responsibility for the performance of your team, that will include putting a smidgeon of distance between you and them. You will not have to do this, actually, because they will do it for you. It’s certainly not true that you can’t be both liked and effective, but it’s sometimes hard.

3 Avoiding giving people feedback
Nervousness often undermines the new manager’s willingness to give people feedback. Inside, you think, "Maybe they won’t take any notice of anything I say." Actually, giving feedback is one of the quickest ways to learn. Depriving people of feedback is inherently punishing, so learn how to do it.

4 Criticising more than you praise
Once you get over Trap 3, it’s easy to fall into this one. The safe ratio is five pieces of praise for every one piece of criticism. If all you do is criticise, you will soon get a reputation for being impossible to please, people will hide their mistakes rather than owning up to them. Soon, innovation (the lifeblood of any team) withers away.

5 Trying to do it all yourself
New managers often believe that they must get credibility with their team by doing everything that team members do. "I wouldn’t ask anyone to do things I don’t do myself". If this is your approach, you will have no time to do your real job. Delegation is the key here and learning the difference between genuine delegation, dumping, abdication and allocation can be a really useful exercise.

6 Forgetting to manage your manager
Your new role is about managing your team but it’s also important to devote some time to managing your boss, using the same skills of course that you will be using to manage your team.

7 Believing that you can tell people what to do
Every now and again, a new manager’s apparent power goes to his or her head. They fall to ‘ordering’ as a their prime and sometimes their only influencing tactic. Sadly, it’s often the case that when you use your power, you lose it. Learning how to persuade means that you will be far more influential.

8 Not ‘walking the talk’
As a boss, everything you do will be minutely scrutinised by your team. Behave as if you are completely transparent because to all intents and purposes, you are. Any failure to practise what you preach will be noticed immediately so what you say and what you do need to be absolutely the same.

9 Forgetting how important it is to communicate
Mind reading is a very inexact art. Tell people what you expect and how you will support them, what your personal values are, why the future will be both exciting and challenging and what your role will be in leading them there. Then tell them again – and again.

10 Not understanding leadership
Secretly believing that leadership is the same as management which is the same as administration, ie paper-pushing and therefore pointless. Not really. Without leadership, a team soon falls apart. Leadership is a creative job, every bit as creative as whatever role you left to take it on!