How to Manage People for New Managers
Congratulations, you have been recently promoted and are now a manager. You are very excited and have been waiting to get to this next step in your career. Being promoted to a managerial position is a landmark event for you in your career when you first get a chance to manage people, it shows that you are now an expert in what you do and people who look to you to get work done (a.k.a senior management) expect more from you and are willing to provide more resources for you to help you get even more work done. Your hard work has paid off.
However, at the same time, the skills that enabled you to get to this point are not the ones that will make you successful in a managerial role. You are a respected individual contributor to your organization but how do you transform that into being a strong leader for your organization? How do you make that transformation? How do you ensure you are much more effective now as a team manager than as an individual contributor?
If you follow the below guidelines it will make this transition much easier and more fruitful and help accelerate your career.
Make sure your team and you have the same goals.
Having individual goals is good and probably one of the reasons you have managed to come to this point in your career. Make sure you now have team goals and identify what each one of your team members will contribute towards those goals. This will ensure the team shares the same vision.
Train your people
If you have people who are not skilled to do what they are supposed to do, you will have inefficiency issues, you will have a team that will struggle to get work done and meet timelines
Give regular feedback
Do not wait until the end of the year to give feedback. This may come as a surprise but giving regular feedback will keep you connected with people who are working for you and will ensure work is getting done how you would like it to be done.
Reward effort
If someone in your team is trying hard to achieve a certain goal, even if they fail, make sure that they are rewarded for the effort. This will keep them motivated and focused on the next goal. If you do not do this you are sure to de-motivate the person.
Once you cover these four bases, you should be ready to take charge as a new manager and be pretty awesome at it as well.
