Three Mistakes New Managers Make and How to Avoid Them
Congrats! You took over a team, you got promoted, you got a raise and a whole lot more responsibility.
In the first few weeks, there’s a lot to worry about. You’ll be setting up 1:1 meetings, addressing workload and projects, all the while trying to establish yourself as a competent leader of humans.
Your team is watching too. They’re looking for clues that they’re going to be okay. Are you going to be a tyrant? Are you going to open to new ideas? Are you going to address performance issues? Are you going to be a micro-manager or an absentee?
In the hustle to establish yourself as a new manager, there will be some mistakes.
Here are three common ones and strategies for avoiding, or at least, minimizing, in the first 90 days.
Mistake #1: Acting like a Boss
In the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, we learned a valuable and unexpected lesson about how humans inhabit societal roles: when we’re put in positions of perceived power, we assume the characteristics of the empowered. Simply getting told “you’re a manager now” sends the invitation to your subconscious to start acting more “managerial.”
The problem is, when you’re a new manager, you don’t know what that is yet. You only have observations and archetypes to draw from. So what happens? The worst of these archetypes can seep through without even realizing it. You start acting the part, and typically that means an attempt to assert more control over your team.
This can show up in the form of quickly establishing new trackers or rules, asking for weekly reports, squashing casual chit-chat, obsessing about productivity, mansplaining, talking over others, making unilateral decisions, being over-confident, and a whole host of harmful behaviors. Taking this journey to boss-town can cost you weeks or months of trust and performance with your team.
So what’s the alternative?
Act more like a new teammate.
Get to know who your teammates are. How does this team work? Ask for help. Seek background and context. The managerial parts of the job aren’t going anywhere, they’ll present themselves naturally in the form of decisions and roadblocks.
Mistake #2: Ignoring Your Own Manager
In the early stage of team building, it’s easy to spend countless hours focusing on your team dynamics, building trust, and developing working processes. And you should spend time on this. But in the end, the success of your team, and your success as a manager, is judged by your manager.
To avoid getting lost in the needs of the team, you have to manage your manager. Here are the things you should find out in the first 30 days:
How will you judge my success?
What’s important to you? What do you care most about?
If the team is performing exceptionally well, what will that look like to you?
What are your expectations around working norms: hours, email, Slack, etc?
How do you want to be kept up to date on our progress? How often?
How should we make decisions together? What areas do I own the decision and where do you need to be consulted?
Answering these questions early and often will ensure your team is working on the right stuff. Your ability to set your team up for success is directly related to your ability to manage your own manager.
Mistake # 3: Not Trusting Yourself
So you might be saying, “wait…in Mistake #1, it was about being overconfident and too bossy, and now you’re saying that lacking confidence can also be a problem. Which is it?”
Both. Welcome to the wonderful and insanely difficult job of leadership.
All of leadership is a fine balance between making decisions and seeking input, listening and directing, communicating with confidence and showing vulnerability.
At the end of the day, the decisions you make and the direction you want to go is on you. This can be exhausting and difficult, and it will be made even more difficult when you start second-guessing. Your team may not agree with every choice, but more than they desire agreement, they desire to trust that you know what the fuck you’re doing. They want you to steer them towards meaning and impact. You don’t always have to know the way, but always looking like you don’t know the way, will end in disaster.
For tough decisions, seek input from trusted mentors. But once you’ve made a decision, give it all you have to make it successful and adjust as needed.
There are of course many more things to worry about, but by managing these key mistakes and learning from them, you’ll accelerate your growth and experience more success.