Introduction
First off, Congratulations! Whether you’ve recently been promoted as a Manager or got hired as first time manager, it goes without saying that this is an exciting phase of your life. We understand that you’ve worked diligently as a contributor and proved your intent, loyalty, and grind to come so far.
We’re sure that you’ve displayed some mentorship and a problem-solving attitude in your management’s eye. This is probably why you got the role and it makes even more sense to get a better grip on these skills for maximum effect.
Do you imagine being promoted as a manager will invite more ease into your life? Less work, more time to chill and do whatever it is the bosses do? You’ll be surprised to know that this image is far off from the reality of being a first time manager.
Now that you’re a manager, expect an overwhelming psychological shift in the way you perceive and react. You’ll be expected to coach and motivate your team, and have difficult conversations while being in line with deliverables that your organization needs for success. Do you think you have what it takes? Even if you answered yes, we can help you refine these elements so there’s not even an ounce of doubt left in you.
“The president of the United States gets 100 days to prove himself, you get 90. The actions you take during your first few months in a new role will largely determine whether you succeed or fail.” – Michael D. Watkins
How long do you think is enough for your organization to identify how well you’re doing? A week? A month? Perhaps a year? The three-month period (often known as the quarter) is a long enough time frame used by corporations to track the performance of an individual. It is enough to find out how well a new Manager or first time manager is doing and during this initial period, the success or failure can determine your future outcome. And first, you need to identify how first time manager prepare.
Since quarters are important, you can follow the 30-60-90 day plan where you’ll outline short-term objectives and figure out how you’ll make a difference.
For complete guidance on how to do so and what goals to keep in mind, you can check out and enroll for our complete First Time Manager Bootcamp.
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As a new manager or first time manager, your team’s success translates to your success and your team’s challenges become your challenges.
Now, how do we fix the highlighted issues in the above figures? Since you’re no longer an individual contributor, who only needs to think about yourself and dash out at the end of the day, you’ll need to consider a new set of skills so you’re equipped at managing your team with the right mindset, so you can motivate people and tackle challenges by preparing with strategies and resourceful decisions.
Let’s dive into 6 essential skills that will help reach your maximum potential and help become successful as a first time manager.
Interpersonal and People Skills: Thriving People Skills
What do you think are the interpersonal skills of a new Manager or a first time manager? And people skills? Your good guess would broadly put it into communication and behavior. However, there’s more to it. Let’s take a look at what we mean.
Empathy: It is arguably paramount in understanding people at the workplace, and also in life. It is the core ability and capability of a person to understand another person’s emotions and situation. In a workplace, the fast pace environment can take a hold of you and make you forget of being considerate of others’ feelings.
As a first time manager, without empathy, you won’t be able to determine where an individual is coming from and what they want. Always do your best to imagine, with conviction, your team member or peer’s situation, and perception.
If you can imagine being in their shoes then you can act accordingly and build trust. Doing so is going to go a long way for your benefit because people always prefer to come first to those they trust.
For instance, Jitendra, an experienced manager, noticed his employee Rajan frowning in his cubicle. Jitendra approached him and asked what was going on. Rajan was having a bad day because he received news that a close family member had passed away. Jitendra empathized with Rajan and advised him to take the rest of the day off.
An ideal first time manager would not only listen to a distressed employee having a bad day at work but also truly understand how this affects the employee and take suggestive actions to help out in any way they can.
Learn by Listening: As a newly promoted or being a first time manager, you must stand out. To do so, you need to exercise listening actively to others when they speak. Making eye contact, and non-verbal indicators such as nodding your head can show that you are paying attention and you value the speaker’s emotions.
During an employer’s presentation or the conversation where they’re sharing suggestions on improvements, it is ideal to show through your body language that you’re not just listening to them but also understanding.
Speak to Inspire: As a fisrt time manager, you need to inspire confidence and thought through your speech which means that you need to communicate well and make sure that the intent is clear to your listeners. Effective professional communication is a driving factor in success.
Being a new manager or first time manager, you may find some difficulty in quickly upgrading your communication skill or suave. But you’re in the bigger league now and you need to take charge of the way you speak. Partaking in internal presentations or discussions can be a good practice point for you to work on your speaking skills.
Observation is key: While listening is still considered one of the more important soft skills for a first time manager, observational scrutiny can prove useful in identifying patterns and behaviors to approximate potential problems and solve them before they become critical.
A good manager is always looking out for you, and also at you. A good manager will always know your numbers and can help offer insight on how you can bring improvements. As a new manager or first time manager, your job is to learn how to analyze key performance metrics and educate yourself on how to bring change.
Emotional Intelligence: A good manager always inspires and never dwells upon their own emotions while dealing with work. This is essentially the most important skill that you need to understand and master when you become a first time manager. Practicing to maintain self-awareness and a positive attitude is fundamental for emotional intelligence.
Imagine if you’re seen sulking over a failed project for too long. What will your team members and other employees think? Do you think they’ll feel inspired? Probably not.
Having good interpersonal skills will go a long way in your role as a new manager or a first time manager. Here are some first time manager tips for your interpersonal skills:
Motivation is Elevation: Mastering Motivation, for Self and Others
Can motivation be taught, or measured? What does motivation look like? We realize that these questions can appear daunting, however, for most employee engagement within any organization, motivation is a huge factor. Let’s take a look.
Praise and Cheer: A positive comment about how well one has done feels great and can turn around your day from a frown. As a fisrt time manager, you need to understand that it’s important to compliment your team members if you know they’ve done a good job. This can spawn motivation and a feeling of excitement among the members of your team.
In your memory, look for times in the past when a good manager appreciated your hard work. We know that a timely expressed gratitude can be an excellent motivator for any employee.
According to Glassdoor’s Employee Appreciation Survey, 53% of employees say they would stay longer in a company if they feel appreciated more by their bosses.
Respect goes a long way: Treating your team members and peers like they’re capable beings helps motivate people to be competent. And as a fisrt time manager, you will garner respect from your team.
Even if we weren’t talking about workspaces, respect plays an important role to establish good relationships with people around you. A Harvard Business Review Study, where nearly 20,000 employees around the world participated had some interesting results to share.
Those that get respect from their leaders reported 56% better health and well-being, 1.72 times more trust and safety, 89% greater enjoyment and satisfaction with their jobs, 92% greater focus and prioritization, and 1.26 times more meaning and significance.
Promote healthy work-life balance: Asking and promoting your team to put in extra hours too frequently may boost productivity temporarily, however, this will result in them losing energy, motivation, and likeliness to perform.
As their manager you don’t want that, so make sure to advocate a healthy work-life balance by not demanding overtime every week and letting team members take time off if there’s a good reason for it.
In a survey by Family Living Today, 51% of people say they have missed important life events because of inadequate work-life balance. In another statistic, they’ve mentioned that employees who work over 55 hours a week are at higher risk of depression and anxiety than those working 45-40 hours a week.
Make room for criticism and feedback: Most employees shy away from giving feedback to their superiors or the overall management because of the lingering vibe that position of power gives off. As a capable leader, promote honest and open-minded feedback amongst your team and peers. Understanding complaints and acting on them can make your work life easier.
A Gallup study found that units with managers who received strengths feedback showed 8.9% greater profitability post-intervention relative to units in which the manager received no feedback.
Some quick tips to keep in mind:
- Only share honest praise
- Encourage autonomy to boost the freedom and morale of your team
- Build an error management system rather than blaming or scolding employees
- Apart from abstracts, it’s important to stay hydrated and well-fed throughout the day for energy. Promote it.
Organizational Skills: Ace Workplace Organizational Skills
These are sets of techniques that you, as a new Manager or first time manager, should use for bringing out the best efficiency, problem-solving, and task completion trend. If an experienced manager were to tell you a few things about organizational skills, this list would come naturally to them.
Time Management: Tenure makes great managers and they become experts over time in strategic control over how time is spent on various activities. While good time management skills and routine can help tackle deadlines and achievable tasks, poor time management techniques can cause stress, dip in quality and quantity, hinder focus and cause damage to professional integrity.
Leave things better than you found them. Use this approach to focus on improving halfway projects that need immediate attention and focus on their completion. This is what good time management looks like.
There are some excellent time management tools you can use to bring a boost:
- RescueTime – Take back control of your time
- Toggl – Effortless time tracking and reporting
- MindNode – Mind Map & Brainstorm Ideas
- Trello – Collaborate, manage and reach new productivity peaks
Plan and Span: Uncertainty and irregularities in an organization can be reduced, even eliminated with efficient planning. A powerful planning course will help you identify all kinds of solutions to your problems. Begin by taking a careful look at requirements and direct inputs while keeping space for uncertainties and optional methods to resort to.
A great manager is required to make decisions based on incomplete information, so in such instances, you must be aware of how to build flexibility for the unknown variables.
“Consider the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.” – James B. Conant
Resource Allocation: The correct awareness and utilization of resources within your team and organization will help transform the quality of returns in the business. Compartmentalize correct resources to correct tasks and you’re halfway there to your success. If one of your team members cannot handle the task at hand or has several responsibilities, then delegating some of that work can bring breathing space for them and increase the quality of work.
Prioritization and Collaboration: As a first time manager, create a to-do list and place more important tasks first so that deadlines can be met first. With practice and over time, you’ll become more confident in analyzing which tasks are of more importance. Along with prioritizing, from your manager’s position, you need to bring together different team members with varied skill sets so they can contribute to achieving a common goal much faster. This is an effective way of team management.
The folks at Development Academy found that 49% of working professionals have never conducted a time audit to see and analyze how they spend their time.
Harvard Business Review discovered many executives feel overwhelmed by meetings, and no wonder: On average, they spend nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. What’s more, the meetings are often poorly timed, badly run, or both.
Make impactful decisions and eliminate problems: Decision Making & Problem Solving
When you transition into a manager role, you’ll be making decisions more often than you were when you were contributing individually. Now, how do you make sure to choose between decisions and know what impact they may or may not have? We’ll tell you.
Causes vs. Symptoms: If you go head in first towards tackling the metaphorical symptoms of a problem then it is going to become time-consuming. Your role as a fisrt time manager is to bring the bigger picture into perspective and work against the cause of a problem to ensure effective dealing as well as minimize future occurrences.
Slow down to speed up: At times, you will need to take your time to analyze the problem at hand, think things through and think well to resolve it. Diving straight into conclusions and an assortment of reactions can prove detrimental and cause dissatisfaction. Remember to pause, take a second and think about problems before thinking about the solutions.
Ask questions: As a first time manager, it’s essential to recall from your previous pursuits and find out answers to questions like, “Why did the solution work?”, “What train of thought led me to the solutions?”, or “How much do I need to bend my perspective to see if I’m missing something?”. Ponder over these questions from time to time so you can bring about answers and a unique approach to your problem-solving structure.
Forbes’ study of 500 managers and executives found that 98% fail to apply best practices when making decisions.
Overpower with Leadership Skills: Mastering Leadership skills
As an individual contributor, did you ever think of how much more effective your company would be if every leader and manager were better at strategizing and profound thinkers? If you did, then it’s time to be the change you want to see.
Think to act: The best manager leaves no room for doubt in ability and impact, so rather pay close attention to churning and brainstorming your thoughts to identify shapes and patterns of different relationships and processes within your organization. You don’t need to constantly please everyone. Stay intent on dealing with your fundamental role.
Resilient scheming: Practicing optimism despite setbacks and roadblocks, persistence in seeking goals, and transparency in communicating perspective is what it means to be a resilient manager.
Influence: Resilience or compliance alone won’t get you what you want. Work on cooperation with others within your organization, regardless of expertise or position. Keeping your network wide and dynamic throughout your career can prove instrumental in becoming an influential first time leader.
Let’s check some more tips on this:
- Be prepared to learn from your bosses and their bosses. Advice and good practices get passed down the hierarchy.
- Be vocal about your plan and hum it like a song. Being clear and reminded of your goal will compel your team to not falter.
- Do it yourself before you expect it from someone else. If you expect your peers to show professionalism and have an upbeat attitude, then ensure that you do it first.
- Don’t shy away from taking help, advice, or guidance from your organization’s network. Approaching a person with a different skill set is always a learning opportunity.
Negotiation as a Skill: The Art of Negotiation
People often confuse negotiation with being confrontational with others, however, this isn’t even halfway to the truth. Instead of focusing on winning a formal argument, you should care about finding a resolution that works for both sides.
Being a first time manager, your team may attempt to challenge your decisions and askance from them. Learn to read body language, since it’s full of clues about how one is feeling. At the same time, it’s essential for you to keep your poise in balance.
Make habit of painting a picture of your proposal to your crowd and keep arguments handy as to why someone should agree or say yes to you. An important factor to keep in mind during negotiations is to be concise. Don’t lose momentum from your point and talk too much about details or commentary.
Here are some useful tips to keep in mind while thinking about negotiation as a skill:
- Learn to see individuals as people instead of organizations or groups when negotiating.
- Give more power to your perception and create value around it. People pay close attention to perception.
- Do not be afraid to walk away from a negotiation if you do not reach an agreement. That’s not negotiating, it’s settling.
- Avoid becoming greedy through a negotiation. Sometimes a good deal can spoil a relationship.
“Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.”
Peter F. Drucker
Bottom line is, that your career comes down to your ability in making good decisions, particularly if you strive to be or are in a leadership position at your organization. To make excellent decisions, you need excellent structure.
If you’re in a new managerial position or responsible for training new Managers or first time manager at your organization, you can seed skills for success with our First Time Manager Bootcamp.
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