People Skills for a first time Manager made simpler in 4 steps

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People Skills for a First Time Manager

“Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.” – Peter F. Drucker

When it comes to talking about a person’s professional career, people often resort to thinking about qualifications and vocational experience. It’s remarkably surprising that one may not stop to think about Soft Skills, commonly referred to as People Skills.

What are People Skills? These are a set of qualities such as but not limited to, communication, composure, humility, trust and faith, confidence in your abilities as well as being dependable. As a new manager, your quality people skills can save you from living a life with a team that is distracted, not motivated, and underperforming.

Why do you think the best Manager you’ve seen so far in your career is the way they are? What separates them from the crowd of other incompetent managers? Excellent leadership begins with awareness and that’s where they shine. An experienced manager would be well versed in people skills and interpersonal skills in contrast to a first time manager. It is through their suave that they move mountains and break down business barriers.

How much good people skills matter? Are good people skills rewarded inside the company?

In this blog, we have answered these types of questions related to people skills to give you the valuable insights and approaches to become a better manager or someday an influential leader.

Mastering People Skills as a new or first time manager can be the reason behind finding yourself amongst a team that is engaged, motivated, and equally productive to expectations.

While you’re here, you can look at transforming your leadership journey with Essential Skills for a first time Manager.

Communication as a Spell

Contrary to the belief, an average individual contributor sits rather unaffected by communication skills which is an essential part of people skills as an accessory at the workplace. However, after transitioning to the role of a manager, you’ll need to do more than just sitting in a cubicle all day, avoiding as much contact and focusing only on your daily set of tasks. A much-needed preparation and ample practice are needed to be good at communicating with people in a workplace. And not just communicating, but being highly effective and influential at that.

A great strategy for communication practices includes taking the upper hand with the usage of tools. Some popular recommended and preferred time again by various organizations are Slack and Teams. You can also resort to using an internal communication platform if provided already by your company.

While we’re talking about communication, you should also pay attention to how this as a concept is fundamental for sharing effective feedback with your employees. In your new role as a first time manager, you’ll be required to coach and guide your team members to help them cover up their shortcomings and areas that need improvement.

You can shine and go above simple feedback such as “You struggle with giving logical arguments”, rather taking a different approach such as “You seem to be struggling to put forth logical arguments and thoughts forward. I advise that you do your due diligence in research and fully understand the argument before presenting it. This will be of help.” appears more effective. Always try to answer the what, why, and how of feedback.

The most common activity you’ll be indulged in is writing emails as a manager. Does writing an email intimidate you? Do you find yourself at a loss of words while drafting an email? Take this matter and opportunity as urgency and get started on how to write an effective email. Here are some tips to upgrade your email writing game, as a first time manager: Writing Professional Email

It’s imperative for you as a manager to send out correct and appropriate emails around your organization.

The Air around Leadership

The most skilled and capable managers need to regulate the mood inside their team and organization. To accomplish so, as a first time manager, you’ll need a psychological ability which is commonly known as emotional intelligence. But what exactly is it? From a scientific standpoint, the ability to understand your own and others’ emotions by virtue of distinctly perceiving your own and others’ emotions, or feelings. Bringing such practice into your routine will require you to get familiar with people around you and better observe non-verbal cues.

People Skills consist of an extension of your emotional intelligence that can be expressed as your thought process or quotient towards cultural and gender diversity at your workplace. As a new manager, having a good approach for managing employees and people skills with different ethnic or cultural backgrounds, their nuances, and also sound knowledge of how to deal with different genders while guiding them, or sharing feedback is instrumental in performance.

A McKinsey research shows us that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 percent, and companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.

Listening to Lead

Greek Philosopher Epictetus said, “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”. It’s agreeable that this phrase holds a lot of value when it comes to active listening when you become a manager in your organization.

Here are some quick tips:

Ask more questions and show curiosity

Allow more silence before you speak

Repeat, paraphrase and reflect

Don’t jump the gun with advice

More questions and curiosity from your side as a manager will allow your team members or colleagues and peers a space to highlight issues that are important to them. Open-ended questions are great since they will help you get a whole story of what people want to tell you.

People Skills as Combating Conflicts

Everyone is different in their individuality and at a work place when people come together to complete tasks then often you’ll find them, or even yourself to be tangled in a clash of thoughts. As a new manager, you’ll find your team members or employees get worked up over something and with further intervention, it will be discovered that there are some unmanaged issues.

How you apply yourself as a manager in these situations will be the difference between being an incompetent manager or the best manager. People skills of a good manager include better assessment and effective conflict resolution. A bad manager can make things worse and send things spinning into escalation.

Since you’re a new manager, you need to invest in learning how to deal with conflict, be able to differentiate the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of a conflict and practice consistency in interpretation.

For instance, two co-workers are working on a presentation together and run into a conflict. One of the employees redid the presentation and removed the contribution of the other employee. The employee who redid the presentation felt that it needs to be as good as possible and they felt there were inconsistencies or didn’t like the idea from the other employee. The other employee feels disrespected for their work and opinion.

The ‘what’ and ‘why’ of this conflict are clear. As a manager of these employees, what is the approach that you’ll take? Here are some ways you can resolve it:

Competing: Have both the co-workers create their own versions of the presentation, then have them send it to you for approval. Review each presentation and pick the better choice.

Accommodating: Understand the perspective of the employee who redid the presentation and helps pacify the thought behind it to the other employee so it doesn’t feel as harsh. You can assign them to other work.

Collaborating: Discuss with the employees and come together to a common ground in terms of perspective and approach for this presentation. If both the employees are in harmony, then allow them to continue with the collaboration.

Here’s a structure to make conflict management easier:

Investigate the source of conflict
Look for a private space to talk and discuss
Allow everyone to have their say and listen actively
Look for details on conflict causing events
Rule out ways to meet the common goal
Agree to the best fix and determine the responsibilities each party has in the resolution
Once the conflict is resolved, keep a check on how things are going and decide preventative strategies for the future

At the end of the day, nobody magically knows how to resolve conflict. It comes down to your intention, commitment, and acuteness for your and your organizational success.

Most of the time, conflicts are sincere and honest between two parties, however, there will be times when a conflict is originating entirely because you have a difficult employee in your team. These employees cause problems in the organization and disrupt harmony. So, how do you deal with difficult employees as a new manager?

Be professional in communicating with the employee that they’re causing a hit to the productivity and work environment.
Ask open-ended questions and use examples to remove the employee’s defensiveness in answering you.
Keep a record of everything that follows. This helps in tracking and improvement, or in the worse case proves as evidence of your precedent efforts.
Involve the help of the Human Resources team to get clarity on the course of action, in case things go south.
In case the employee agrees to your accord and arguments then isolate them for a while so they work on improvement, and while this happens they cannot spread the disrupting behavior.

When things really do go south, as a manager, you will need to take some difficult actions such as issuing a warning letter to the employee. This is not only impactful for scenarios where the employee has bad behavior but also where you’ve seen less and less improvement in an individual’s performance.

We’ll give you some tips on how you can create an effective warning letter:

Speak to the employee once, privately to discuss the matter and carry out the conversation around the reason for this warning letter and next steps.
Hand over the warning letter promptly after an incident has occurred.
Draft the letter with your company’s letterhead
Collect the employee’s signature and acknowledgment on the letter.
Seek advice from HR and discuss the legalities of the disciplinary action.

Now that you’ve understood how essential it is to acquire people management skills in the form of effective communication, emotional intelligence, power of active listening, and conflict management etiquette, it’s high time you take charge and browse through our mission and vision to help you achieve the best as a new manager.

If you’re in a new managerial position or responsible for training new Managers at your organization, you can seed skills for success with our First Time Manager Bootcamp.