Becoming a manager is one of the biggest and most stressful professional transitions you’re likely to make in the course of your career. When you’re new to managing, it can be tough to realize the skills that served you well up until this point aren’t necessarily the same ones that will make you successful managing a team. Managing well means you’ll have to get comfortable with — and eventually master — a whole new set of skills and behaviors. Here are five of the most important.
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1. You’ll need to get comfortable with different boundaries. New managers who are used to being friends with their co-workers often have trouble adjusting their work relationships to fit the confines of their new role. When you’re managing people, you can have warm, friendly relationships with them — but you can’t be friends in a real sense. You have to be able to give critical feedback and make impartial decisions, and you might even need to lay off or fire an employee one day. And even if you think you’re perfectly impartial, appearances matter too. If you’re going to lunch every day with one employee or hanging out with another outside of work, people aren’t likely to believe you’re behaving impartially even if you are. They may also be reluctant to approach you with problems about someone you’re seen to be friends with. This is a tough lesson for new managers to learn, but it’s crucial.
2. You’ll need to get comfortable exercising authority. Authority often feels really weird when you first have it, and it can take awhile to get comfortable using it. In a desire to be nice and to be liked, new managers often shy away from using their authority at all, which can lead to unclear expectations and frustrations on both sides. Other new managers get the balance wrong in the other direction — becoming tyrannical and rigid. It’s important to get the balance right and to see authority as a tool you need to use to get things done, but not as something to lord over others. And speaking of authority …
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3. You’ll need to get comfortable with the fact that addressing and resolving problems is now one of the most important parts of your job. Managers sometimes avoid addressing problems because they don’t like conflict or they fear hurting someone’s feelings (or making themselves uncomfortable). But it’s no more OK to do that than it would be to neglect any other key part of your job. You can’t manage effectively if you’re not willing to have hard conversations, make tough decisions and sometimes disappoint people.
4. You’ll need to get comfortable not doing all the work yourself. Managers often become managers because they were good at doing their own work — and it can be tough to step out of that comfort zone. But as a manager, a large chunk of your time now should be spent on the work of managing — i.e., overseeing other people’s work rather than doing it yourself. That can actually take more time, and it’s a skill that new managers may not have yet. As a result, the temptation can be strong to just do things yourself, especially if you don’t think your staff will do the work as well or as fast as you would. But if you don’t let your staff take on meaningful pieces of work, you’ll be forfeiting the power of having a team of people working with you (and you will be a manager people aren’t excited to work for).
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5. You’ll need to get used to being on a stage. As a manager, your team will pay an enormous amount of attention to what you say and do, your demeanor and your moods. Your comments and your energy will carry much more weight than they did before you became a manager, and your offhand remarks may be scrutinized for hidden meanings. That doesn’t mean that you need to walk on eggshells, but it does mean you need to be thoughtful about how you manage your emotions, and especially your stress, at work. If you’re used to using the office as a place to vent, find a different place to do that now.
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First-Time Manager? Here’s What You Need to Know originally appeared on usnews.com
