You just became a manager – what does that mean?

First, congratulations on your choice of role – this is the start of a journey where you will be able to support people and teams to create things they did not know they could do! And welcome to a journey where your success will be determined by how well you know yourself and your ability to use your own behaviors to drive the change you want. Exciting times!

I have put together some things that I learned when I became a manager for the first time and some things I wished someone would have told me.

What is different now?

You have more power than yesterday. You now have power over things that are important to people, like salaries and promotions. This means that you need to make sure to treat people fairly and make sure that people trust that you do that. This means that you need to treat people in the same way, you need to make sure to share the same information with everyone and make sure to listen to everyone in your team. And you need to be conscious about small things like who you go to lunch with to not being perceived as playing favorites even if you are not. 

Does this mean that you can not be close friends with the people that you work with? I would not go that far but it is a fact that you can not completely separate the manager self with the private self why being close friends always will be a bit more complicated. If you are closer to someone in your team you need to make sure that you are not giving any benefits to that person and that everyone in your team knows that you will not.

Being a people manager also comes with a legal responsibility since you now are the employers representative towards the employee. This means that your actions are the same as the employers actions why you need to be well aware of company policies and the labour law to make sure that the company is fulfilling all legal obligations. Examples of things that we need to follow are number of work hours per week, vacations guidelines and workplace safety and code of conduct. Whenever in doubt you should reach out to HR (or your own manager) to make sure you are doing the right things. If you are noticing someone in the workplace that is not being treated in a good way or become aware of some form of harassment you always need to act since being a manager and not taking actions is the same thing as saying “this is ok”.

What you say matters – at all times. Depending on the culture in your company this aspect might stronger or weaker but you should be aware that your word will be taken more seriously now than it did before, at least for some people. If you come up with a spontaneous idea as a suggestion, even if you meant it as just an idea, there is a great risk that people will take it as decided since it came from you. When you share your opinion lots of people will follow your lead and it might feel more difficult for people to question your opinion now when you have formal powers. Building an inclusive culture where people feel safe and encouraged to be opinionated is important for many reasons and when that is your culture – the risk of you sharing your opinions early will be much smaller.

Being a person that people listen to gives you an important part to play as a role model. The behaviors you show will be copied by others. If you show that you are not afraid of rolling up your sleeves and do the hard work needed people will be much more inclined to do that themselves. If you talk about the importance of collaboration and always try to bridge the gaps between people instead of saying “they are not delivering”, people will be much more inclined to go the extra mile to improve collaboration instead of complaining that it is not working. If you show inclusive behaviors and make sure to listen to everyone and points out when we are not being as inclusive people will improve their listening and feel safe enough to point out when we are not being inclusive enough. If you send late emails outside of office hours you will subconsciously tell people that they are expected to work outside of office hours but if you don’t do that and encourage people to take time off from work outside of office hours you will create a more healthy work life balance.

You don’t need to have an answer to all questions. When I became a manager I had the feeling that I needed to have all the answers since I was a manager. Now I know that is not true. If I don’t know something I have no problem saying so but I always take on finding the answer that I don’t have, unless it is a better idea that the person find the answer self. Sometimes a question gets you a bit off guard and you don’t know what to say. Saying something wrong might be more damaging why I would recommend saying that you don’t have an answer but will come back later.

If you are communicating something, like a change you are driving, a decision or the result of a compensation review, where it is not unlikely that people will have questions that might be difficult to answer I recommend that you do some preparation work. Think through which questions people might ask and what you would answer. Talk to a colleague about it to get more perspectives as an inspiration. With these kind of preparations you will reduce the risk of being taken by surprise, having a hard time finding the right answers.

The role that is in between

As a manager you are the voice of the people that reports to you as well as being the voice of the employer. Balancing this is most often not a problem but it requires you to be good at shifting perspectives. You need to be good at advocating for the people that reports for you to other parts of leadership and you need to be good at represent the employer in your teams. Sometimes these perspectives are in conflict with each other and then you need to look at the holistic perspective and find the best path forward. There might be times when things are decided outside of your control that you have to implement and “selling” those decisions to the team might be difficult if you don’t believe in it. What I have learned in those situations is that to successfully communicate such a message I need to find a reasoning that I believe in. If I try to send a message that I don’t believe in my body language will most likely give me away and the team will see that I disagree. That will make them ask questions that I most likely have a hard time answering and most likely they will not buy the message I am “selling”. So to successfully communicate a message I don’t approve with, I need to find a way to reason about it that makes sense to me, so I can send a message in my words that I believe in.

How do I know what I should do as a manager?

As a manager there will always be more things you could invest time in than there is time in the universe. This means that an important manager skill is to manage your own time and prioritize the right things. You will have lots of tactical things that you just have to do but you also need to have a strategic approach to make sure to drive longer term things as well.

In the post the work we do as managers I describe five areas of responsibilities that I divide my manager work in; people, delivery, technology, business and organization. With help from self reflection, or other ways of gathering data, I continuously assess how I am doing in each of these areas to make sure that I have a healthy balance between them and prioritize the right things.

My generic priority order is:

1. People – the individuals. First priority is to make sure that people are feeling well and have what they need to deliver. If someone is suffering, supporting that individual always comes first.
2. Delivery. My second priority is to make sure that the team is functioning well and have what’s needed to deliver.
3. People – Staffing, Technology, Business and Organization. These categories are my third priority and I will balance between them depending on the needs.

For all priorities it is important to balance between short term and long term needs.

Determine how you are doing

As a manager it might be difficult to keep track of your impact since your performance, at least to a big extent, is determined by the success of others. You are often working with longer term impact and getting a sense of accomplishment might be challenging when your output is less tangible.

I work a lot with self reflections to understand how I am doing and also gather data from the people that I am working with. I use self reflection in a few different ways to learn from my own experience and assess my impact:

• Reflection after an experience. I find it valuable to reflect after an experience that I found challenging or difficult to think through what I did and how that was perceived and the result.
• Reflection periodically. One thing I used a lot when I was new as a manager and still come back to when being in particularly challenging environments was to set aside some reflection time for myself in the end of each week. In such a session I would think back on the week and reflect upon events that were challenging or successful and the learnings that I have gotten during the week together with what I would like to focus on the following week.
• Reflection based on goals or the areas of responsibility. This is a more structured approach where I go through all my goals or the areas of responsibilities I have as a manager and assess where I think I am at the moment. What I have done in each area or for each goal and what next things I need to do in the following period.

Another powerful thing to assess how you are doing is to ask the people that you are working with. I often end my 1:1s with a question on how this session was, which value did the person get and how can we improve until next time. From time to time I could ask more structured questions to get more holistic feedback around how the support I give is experienced and what kind of impact it is having on the individual. You could also talk to fellow peers about the work you are doing and the actions you are taking to get feedback on how you are approaching things but also learn about other perspectives and things you could try.

Finally if you care about the people you work with, are curious about learning more about them and how you can help them take good decisions and deliver great impact that is a great start!

And if you are wondering about something else or have a tip to share with someone else, don’t hesitate to add a comment here! Good Luck on your journey!