Becoming a First-Time Manager: 5 Strategies to Confidently Transition to Leading a Team

If you're thinking about becoming a manager for the first time, you may have some concerns. Concerns that women have shared with me about transitioning to leading a team include things like how do I know I'm going to be a good manager? I've never done that before. How do I know I'm going to like it? I'm going to be affecting other people's careers, what if I'm not great? Or what if I hate it? What if I have an underperformer who's going to totally blow up my experience of being a manager?

Right. All legitimate concerns, because you've never had this experience before and it's different from what you're doing now. Even though the underlying technical capabilities are the same, being a manager of others is very different from being an individual contributor.

In this post, I’ll share five strategies to prepare so that if you become a manager, when you become a manager, you'll have an effective transition process, you'll be at ease, and you'll be able to step into the role with confidence.

First, let’s talk about why gaining experience as a manager of others so important. If you look at the McKinsey/Lean In research that came out recently about what's it going to take to crack the glass ceiling, they're pointing to a phenomenon that's relatively new in this conversation, which is called the “broken rung.”

What they're saying is at senior levels of companies there’s disproportionate leadership in terms of gender because at junior levels women are not stepping into first-time manager roles as often as men are. And so that winds up having an effect all the way up the chain. One of the things that will help correct the balance is to encourage more women have experiences earlier in their career managing people, so that they set themselves up with the skills needed later to rise to senior levels.

Before we jump into the strategies to prepare yourself to be a leader, I'm curious. What do you think are the pros and the cons of becoming a manager of others? If you wouldn't mind sharing in the comments, I think it's advantageous to our whole community to see different perspectives on this.

Let’s get into the five strategies. The first one is to establish how you're going to be being as a leader. What I mean by that is to determine the set of principles by which you'll lead.

You have to figure out what's going to resonate for you. I have a recommendation for one that I love which I used actually my first time teaching management training back in the 80s. The company used to be called Zenger Miller and now it's called Achieve Global.

This article, The Basic Principles: Building Blocks of Trust, explains what their leadership principles are, why they’re important, and where they came from. They're tried and tested, and having trained managers to use them, I can I get attest to the fact that they help create an environment where people produce their best work. They include, for example, things like focusing on the situation, behavior or result and not on the person, maintaining people's self-esteem, taking initiative to make things better, and leading by example.

While these are very simple, elegant principles, they take work to practice. It's helpful to develop muscle memory with them to make it easier to use them when you’re under duress, because that's the time when they're most important, and when they’re hardest to deliver. So identifying your principles and practicing them in all situations is the first step to preparing to become a good manager.

Second step is to really understand the role and have a blueprint to shape your performance: what skills are needed, how you're going to be spending your time, and what results are valued. Here’s a great example - I love the book The Leadership Pipeline by Ram Charan for this. It gives you an outline of the manager role and responsibilities at every level and shows you the connection between each or what the passage looks like from one level to the next.

For instance, what is the transition between individual contributor to manager of others, and what does it look like going from manager of others to manager of managers, from manager of managers to managers of a function, from managers of a function to managers of a business, to a division, to CEO.

Each level of has its own challenges, specific required skills, specific ways that you spend your time, and specific results that are needed and valued for that level.

Let's drill down for a second into the transition between individual contributor to manager of others and the skills needed for each.

The way you spend your time as an individual contributor is meeting the priorities and goals that are set for you. The way you're spending your time as a manager is ensuring that your team is meeting their goals and also coordinating and communicating with other departments and making sure that things are aligned.

As an individual contributor, you’re typically focused mainly on your technical skills, as well as being a good team player, and probably adhering to the values and rules of the organization.

As a manager, you have the underpinnings of those same technical skills, but you also have creating a plan for the department, a budget, goals and milestones for the year. You have communicating the vision, delegating the responsibilities, monitoring performance and providing feedback and development, coaching, providing rewards and recognition, selecting people for the team, all that good stuff.

The third strategy is to engage a group to act as your advisory team, one that gives you a 360-degree view of yourself (meaning the good, the bad and the ugly), and a variety of different perspectives. This team is going to help you to reflect, they're going to coach you, and they're going to give you an opportunity to have sounding boards from different views.

Who should be on this team? Your manager, if trustworthy. Perhaps your manager's manager, some individual contributors that you respect, some other first-line managers who are either new or experienced, some managers of managers because they have a different view, and some HR people. Maybe at least one of each.

What does each provide? The individual contributor can share what works and doesn't work from the perspective of direct report. S/he can give you a sense of what managers do that help him/her be most effective and/or what gets in the way.

Other new managers can share their perspectives on the challenges that come up in this transition and how they overcome them. You can compare notes.

Experienced managers of others can give you tips and tricks about what's worked for them. Since managers of managers have a broader view and are used to coaching managers about the process of managing, they offer another perspective, and HR people have seen a plethora of managers and have different perspectives about what they've seen that works or doesn't work.

Fourth strategy is to come up with a process flow that will keep you in flow. When you're in the job, things will be coming at you and there's not necessarily a lot of time to think philosophically about how you would like to be operating. If you think about it ahead of time and set up a structure - both an annual process and a more short-term process, and lay out the things that you want to see happening, you'll be much more likely to include strategic processes in how you do day-to-day work.

In the annual process, besides overseeing and executing the day-to-day work you’ll have goal-setting, planning, budgeting, setting objectives with your team, monitoring your team's performance, mid-year coaching and performance appraisal, developing your team, end of year compensation planning, performance review, etc. You might want to have a development opportunity for your team as a group, like an off-site or some kind of learning activity, or a way for them to be together in a casual setting so that they get to know each other and you can build your team to be more cohesive.

So what are all the big-ticket items that you want to have in an annual plan, how will you parse out time to prepare for those, and who will your partners be to help execute.

And then your shorter term things - every week for instance I want to have a one-on-one with all my people, or every other week. I want to have a team meeting once a week where I communicate what's going on at a broader level. I want to walk the floor at least once a day (if you're in a space where you're co-located with your colleagues) and speak to at least two or three colleagues to see the business from their point of view.

What are the routines, what are the ways to be in communication, to be understanding what's going on, and to be in relationship with your people. The other piece is to engage your advisory team to see what their processes are, so you can pull from all their ideas and build something that has integrated success practices that others have already established.

Fifth strategy is to assess and build the skills that are going to be most valuable to help you be an effective manager. I like to use the Leadership Pipeline book mentioned above for the competency model (what are the most important skills knowledge and behaviors for that level manager role) and paired with that I suggest the Career Architect Development Planner to provide the content for a targeted, concrete actionable development plan.

Additionally you can work with your advisory group to help you distinguish the competencies from the list that are going to be most valuable to you in that specific setting. In addition to your own self-assessment, you can seek feedback from them about how they perceive your strengths and opportunities for development with respect to those competencies.

A great way to develop your skills and to help you have some foundation level experience so that you're not doing this for the first time on the job is to set up a project for yourself in a volunteer space where you manage other people through some kind of building of a result or developing an output.

Example: leading a small team to raise funds for a fundraiser for your favorite not-for-profit, or building a voter registration drive and engaging a team of people to plan it and execute it. This gives you the opportunity to do all the things that you'll have to do as a supervisor. This will help you to hit the ground running with the confidence that I've been to this rodeo at least once and now I'm going to iterate and continue to improve. Because you're always improving and learning new things about how to motivate people and how to get things done. But there's less fear where there's less unknown.

Taking on a management role is one way to advance your career and I think it does provide a lot of choices and a lot of opportunities beyond what you can do as an individual contributor. Whether you want to be a manager or not, understanding how to best position yourself as high potential, high performing, and promotable is a valuable step in elevating your career prospects. To learn more, download my free roadmap to accelerate your advancement at fullpotentialrealized.com/advance.

Please share this post with a friend or colleague who would make a fantastic manager.