What New Managers Should Do First
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It’s a great feeling when you’ve landed the management job you wanted and you’re looking forward to the challenge.
Now you have to work out what new managers should do first and you have two weeks to design your 30 day plan or your 60 day plan – what you’ll actually do and when.
You need to make a good start, a carefully considered start. It has to be a start based on understanding of the current situation in the company, your existing skills and experience and the existing skills and experience of the staff
Where do you begin? Stop and think. What are the most important issues? Do you go in as the proverbial new broom to sweep clean? Is that what everyone expects?
It may be what everyone expects but that’s not the best way. The new broom can cause resentment of a new manager – that won’t benefit you when you need people in the company and your team to work with you.
The preparation time in between getting the job and starting the job is vital. If you miss it out, your new job will be so much harder. This preparatory stage will have to be done at some time and it is best done at the most appropriate time – before you start.
The first steps and questions are these:
Where have you come from?
Is the management job with a company where you’ve not worked before?
Have you been promoted from within the company you’ve been with a while?
Have you been promoted from the department you work in or from another department within the company?
Depending on which of the above scenarios applies to you, you’ll be beginning your new management job with one of 3 different perspectives and with one of 3 different sets of issues engaging your thinking.
New to the Company:
If the company is new to you, you’ll be an unknown quantity to everyone. You’re untried and untested. You’ll have to prove yourself to your CEO, senior executives, your immediate boss, your team and to all the other people in the organisation who you come across, including the security staff, reception staff and cleaning staff.
You’ll have to prove your basic qualifications, skills and abilities in the work of the company as well as your managerial skills and people management skills.
Everyone will be speculating about you and swapping impressions for the first weeks and months. You’ve got a lot to prove but you’ve got a clean and blank slate to write on. It’s an exciting challenge.
Promoted from within the company:
If you’ve been promoted from within your own department, there are likely to be a different mix of things to deal with. It’s likely that you’re already respected for your qualifications and the work you’ve done up to now. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have been given a management job.
There will be those on your team who will be very pleased you got the job and they will back you and support you. That’s a huge plus – a proven track record and people batting for you and looking forward to working with you. You’ll have a honeymoon period of a couple of months where you’ll be cut some slack and you can settle in to your role.
There may, however, be some staff who are not so pleased that you got the job, especially if another member of the team also applied for the same promotion and they were passed over. You’ll have to have a strategy for the person who is passed over and their followers who are disappointed. You’ll have to accept that those staff will be comparing how you’re working out with how the other person would have managed them. It will take you a month or so to convince them you can do a good job.
Don’t expect them all to say that you turned out best for the job. Only the confident and brave ones will be able to do that. The rest will say nothing and just become your supporters over time. Your challenges are in proving you can manage the team and team projects and that you have the skills to manage people.
Your predecessor:
You need to bear in mind that you will have inherited some sort of baggage from your predecessor. It could simply be that your predecessor was a really nice person who was easy going and was perhaps a bit soft on the staff and didn’t enforce some rules, so that you will appear more rigorous.
There are also many examples of a predecessor leaving a lot of difficult situations for someone who takes over. The previous manager may have allowed a totally unacceptable poor practice and you have to put matters right.
There are cases of a predecessor allowing credit to accumulate for some customers and the new manager having to collect debts before he can start to meet his own targets.
Whatever sort of manager your predecessor was, be sure there will be some fall out for you, so look out for it heading your way. Deal with it as soon as you become aware of it and involve your own boss too – you don’t want someone else’s shortcomings being attached to your watch.
No matter which scenario you’re working, careful thought, consideration and tact, will get you set and able to do the job expected of you. You need understanding, a plan and you’ll need some help and some training.
Elizabeth Best co-founded TeamEffective at http://TeamEffective.org
You can currently join TeamEffective as a Free Member to develop your Effective Management Skills
TeamEffective offers a ground-breaking approach to management training and support, saving managers both time and money.
Elizabeth is a management consultant, specializing in manager development and renowned for her focused practical advice.
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