Eight tips for first time managers

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

Inevitably, as you gain career confidence and experience, you will start managing people. Management gives us a way of guiding, teaching and increasing impact. It means you are trusted and have figured things out. And it’s expected for senior roles.

But how do you learn to manage people? There are surprisingly few resources that I find valuable. Beyond practice and learning from other managers, there is no cheat sheet. But to help you along, this post is the advice I give to first time managers. Future articles will be devoted to more complex challenges. The dozen or so lessons in these stories are built over many years of painful mistakes, experiments that worked and patterns that repeat over and over.

Great management is built on emotional intelligence

Managers come in all shapes and sizes. Some start confident while most begin tentative and unsure. Introverts and extroverts can make great managers, though they take different approaches. I’ve met terrific 25-year old managers and even managers who do most of their work remotely, over video calls.

Yet I don’t believe it’s possible to be a great manager or even a good one without high emotional intelligence (EQ). Your job is to connect with people, navigate relationships, and understand and translate emotions in the workplace. Successful management also requires to evolve and the self awareness to understand your shortcomings and improve.

The tips below will generously lean on high EQ. Sadly, if you struggle with emotional intelligence, management may not be right for you.

The world is filled with poor managers

Most managers aren’t very good. Let me explain why.

Let’s first start with defining the term. A manager is a coach for their team and owns the team’s successes and failures. Your job as a manager is to teach and mentor. You must love team building and people. Help them get up when they are down and patiently problem solve with them. You are no longer solely measured by personal output but your team’s. If you are great individually but your team is terrible, you have a serious problem. You must spend the majority of your day making sure others succeed, even at the expense of your personal recognition. If that doesn’t appeal to you, don’t become a manager.

By the way, management and leadership are different. A great CEO or leader isn’t measured by coaching professional growth. They need a separate skillset. They set vision and direction, take risk, build culture, drive accountability, and scale organizations. They hire great managers so they don’t have to be world class here. Though CEOs get all the press, don’t assume copying their tactics teaches you to manage.

So why are most managers mediocre? Consider the story of Derek. Derek is a great individual contributor at his job. He does great work and is on the rise. The company needs a manager so he naturally gets tapped to lead the small team. Given Derek was great individually, shouldn’t he succeed?

Probably not at first. Derek didn’t become great because he was selfless, built a strong team or taught others. He became great because he got things done as an army of one. He mostly needed IQ, not EQ. Now he needs a completely new set of skills, ones that require him to take a backseat and use his powers of influence, partnership and coaching to succeed.

This isn’t unique to Derek. It’s how every manager starts. Since you have much to learn, you are likely to start off rocky. Your skills won’t translate instantly and you might face a series of setbacks, perhaps for the first time professionally. If you feel like an imposter, don’t get frustrated and give up! You will only get better if you love the craft and have strong mentors and want to work. But few devote the time and patience required. So the vast majority of managers are mediocre. And they teach their mediocre skills to the next batch of star individuals, repeating the cycle.

Important aside. Poor managers are at the heart of the challenge we face with bias and diversity in the workplace. New or weak managers who get frustrated by their inexperience replicate what has worked from their narrow set of past experiences. Great managers teach us to see the whole game board. Not just solve problems, but teach their teams the skills to problem solve without their manager. They help us look at a decision from new angles and identify what might work differently.

Without great managers, we make the same decisions over and over and fail to recognize and defeat bias and discrimination. No wonder minorities have a hard time advancing in an organization or cultures are so difficult to change. This topic is definitely getting another story, perhaps a whole series. But since I was here, I want you to take note. We need great managers for our companies to sustain growth and our industries to evolve. This really matters.

One last background note. Let’s come up with a term to define a person you manage. Searching on the web, terms include supervisee, mentee, underling, slave, staff member, servant, serf, aide, lackey, hireling, and many more. These are all terrible. Just ask yourself, do you look forward going to work as a hireling? I’m going to simply use the term “teammate”, which by the way, no one seemed to use. Go figure.

Eight things you should do as a first time manager

The tips below are the foundation for a strong manager. I list them and then follow with detailed explanations.

1. Know the past, present, and future career ambitions of your teammate.
2. Care for the whole person, not just the person they are at work.
3. Be yourself, don’t forget who you are when you manage.
4. Enable unstructured, less formal communication.
5. Share what you know, early and often.
6. Master the art of giving feedback.
7. Coach development areas one at a time, not all at once.
8. Make escalation to you a common occurrence, not an instrument of last resort.

Though I consider these skills fundamental, they aren’t easy to master. They require practice, desire, and skill. But by learning the foundation, it’ll be easier to recognize and solve more complex management challenges we’ll discuss in future.

1. Understand your teammate

When you start managing a teammate (let’s use the name Chris), start with his past. Figure out what makes Chris tick. Consider each job or school as a separate “chapter” for Chris. So you might get Chris on “chapter seven”. Six chapters have come and gone. If you manage him without reading the previous six chapters, you might be as lost as starting a book from the middle.

What is his job history? Why did he leave past companies? Did he enjoy school? Is he new to the industry? Is he new to the city? What feedback has he received from past managers? Basically an expanded version of what you might have covered in an interview. Learn background to understand and explain future behavior.

• Chris worked at a company known for its aggressive style. Or his last company had a highly collaborative style and was known for being nice. If your workplace has a different culture, you must ensure he knows what’s permissible vs. out of bounds.
• Chris has never had a manager, you are his first. Alternatively he’s had a long history of great managers. Or Chris has had many managers, all of which he considers terrible. Knowing this helps set realistic expectations (more on expectations below).
• Chris built great relationships with his past coworkers. He speaks of them fondly and describes how he invested in others. Or Chris didn’t see the value of these bonds, focused on getting things done and was a bit puzzled by past feedback criticizing this. To manage Chris, we need to determine his emotional intelligence. If he has high EQ, you can move quickly through people related issues. If he struggles, you’ll need to coach more slowly and thoughtfully.

Now let’s turn to the present and future. Why did Chris join the company and your project? How does he like what he is learning and how fast he is progressing? What does he expect from you and from the project? And what’s next after you or after this company?

Once we understand his expectations, ensure they can be achieved or work to make them realistic. This is critical to a strong relationship with your teammate, since the reason why relationships fail is largely due to misaligned expectations. “I thought you would meet with me every day.” “I thought you would leave me alone.” “I thought you would know all of the answers.” “I didn’t realize you wanted me to tell you that.”

So ensure as you start managing Chris, you have a formal conversation on expectations. Describe your style, things you will or won’t do, and align his expectations. Better to establish now than risk one side feeling they are failing. Also recognize that expectations need to evolve over time so you need to continue to have these conversations and update expectations.

It takes time to understand Chris. You might feel comfortable asking lots of questions or you might prefer to observe situations and reactions. Both help build a rich profile and your teammate will appreciate your interest. Even consider talking to a former manager or peer, with permission. It’s quite useful to know past development areas or see how your teammate has changed.

Your teammate is entrusting you to coach their career and you need to care for it. So start with learning about them. If you don’t understand their past, present and future career plans, you’ll end up guessing. Don’t skip over this. Lots of people jump immediately to managing execution. That matters too, but once you understand the career of your teammate, it may shed light on problems your teammate encounters on the job.

2. Care for the whole person, not just who they are at work

To know your teammate, understand what drives their joy and happiness within and outside of work. In the case of Chris, if you ignore his life outside of work, you are ignoring at least half of who he is. But if you pry too far, you’ll make him uncomfortable and step on his right to privacy.

I find it most valuable to establish a conversation on work life balance. It can help explain behavior. Examples: Chris snapped at someone in a meeting — but you recognize this is due to a new child at home. Or Chris’ performance is faltering because the project deadline is preventing him from spending time in the gym or with his family.

To help Chris, ensure he knows your door is open in case he needs to chat about a non-work situation that impacts his performance. Establish that you care about him as a person, beyond the project and the job at hand. In case pressure at work or at home impacts his performance, you want him to feel safe in discussing this with you. And you want to check in on his balance and help him regain it if it falters.

This requires judgment. Many teammates treasure their ability to keep their work lives separate. Managers sometimes are the “last to know” for good reason. As long as he knows you care and are approachable, you are doing your job. You don’t have to be a close friend or therapist. Likely your teammate has help from others, which may include friends at work and your HR team. But you do want to be there if you are needed.

Performance at work isn’t the number of hours your teammate works. It’s the energy and quality of their output as they work. Your teammate can be blind to these tradeoffs. When you care about a person, their balance and their happiness, it gives them a chance to feel safe and develop skills to maintain this balance.

3. Be yourself, even as a first time manager

So you are asking questions, learning about your teammate, and building a strong relationship. Notice we haven’t started telling our teammate what to do. We are listening and understanding, not telling and demanding. When we start managing people, start by building that relationship, being yourself, and laughing a bit. You won’t be perfect or have all of the answers. You simply have to be yourself.

In fact, when you don’t know the answer, don’t panic or rush through it. Recognize that many critical problems don’t have an answer, they are subtle and challenging and require time to resolve. Consider admitting this to your teammate as it shows great safety and confidence. I encourage this, but recognize how difficult showing vulnerability might be for a first time manager. Thankfully you have your own manager who might be able to help provide answers. Or find your own management mentor — someone who has a similar style but further ahead on the road. If you are really stuck and don’t have a good resource, leave a comment here. I’ll try and help or find someone to assist. We’re all in this together!

Though being in charge is serious business, try going slow and relaxing. I recognize that’s hard when it’s your first time doing anything. But like any relationship, it’s best to be your true self and enjoy the process. Laugh as often as you can. If you feel yourself consistently anxious, strict and overly serious, consider waiting a few years and practice mentoring others in the meantime.

In fact, I advocate all managers begin as mentors to build confidence. A good manager is closer to a coach and teacher than a critic or commander. For those of you reading this article hoping to become a manager, start being a mentor today. No one is stopping you. And as you transition from a successful mentor to an official manager, don’t change but evolve. In fact, this article in Harvard Business Review describes what the best mentors do and all these lessons apply to managers. Far too often a successful mentor becomes a manager and starts acting differently. They grip the steering wheel far too tight, telling their team what to do and micro-managing deliverables. Assistant coaches advance to head coaches, not return to the court as a player.

4. Enable unstructured, less formal communication

Okay, so you are building a strong relationship, you are relaxed, and you understand each other and have aligned expectations. Great start. You are further along than most managers already.

Let’s focus on communication. You have many opportunities to communicate with your teammate. You probably have scheduled team meetings, 1:1 discussions, and performance reviews. And undoubtedly chat in the hallway, email or text one another, or talk socially outside of the office. This section focuses on how to make best use of the time.

The most important meeting you have as a manager is your 1:1. If they are stressful for either party, you aren’t doing them right. Though scheduled, they don’t have to be in a conference room. Depending on your style and your teammate, you might consider taking a walk or mixing things up so you both relax and loosen the agenda.

I can tell the strength of most managers in how they manage their 1:1s. Unfortunately, most 1:1s aren’t useful. If your 1:1s are infrequent and primarily devoted to project status, you are missing an opportunity. Ask your teammate to send you an email status instead. Then devote your 1:1 time to focus on providing context, giving feedback, working through development areas, and problem solving relationships.

Most critical is to strike a balance between structured and unstructured communication with a welcoming and friendly tone. Don’t create an air tight agenda where you do most of the talking. Give your teammate a chance to talk about what’s most on their mind and how you can help without forcing them to interrupt. Similarly, if your teammate is doing all of the talking, you aren’t able to direct and ensure your notes are considered. Balance is key here.

Unstructured communication is improvisational and two-sided. Here you don’t spend time figuring out how to communicate. Instead, you feel safe to focus on what to communicate. The quality of your relationship is often directly related to the frequency and tone of this communication. If you text your teammate throughout the day, you clearly prioritize keeping each other in the loop. You talk through concerns and new information as it comes up and almost certainly have a personal, natural tone. On the other hand, if you only communicate in infrequent, formal settings, it’s unlikely your communication is complete. Much gets lost in the packaging, so strive to enable frequent, unstructured discussion.

5. Share what you know, early and often

Let’s say you just got promoted to manager. Congratulations! You now have a small team reporting to you. Will your team be overjoyed to soak in your wisdom?

Perhaps. More likely, some of your team will be dubious. They may be older or even more tenured or experienced. They may be further from your boss now and resent being layered. Or they may be upset they were overlooked. Regardless, your initial rise to manager may come with some extra challenges. This section is designed to help.

As a senior person, you understand far more than your teammate why things happen as much as what is happening. Not just because you are super talented and experienced. It’s because you are simply higher up the mountain and can see more of the valley. You go to different meetings, talk to other managers and leaders, and get paid to put things together. Your teammate is asked to go deep so you can work more broadly — both are required to get things done.

Recognize that the context you have is likely unknown to the rest of your team. As a manager, it’s crucial you share this context efficiently and frequently. Not doing so means your team makes decisions or draws conclusions in the dark. Or worse, you struggle with coaching them because their choices are erratic and uninformed.

Use your staff meeting and your 1:1 to educate your team on what you are seeing and how things are changing or connected. Proper context enables your teammate to make decisions without you and drives more ownership.

Providing this context also shows your value as a manager, even to the most skeptical teammate. It is a gift to a first time manager, making you instantly valuable. You might not have the skills to coach everyone who comes your way. Nor will everyone want your coaching. But you are likely to have more background on why decisions are made or upcoming challenges your company face simply due to what you learn in your day-to-day. Share this and all of your team will find it informative.

6. Master the art of giving feedback

Make a point to share feedback monthly in your 1:1s. Recognize what’s working and what’s not working. If you know you have to give constant feedback, you’ll start watching more carefully. Maybe it’s observations from a team meeting or presentation. Or an email response (or lack of response). What one of your peers said about your teammate. Or simply credit for a job well done. There should be dozens of opportunities in a given month, you just need to pay attention to small signals.

Note that I’m looking for lighter, more frequent feedback. This is good relationship hygiene. I name these “pinches” not “punches”. Pinches are lightweight, “Hey quick thing — I noticed when you said X, Jane didn’t react the way you intended.” Pinches are the best way to develop someone, because they are timely, built on an example, and don’t warrant a jarring reaction. Pinches avoid abstract and generalized guidance. The more specific your feedback, the easier it is to understand. Though they might indicate an important pattern, five specific pinches over six months is far better than one generalized punch in a six month review.

Your goal is to avoid surprise. Avoid placing your teammate on the defensive, when they stop listening and start rationalizing. Pinches are great ways to help people see an issue that feels collaborative, not critical. And don’t assume an instant response. Plant the seed and give time for your teammate to understand and clarify. The more time they take to digest and internalize, the more likely they are listening and taking your notes to heart.

Let’s say you hear Chris isn’t giving everyone in his team an equal chance to voice an opinion. He tends to shut down people in the interest of moving efficiently. You haven’t witnessed this personally, but your gut tells you the point has merit. A couple of people you trust have mentioned it, though they indicate it’s not a “big deal”.

You have a few choices. Ignore it — it seems small and hopefully will go away with time. Have a “talk” with Chris, ensuring he understands this is happening and it might be a problem. Or include this feedback in his formal review.

Instead, pick a reaction in the middle. In your next 1:1, start with, “Hey, I got some interesting feedback in the past couple of weeks I want to run by you. I’m hearing from your team they don’t always get to voice an opinion. I can see where they might be coming from, but I don’t think that’s intentional. Does this feedback surprise you?”

Compare that to a formal approach of “Chris needs to partner better with his team”. This forces Chris on the defensive and though it might be a spot incident, the generalization comes across inaccurately as a pattern.

This approach has a lighter tone and involves Chris in a conversation. You want to collaborate with Chris on his development areas, not just drop bombs and have him solve. Feedback is the first part, but now he’ll need a partner to help him solve this challenge. And you might find his perspectives alter your perspective, as there’s always two sides of the coin. If you can join Chris on the same side of the table to solve the problem, you are doing things right.

7. One thing at a time

Undoubtedly, as you start coaching Chris, you are going to identify multiple areas of development. Building a rich background on Chris and aligning expectations will ensure these are on target. And healthy communication and feedback enables you to present these in a thoughtful, timely manner.

So naturally you’ll start making a list, perhaps a lengthy one, of all the things where Chris can improve. What a gift to Chris! You’re helping him reach new heights and doing your job. But don’t do it all at once.

As a manager, your initial goal is to establish trust. Giving feedback and listening are great starts. But you’ll ruin it if you rattle off three to five things to work on. It’s overwhelming and for most, frustrating and stressful to feel like they are failing. In most cases, when I work on development areas with a teammate, it’s one of the first times in their professional lives anyone has cared to coach. (In fact, you might be Chris’ very first good manager.) So developing him is uncharted territory for you and for him.

So pick one good development area that is actionable. Check in on this frequently, giving feedback on progress. Ensure Chris gets positive feedback as well as negative feedback, so he doesn’t feel like a failure. When you see significant improvement, celebrate and pick another area. Then use your less frequent formal reviews to outline multiple areas of development and improvement, ensuring you still can put his development areas and strengths in context.

This also applies to crafting healthier 1:1 conversations. By focusing on a single topic, you can go into greater depth. If your 1:1s are 30 mins, it’s hard to discuss multiple topics in one setting. But a single topic enables deeper examination and leads to trust and safety since you operate on the same set of facts and show genuine interest.

Going slow means you wait to develop Chris in certain areas, which seems unintuitive. But working serially gives him the ability to digest what you are saying, builds confidence that he can improve, and establishes confidence that you can successfully coach him.

8. Escalation as a feature not a bug

As managers, our job is to identify and remove obstacles. But you can only help with the obstacles you know. So naturally, you’ll assume your teammates are drawing your attention to the critical challenges.

Consider it from your teammate’s perspective. When Chris asks for help, he’s admitting failure to himself. In his mind, he’s failed to solve the problem. His fear is that this will be used against him in his performance review. Escalation draws attention to a clear skill gap. So he’s reluctant to bring your attention to the matter.

To help Chris, you need him to feel safe when he escalates. Otherwise, your 1:1s will go fast and painlessly! But they won’t be productive. Start by asking what challenges he is facing and his approach in solving. Then probe to see if he’s considered all of the options, including assistance from others including your help. Often, given your vantage point, the alternatives you see will genuinely be appreciated.

It’s too late if escalation is an instrument of last resort. Your choices are limited if Chris has “tried everything and he’s stumped” or his mindset is “It’s time to tell the boss, we have a serious matter”. Define escalation as a way to get your take on a problem and one that will be met with partnership and love, not frustration. Often I send the problem back to the teammate, suggesting a few tips and have them continue to solve. Other times I do some digging and report back. If the problem is especially challenging and beyond their role, I thank them for bringing attention to the matter and ask to own the solution. Healthy escalation is one of the keystones to building a productive relationship with your teammate when handled correctly.

Summary

With high emotional intelligence, you will establish an authentic and powerful relationship with your teammate and align on expectations. This leads to effective communication, improvement to your team’s development areas and increase in your confidence as a manager.

Here is a checklist for managing your Chris, your teammate. Ensure you can answer these.

• What’s Chris’s background? How is he motivated and how does he see his career unfolding?
• What are his expectations of you? And how well does he understand your expectations?
• How well do you know Chris outside of work? Can you describe a good day and bad day for him and what drives joy and frustration for him?
• Are you a confident manager? If not, are you working with your manager to increase your safety and confidence? Are you able to bring your true self to your team as their manager?
• Describe your communication with Chris. Do you have shorthand, i.e. frequent lightweight discussions that directly tackle important issues?
• Does Chris have sufficient context to do his best work on the project? Are you regularly updating him on changes?
• How frequent is your feedback? The majority should be timely and lightweight and should be a blend of praise and development.
• Are you working on a few issues with Chris or many at the same time? Fewer issues in greater depth is desired.
• When Chris escalated, is this a feature or a bug? It shouldn’t be an instrument of last resort but a way to problem solve together.

In the next article I’ll touch on more advanced topics. These include:

• Managing entrepreneurs vs. future executives is very different, especially as it relates to their first 100 days in your company.
• Often it’s better to wait on working on a development area, especially if you have an over achiever. Waiting for rock bottom may be the only way to see change.
• Most teams have members fighting imposter’s syndrome where they don’t feel they belong. Tips on how to create safety for them.
• How do you manage people who are very different than you. What if you don’t represent their future self? Can you still help them?
• How to diagnose problems when your teammate behaves differently around you vs. others?

Good luck and drop me a comment if you have other questions or tips.

Special thanks to Poulomi Damany, Anish Acharya, Hannah Zachritz, Laura Holmes, Brionna Ned, Mckenzie Lock and Jim Sniechowski for your wonderful help editing this article.