10 Tips to Help New Managers Succeed

Training Foundations – By Larry Freedman

Without training, new managers are more likely to fail than not

According to a study by the Corporate Executive Board, 60% of new managers fail within the first 20 months. Wow, let that sink in!

As a new manager, you are more likely to fail than not, and the No. 1 reason for the high failure rate, according to Steve Smith, the author of “Managing for Success,” is “they were never properly trained to manage.”

This statistic is staggering and costs companies millions of dollars in lost revenues, attrition of high performers, bad hires and, in some cases, lawsuits. That should make the case for investing in leadership development; this article can help with the development of emerging, new and experienced managers in your organization.

Your first one-on-one conversation with a team member, which should ideally precede a team meeting, should be roughly 80% personal and 20%business. For years, I’ve asked the members of my team to fill out a personal profile, which we covered during our very first conversation. I filled out the same profile and shared my responses during the initial discussion. The desired outcome of this first session is to start to build rapport and trust. If this meeting turns into a full-fledged business review, then you are sending the message that the business comes first, and your team member is a distant second.
It’s important for a manager to set mutual expectations and ensure clarity and alignment. This means that as a manager, you need to make certain that your team members know what you expect from them and what they in turn can expect from you. It’s also important that your team member tells you what they expect from you as their leader. To ensure alignment, your team members should know the answer to two questions: 1) What is expected of me, and 2) How am I doing versus expectations?
Praise in public and critique in private! Seems obvious, right, but it doesn’t always happen. It’s embarrassing to the person getting critiqued (in front of colleagues) and it also sends a message to the entire team that no one is safe. To that end, managers need to always remember that it’s not what you say but how you say it! Practice kind candor!
Your team will place emphasis on what you make important! If you want to create a performance-based culture, then place emphasis on performance by celebrating success, sharing best practices and committing to excellence. Conversely, if having flawless administration is your point of emphasis, well, not that it’s not important, but it won’t help your team drive performance.
“Prescription without diagnosis is malpractice.” Meaning, it’s important that as a manager, you take the time to truly understand the strengths and weaknesses of your team members, prior to creating a plan for them to improve. This is critical to ensure buy-in and alignment, so there’s a commitment to improving, versus compliance to a plan they don’t believe will work in the first place.
This may sound silly, but I encourage you and your team to create a team name, which helps to create an identity and a common bond. A few personal favorites include, but aren’t limited to the Wolf Pack, Rainmakers, Game Changers and, my first team, the Westchester Warriors. Individual, light-hearted nicknames, as appropriate, can also bring teams and people together. This is all part of building a strong and inclusive culture.
When you are a manager, all eyes are on you all the time, and your team will take their cues from you. You need to model the behavior that you expect from your team. Candidly, if you arrive late and leave early, then your actions speak volumes over your words. You need to show, not tell your team, what good looks like by modeling the desired behavior.
As a manager, you are a force multiplier and need to take your professional development very seriously, as it impacts your entire team. As you get better, you can improve the skills and knowledge of each team member, which raises the bar for the entire team. Leaders need to bring value and new ideas to their teams, which reminds me of the expression, “evolve or become extinct.”
When it comes to skills, abilities, attitude and performance, your team is on a bell curve. For example, you may have two superstars on the right of the curve, six people in the middle and two low performers on the left. A strong manager and good team will work to promote the two on the right, replace them with two in the middle and ideally improve the two on the left, if they put in the work and effort. Conversely, a weak leader will be too insecure to promote the two stars, which will breed mediocrity in the middle, and then allow the two weak performers to “stick around” for as long as they want! This is a recipe for disaster and happens more than it should.
One of the toughest things to do as a manager is to terminate one of your team members. This can often be an agonizing situation for several different reasons, but if it’s appropriate, the onus falls on the manager to make the difficult call. There are often many factors to consider, but I took away two questions from Jim Collins ’book, “Good t to Great,” which have significantly helped my former leaders and me: First, would you rehire them based on what you know now? Second, would you be disappointed if they left the organization?