New Manager Challenges

by John G. Agno

Published on this site: November 24th, 2005 - See more articles from this month

Employers often promote strong individual performers to supervisory roles with little instruction. But people who excel among the rank-and-file don't automatically have the skills or knowledge to manage well.

New managers who are forced to learn to be leaders through trial-and-error find the transition difficult because they are ill-prepared for all the routine things that managers do. Much of training goes to help managers comply with workplace rules on issues like sexual harassment or teach them financial basics such as budgeting. Little training time is spent on "soft skills" such as coaching, leading, disciplining, giving feedback and resolving conflicts.

Whatever the field, one of the toughest issues for new managers is supervising former peers. As a result, new managers struggle to strike the right tone with former peers and tend to confuse staffers with intermittent or conflicting feedback. The bottom line is up to 40% of newly promoted or recruited leaders fail to move up to the next level.

Leaders often fail for a few common reasons: due to unclear or outsized expectations, a failure to build partnerships with key stakeholders, a failure to learn the company, industry or the job itself fast enough, a failure to determine the process for gaining commitments from direct reports and a failure to recognize and manage the impact of change on people.

Executive onboarding coaching of the newly recruited or promoted manager can turnaround this high rate of failure.

Source: Managing by Erin White in The Wall Street Journal November 21, 2005

John G. Agno, certified executive & business coach Signature, Inc., PO Box 2086, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 Telephone: 734.426.2000 (US Eastern Time Zone) Email: mailto:[email protected] The most critical knowledge is self-knowledge. http://www.MentoringandCoaching.com