Congratulations on your leadership promotion — you’re moving up the professional ladder.
Stepping out of the typical worker role into management is a daunting transition. Not only does this move involve taking on new responsibilities, but it also requires a change of mindset.
You’re no longer an individual contributor but a manager who must focus on leading and inspiring others while connecting your team’s work to the company’s overarching goals, mission, and vision.
That’s a challenge for anyone, especially a first-time manager.
Management impacts the entire employee experience, from workflow to morale to retention. A Gallup study found that managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. Considering the cost of poor management — between $916 billion to $1.2 trillion annually — organizations must prioritize and invest in new manager coaching.
Why is manager coaching important?
First-time managers face significant challenges as they transition. Even after a year on the job, 50% of new managers don’t feel they’re doing good work. And that’s reflected in the success rate: 50% of new managers fail in their first twelve months.
You can try to learn on the job, but manager coaching speeds up the learning curve, helping you grow into your new position quickly and develop the leadership skills you need.
A manager coach can help you handle the following 12 challenges.
1. Managing former colleagues
Moving from being a peer and friend to an authority figure can complicate teammate relationships. While they may already respect your abilities as a coworker, you need to prove yourself as their superior and gain their trust. Thankfully, 66% of workers prefer to be managed by someone promoted from within, so this may not be as big a hurdle as you think.
2. Navigating the company hierarchy
Finding yourself on equal footing with people who were formally higher than you on the org chart is another mental adjustment. You must develop a deeper understanding of company culture and politics to communicate professionally, assert yourself diplomatically, and advocate for your team.
3. Prioritizing and delegating tasks
Before becoming a manager, you were probably only responsible for your assigned tasks. Now, you’re also accountable for your team’s work, so you need to learn to manage expectations, prioritize tasks, and delegate assignments.
4. Motivating your team
Leading a team requires more than divvying up tasks. You’re expected to motivate and inspire your team to think creatively, innovate, and deliver their best work. To succeed, you must build a team that works well by learning leadership skills that help you give direction, keep everyone organized, and monitor activity to meet deadlines.
5. Developing effective communication
Your interactions now span many levels of your organization, from team members to direct superiors and peers in other departments. You need to level up your communication capabilities by developing active listening and negotiation skills that help you work with everyone to deliver the best outcomes.
6. Building accountability
Making sure people deliver on their promises is particularly stressful with former peers and remote workers. You need to develop skills to help you foster accountability within the team and deal constructively with individual challenges impacting performance.
7. Resolving conflict
Whether due to priorities or personality, managing direct reports often means managing disputes. You need to develop conflict resolution skills to proactively avoid disagreements whenever possible. In situations where it’s unavoidable, you must be ready to problem-solve, foster a compromise, and craft a positive resolution so your team can get on with their work.
8. Offering feedback
Studies show that employees want actionable advice on performance improvement. Whether conducting a performance review or a project post-mortem, offering constructive feedback that motivates employees is essential to maintaining engagement and creating a healthy work environment.
9. Integrating a diverse team
The workplace is changing — for the better. Your team likely includes visible and not-so-visible minorities, and you must understand and respect each group’s needs to foster a functional unit. It’s worth the effort: increased diversity results in high-performing teams, eclipsing less inclusive groups by 25–36%.
10. Establishing trust
Learning to trust each other is vital to effective collaboration. Your team members need to have faith in your decisions, and you need assurance they’ll do their jobs correctly. For this to happen, you must demonstrate integrity and learn when to step in when personnel struggle.
11. Coaching team members
Good leaders recognize and nurture team members’ unique knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). By leveraging coaching techniques for managers, you can offer subordinates guidance and support as they build skills and progress along their career path, in turn setting your team up for success.
12. Creating work-life balance
With a management role comes an increased workload, and you might struggle to adjust. Time, relationship, and stress management skills are all essential to developing a work-life balance that safeguards your well-being and contributes to your success.
The challenges facing a first-time manager are daunting but not impossible to overcome. Investing in coaching for new managers smooths the transition. You’ll lay the groundwork to develop the skills necessary to succeed in your new role.
A coaching guide for new managers
No one’s born a good manager — only 1 in 10 possess innate management aptitude. Another 20% can become successful in a managerial role, provided they receive leadership training and coaching.
New manager training programs are often unique to your needs, but most address developing a combination of the following seven skills.
1. People management skills
Shifting from operating as a group member to leading a team means you’ve become responsible for creating an environment that empowers workers to get things done. You must learn to discuss complex subjects, resolve conflicts, and recognize when people aren’t coping.
This change requires developing people management skills like:
2. Emotional intelligence skills
A high emotional intelligence quotient (EQ) helps you recognize, influence, and manage your and your team’s feelings. And according to the Harvard Business Review, your EQ is the primary contributor to your success as a manager.
Through coaching, managers develop skills that contribute to their:
3. Manage age and gender dynamics
For the first time, five generations — traditionalists, boomers, GenX, millennials, and GenZ — are working together. Combined with gender and cultural dynamics, that’s a lot of perspectives and experiences to manage.
Leadership coaching helps reprogram old belief systems to develop awareness and understanding of those differences and build empathy between team members and yourself.
4. Collaboration skills
Getting people to work together is no small feat. You must lead by example if you want to inspire and motivate your team to collaborate. To do so, the skills needed include:
These skills are behavioral in nature and require ongoing coaching and reinforcement to effect the changes necessary to improve.
5. Organizational understanding
Becoming a manager shifts the goalposts, so you’re no longer acting as an individual. You’re now responsible for combining different parts of the organization into a functional team that meets broader company objectives.
To do that, you need to understand each teammate’s contribution to the group’s success and how that success aligns with the company’s purpose, mission, and vision. This requires comprehending the organization’s:
- Business model
- Revenue drivers
- Goals and strategies, as well as its position in terms of meeting those goals
- Expenses related to your team or department
- Specific processes
- Marketing and messaging strategies
You must also understand your team’s daily operations and how they align with the rest of the department or company.
6. Human resources (HR) knowledge and skills
Direct reports will likely seek guidance regarding career and personal problems. Be prepared by becoming well-versed in fundamental HR policies like:
7. Mentorship
While new manager coaching and mentorship are similar, coaching focuses on a specific development area, and mentors offer more generalized help by providing a sounding board for ideas or concerns and offering insights based on direct experience.
That said, your coach can help you find a mentor and, once found, establish a mentee-friendly skill set that includes:
- Active listening
- Organization
- Observation
- Relationship building
8 tips for new managers
Finding the right coach takes time, but that doesn’t mean you should wait to improve your skills. Excellent leaders take the initiative, so start preparing for your new role by practicing these eight simple management tips.
1. Learn from those you manage
Spend time with each of your direct reports to learn about their role and responsibilities, how they like to work, and what they need from you as a manager. This quality time offers insights into individual strengths, team operations, and how to unite everyone as a functional unit.
2. Understand expectations
You’re responsible for performance reviews in your new role, so communicate what you expect from your team in terms of processes, work habits, and other factors. Explain how your management style and requirements differ from the previous supervisor, and ask for feedback on what they’d like to remain the same.
3. Be open-minded
Recognize that the way you do something may not work for everyone — team members might even have approaches that work better than yours. As long as they’re delivering the right results, it’s best to offer them autonomy and not micromanage or assume your way is right.
4. Help employees meet their professional goals
A staggering 41% of employees say they’ll leave a job that lacks career advancement opportunities. Your role as a manager is to improve retention, so try to understand everyone’s career growth goals and find professional development opportunities that develop their skills.
5. Practice active listening
Show your team you care by putting your active listening skills to work. Effective listening provides many benefits, like developing a better understanding of your employees, business, and current challenges while building trust and demonstrating how much you value the people you work with.
6. Know when to coach and correct
When you encounter a direct report’s performance challenge, the best approach is to coach them without being overly critical. Act quickly to define the problem and why it’s a concern. Then, work with the employee to develop a solution you both agree on and monitor their progress.
Serious violations are another matter, often requiring corrective measures. Make it clear that the behavior is unacceptable and outline the consequences should it happen again. And be sure to follow through if it does.
7. Hire the right people
Another aspect of your managerial job description might be staffing. If so, clearly define roles and responsibilities in job postings and work with the HR department to develop a rigorous screening process. Take your time, as hiring mistakes can be costly.
8. Appreciate good work
While constructive feedback is essential to improvement, employees also require positive feedback to stay motivated. Figure out what hits home most with each coworker and the team as a whole — be it thank-you notes, days off, or gifts — and appreciate your team so they know what they’re doing right and feel determined to keep up the good work.
Next steps for becoming an excellent leader
Becoming a manager is a significant — and exciting — next step. And, as welcome as it may be, you might want help adjusting.
Start with a BetterUp coach. Our team offers comprehensive new manager coaching programs to build on your strengths and bridge skill set gaps. Enjoy finding the support and guidance needed to help you become an excellent leader.
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