A shift in anyone’s role from a team member to a manager brings a new dimension that needs to be balanced very well.
First of all Congratulations! Your hard work and talent paid off and it's great to see the benefits now.
This role will be a great motivator in handling the new responsibilities with dedication.
You must be aware that the promotions are generally given based on the performance in the previous roles and the potential and promise of the candidate in exhibiting the new role. In practice, the new roles come along with new tasks, with greater impact, and more expectations and so meeting the expectations becomes very important.
Here are the tips on how you can be successful as a Newly Promoted Manager
Major points to focus on include:
Planning
Handling Colleagues
Delegation
Handling Issues
Managing Evaluation
Multitasking at Handling
Check out How you can use the Success Tips for a New Manager
Planning- A manager becomes responsible for his team members' work too. So, apart from planning your work, you need to plan for others work, especially based on their capabilities.
Handling Colleagues- A newly promoted manager may have been handling employees who must have previously been at the same level as his. Generally, these employees don’t take the instructions seriously creating problems for the manager. The newly promoted manager has to manage these employees with more patience for everything to be executed smoothly.
Delegation- As a team member our primary role is to work on the tasks. But a manager’s role includes delegation of work. But our previous habit of working on the tasks take over many times and we fail to delegate work to the sub-ordinates. As a result, he gets overloaded with work creating an imbalance in work. The Sooner we adapt to the new role, the better it is.
Handling Issues- A manager’s role includes handling various issues including technical and non-technical issues. Having had experience working with technical issues, the task becomes easy. But, handling non-technical issues is new and it could become a daunting task, esp. If the team members are not supportive. Also, new managers may not know all the tactics of handling these issues and make things draining. Many companies don’t even give proper training to handle such issues.
Managing Evaluations- Listening to negative feedback is painful, but giving negative feedback to an underperforming employee is equally painful. New managers hesitate to give negative feedbacks which further affects the team’s work. So, one must see how to be assertive yet correct in the decisions, especially which favours the team overall.
Handling multiple projects- While multitasking is a part of any job, handling of multiple projects is altogether at a different level. Employees in Startups must have already been exposed to this, esp. due to lack of resources, but many people are not exposed to this. As a result execution of all projects, each with its own required pace is challenging.
Quotations- In some companies, estimates and quotations are part of managerial roles. If they were not exposed to this in the previous roles, estimations become a headache. Because clients could be very unstructured while providing the project requirements and any deviation in understanding and estimating the client requirement affects the entire team’s future work. Also, it could lead to revenue losses.
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Overall, it is always good to learn all these in the previous roles. Good leaders give exposure to these responsibilities well before in hand and make sure the newly promoted managers handle these tasks smoothly. But, lack of resources, the candidate’s shortcomings and lack of intent within the leader impacts the overall learning process, effecting new managers greatly.
Of course, time and experience will teach everything. But, in this competitive world, fast learners stand out. Make sure you are one. Most importantly, observe your leader how he handles all these things even before you received the promotion. These learnings will be very handy. You can simply replicate your leader’s tactics; and slowly, you can develop your own in the long run.
Thanks for Reading. If you have a similar experience of your corporate life, do share your stories with us, for others to learn.