4 Don’ts for First-Time Managers to Help You Succeed  

If managing people was easy, we’d all be doing it, and we’d all be very good at it. But it isn’t, and we aren’t. Having been a first-time manager and having worked for first-time managers, I have learned some fundamental dos and don’ts to share with aspiring or struggling first timers. Here are my top four don’ts:

• Don’t hire everyone like you. As a manager, it is tempting to hire individuals who share your point of view and work ethic. They feel familiar, comfortable, and easy to communicate with—only, instead of building a team, you are cloning yourself. Chances are they have similar backgrounds and may even have worked at the same prior companies at which you worked. All of this sounds nice, but the more you surround yourself with one type of worker, the less experience you are acquiring. Observing how other employees do their jobs, how they take direction, accept feedback, and develop in their roles all fuel your own growth as a manager. If you are eating only red meat every meal, how can you expect to become fully nourished and acquire new tastes? More importantly, how can you share your expanded knowledge with others? Instead, try to build or accept diversity. Even difficult employees can be beneficial to you early in your career.

• Don’t expect others to do their jobs the way you would. Sure, if you could do every job in the company, you would not need managers. But true teams need different players with different skill sets who work differently from one another. In leadership training they often equate teams to an orchestra and managers to the maestro. Each has his/her own instrument, each plays at varying levels, each contributes according to the overall song needs. It is the maestro’s responsibility to pull them together and turn noise into music. While there are extraordinary solos, the best music is a harmony of sounds and timing. Finding that balance is the true spirit of management: organizing a diverse group, focusing members of the group on the bigger picture, and aligning disparate functions to deliver a common goal. While you are doing all of this, you must let the players play their own way. Even though there are right and wrong methods for nearly everything in life, allowing for the grey area in between is what builds individuality and fosters unexpected greatness.

• Don’t be afraid to work with people smarter than you. It is not unusual to hear great leaders in their speeches thank their teams and partners—saying that the best and only contribution that they, themselves, had made was hiring or finding and collaborating with their amazing staff. Good managers let their team make them look good. They don’t try to “one up” them or constantly minimize risk by not letting them fail.  Instead, they create a vision, empower the right people, and trust that the orchestra will create beautiful music—with a little guidance along the way. A popular management book will often reference putting the right people on the bus and then letting them drive. Rather than simply fill a bus with passengers, a good manager will select the right diverse assortment of talent that complement one another and leave them to create their own journey. As long as they are heading in the right direction, chances are they will get to where they need to be—perhaps even sooner than the manager anticipated.

• Don’t just give feedback; ask for it. Admitting that you don’t know everything goes a long way in building respect and rapport. New managers often try to compensate for their inexperience by coming off like they know more than they do—trust me, no one buys it. Instead of making statements and giving orders, ask questions and accept advice. Survey your team and get input so that you can make informed decisions. While you may not always be right, you will gain perspective from listening to others, and you will evolve more readily than your peers who only follow their own voice. It is a great responsibility for managers to develop people. They, much like parents, need to balance educating their employees with allowing for some breathing room to let them discover things for themselves. By doing so, you will learn just as much from them as they do from you. When you finally become a manager for the first time, put this to the test. Tell your direct reports that, while you are well-versed in whatever aspect of your career that led you there, you are on a journey. Let them know that you are open to hear their points of view and want their feedback given their own experiences. Again, you may not always agree, but you will always have a conversation worth having.

Finding your style as a manager can be one of the most rewarding aspects of your career development. Watching good managers and bad managers can provide insights into the type of leader you will ultimately aspire to become, as long as you pay attention. First-time managers need to be extra cautious not to assume that they just have to work hard and get their teams to work harder in order to be successful. They need to start to become aware of who they are, what they are good at, why they need other skill sets to support their goals. They also need to start to grow through others—not over them. First-time managers, above all else, need to build strong teams, learn to trust them, hold them accountable, support them, and set clear direction on what success looks like. The rest is all part of the journey.