Be Personal to Become an Effective First-time Manager ‘Faster’

Change Your Management ‘Style’ Game

When I became a manager for the first time, I was given the impression as if being a manager was an elite job that would need some out-of-the-world skills. Despite that, I was expected to come up to speed quickly in my new role. The picture is painted almost the same way for every new first-time manager. To some first-time managers, this picture may come across as quite intimidating.

You might be in great luck if you were a seasoned individual contributor within a team, and now you have been given a role to lead the same team as a manager. But we have seen that even when a seasoned individual contributor with high acceptability within a team takes up a manager’s role, they suddenly start behaving differently or unnaturally.

A delicate balance to look good on both sides

There are two forces that create such a sudden behavioral transformation.

First, there is a certain level of anxiety to look good to the team and come across as an effective manager at the outset. Such individuals want to keep things under control without losing a minute while expecting to command respect from the direct report. Somehow, in the back of their mind, they relate their effectiveness as a manager to their chances of earning their team’s respect.

Second, there is this pressure of looking good in front of upper management in an attempt to prove that they have made the right hiring decision by promoting (or hiring) this individual to the manager’s role.

More often, new managers walk on this two-edged sword to look good to the teams and to the upper management. This is the exact thing that makes their life over-stressful, as they are in a constant struggle to maintain a balance between these two forces.

Over-glamorized first-time manager’s role

New managers become more anxious when they are expected to adopt or display a signature management style. New managers are typically given some corporate training to get them started in a management career. However, those training programs are overly unrealistic or overly idealistic. Those training programs over-glamorize the manager’s job. In turn, it gives an impression as if those skills are out of the world. Unwittingly, managerial skills are sometimes presented to look larger than the role itself. Unknowingly or knowingly, businesses treat management skills as elite skills. Amidst that noise, you are likely to underrate or misread your own skills and style.

So how do the new managers learn to be effective right away?

Be Personal

I have been blessed to conduct research with top managers in the industry for over two decades, and I learned what makes them successful first-time managers. Based on my own experience as a corporate manager and a training leader, I would recommend “be personal” – that’s the mantra that can save you a lot of anxiety.

To be personal, I have two tips:

1. Use the personal skills that you use in day-to-day life

Reflect on how you managed with people and vendors while managing your brother or sister’s wedding. Reflect on how you managed a great show at your friend’s birthday party. Reflect on how you went several miles simply to check on a sick relative.

The way you approach your personal events or affairs in your life is exactly what defines ‘your management style’ to become an effective first-time manager. Once you use the same personal skills that you use in your day-to-day life, it will make you effortless, timeliness, and fluid in your performance.

2. Leverage your personal side and extend it out to the workspace

As much as possible, do not come across as a different person simply because you have now gotten a new role. Be the person you would like to fall back on when you are in your natural habitat. Be who you are the most comfortable with, without the anxiety of looking good downstream or upstream.

Deal with your new team members the same way you used to deal with a new person coming to play with you on the soccer court. When personal excellence becomes your goal, your professional excellence will come without effort. Therefore, leverage the personal side of your personality and extend it to your work.

Final words

However, when you see management skills in the basic things of life, you would recognize what you can leverage from your personal space into your workspace, following no specific leadership philosophy or framework. Perhaps you would not need one. To see yourself as an effective manager, you must live in a ‘personal’ space. You probably don’t need any training for that. All you probably have to do is to ‘train’ yourself to notice the management skills you have already applied in your home, family, and even in your friendship circles.

This article first appeared in People Development Magazine available at https://peopledevelopmentmagazine.com/2021/10/28/first-time-manager/.