With your new position your to-do list will grow. While it’s obvious that you won’t need to do everything yourself, you will need to take charge of coordinating tasks and other employees. To become a successful manager, you must be able to delegate tasks wisely and effectively.
Growing Your Team’s Abilities
You know you can complete your earlier responsibilities more efficiently than anyone else. However, you need to move on. Train your staff and pass on your knowledge and project-related skills in order to transfer your previous responsibilities to them. Only then will you find the time to take on the bigger challenges that your new position presents.
Helping Your Team Members Identify Their Strengths
Your foremost responsibility is to help your team deliver their best — in fact, your performance as a manager will be primarily judged by how your team performs. You can achieve this by helping individual members of your team identify what they like doing or what they can do best and then assigning work accordingly.
Listening to Your Team
As a boss and a mentor, it is important for you to find out what each member of your team wants and then set goals for yourself that will help your team members reach their goals. When working on projects, get their input and base your decisions on collective brainstorming sessions. If you fail to do this, you will lose some useful insights on getting the job done better, and your team will lose interest in their work.
Tips for Success as a First-Time Manager
- Learn to delegate work and do it effectively by knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each of your team members.
- As a manager, you are sure to feel the time crunch. However, while you juggle various tasks, do not forget to allot time for your own training and development. Your learning should never stop.
- As a first-time manager, you should not religiously follow the usual processes for accomplishing tasks. Question past practices and find ways to complete tasks more effectively.
- Reward good performance and share project-related appreciation with your team.
- Don’t think you know everything better than your staff. Be open to suggestions and learning.
- Don’t stay aloof from managers of other departments. You may need their knowledge or expertise someday.
- Don’t take all of the credit for a project’s success. Nothing will discourage your team more than this.
- Don’t be ashamed to admit your mistakes. Acknowledging them will not only increase your respect among your team members, but your honesty will make you more approachable as well.
The days of dictatorship and frightening people into submission to make them work harder for you are over. As a first-time manager, you should learn to be a good communicator, mentor, and facilitator for your team. This will increase their confidence in your ability to drive them and motivate them to put in the extra effort for you.
