Managers Promotion Performance Facilitation
You've worked hard, demonstrated skills or capabilities that distinguish you from your peers and now you've been "rewarded" with a promotion into management. Congratulations!
If you have already been doing the job you've just been promoted into, your promotion provides formal recognition of your role, probably includes salary or other benefit increases and validates your company's confidence in you.
If the job will be new for you, your promotion indicates that your company believes strongly in your ability to take on the new responsibilities and is giving you the authority you will need to carry them out. Your salary and benefits are probably also increasing.
In either case, you have just moved from individual performer to group performance facilitator. Your personal performance will ultimately be judged by how well the people you are responsible for perform. You may be charged with meeting production output levels, developing a software product, managing accounts payable, meeting certain sales goals or caring for patients on a hospital ward. Regardless of your group's goals, it is no longer about you, but about the people working for you and how well you motivate and manage them to accomplish the group's business objectives.
Staff management, or what I like to call performance facilitation, can be deeply rewarding, confusing, frustrating, or all of the above. In extreme cases, it can be so daunting that it limits your effectiveness. Your relationships will be different and you will use different skills.
New managers, and frequently even experienced managers being promoted to higher management levels, can be faced with staff challenges they didn't anticipate. Your relationship with your former peers, other managers and managers at the next level, needs to change. You need to expand your sphere of influence and knowledge about the company, its practices, its policies and its group and personal behavior expectations. You need to become familiar with your staff's goals, potential, performance issues, schedule restrictions and compensation (if you will be responsible for administering salary). If your former peers were also personal friends, you need to be careful about appearing to favor anyone in particular and discrete about personal information.
You may be surprised to find that once the initial celebration is over; your staff, even people you thought were friends, are not all on board with your promotion. Don't take this personally; they probably wouldn't be supportive of anyone in the group suddenly becoming their "boss", even if you were unofficially filling that role before. It changes the group dynamics and may make them feel that they were pushed further down the totem pole as opposed to you moving up it. People are afraid of change - any change.
You need to get over the new manager syndrome as quickly as possible. Engage your staff in the change. Communicate, communicate, and communicate! If you need to change anything about what they are doing, explain what you are changing, how it impacts them and how it benefits the group and company. Be clear about your expectations and make sure they have what they need to do their job without smothering them. Be careful not to discuss business during your after hours activities if they involve friends that are now your subordinates.
Get to know your new peer group and understand how you all work together on a larger scale. Politics are always at play, but a successful manager knows they need to broaden their network and be able to influence others to provide the most value to the organization.
Most promotions will require that you already have the skills you need, but that isn't always the case, so if you need to learn new skills to do your job effectively, arrange to acquire them as quickly as possible. Subscribe to business journals and periodicals that keep you on top of what is happening with technology, legislation, customer expectations and changes in your industry.
New managers may feel exposed if they don't share the same level of expertise as every member of their group. Remember that you weren't promoted to manager because you are expected to know everything. You need to understand the degree of difficulty and how much time it takes to accomplish something so you can plan and control the work your group will do, but you aren't expected to be the expert (in most organizations) for everything under your control.
Be careful of over sympathizing with an employee's problems. It may sound cold, but you have been entrusted with company assets. You need to nurture and develop them, make reasonable accommodations for situations that warrant it and maintain confidentiality. However, you need to do it within company guidelines, and your employees are responsible for responding to any accommodations by putting forth their best efforts.
As difficult as it may be, you are not going to like everyone you manage and they may not all like you. You haven't been promoted to win a popularity contest, but to achieve results for your organization. Your staff will respect you if you act impartially and honestly; if you allow them to be heard, consider what they say and recognize their achievements. Coaching an employee to exceed their current level of performance is one of the most rewarding experiences a manager can have.
