Congratulations, you’re the boss now! You may feel like the ultimate GOAT as you ride the elevator up to your first day with your new gig and it isn’t just because you are listening to Drake’s “Started from the Bottom” on repeat. It’s great to be confident, positive, and excited about your new role…but remember that you aren’t immune to making mistakes. Your managerial mistakes can lead you to lose the respect of your team and even to lose your employees altogether. When Gallup surveyed U.S. adults, they found that 50 percent of employees left their jobs “to get away from their manager to improve their overall life at some point in their career.” You could be the primary reason that people give their two weeks’ notice…or you could be the main reason they stay. We’ve rounded up the top new manager mistakes so you can avoid them.
5 Common New Manager Mistakes
1. Acting like a robot:
You can (and should) show your personality and foster genuine relationships even though you’re the boss. Of course, there should be some boundaries. You don’t want to be perceived as playing favorites because you are friends with a few of your employees and you shouldn’t overshare about your personal life but resist being devoid of emotions.
“Too often new managers are taught that now that they are in a management role, they must divorce themselves of any type of personal connection to their team,” says Tamica Sears, an Arizona-based senior human resources business partner at Gannett and founder of the career coaching company Sears Coaching. Strike up friendly conversations and learn about the people who work for you. “Knowing your team on a personal level may be all that stands between them staying with the company and leaving. No one wants to be treated like a cog, they want to be treated like a person,” he says.
2. Laying off employees:
“A trap that new managers often fall into is walking in with marching orders to clean house. If you ever receive this directive, respectfully decline. Take some time to get to know your team, what motivates them, what has gone wrong in the past and why,” says Sears.
If you start laying people off right away, you might miss out on getting to know the talented team members who already worked at the company and know the ins and outs of their role and the organization even if you’ve heard that the team is lackluster. “Just because a team didn’t perform well under different leadership does not mean they won’t perform well for you. Always take the time to form your own opinions, free of bias and prejudgment,” she says. “You may find that the team that you discover is miles apart from the team that you thought that you inherited based on someone else’s perception of them.”
3. Being a ‘bigfoot’:
Bigfoot doesn’t belong in the boardroom. In this case, we’re talking about a metaphorical bigfoot, but the real one would monopolize the office too. “Many new bosses think that they have to make their mark quickly and dramatically to be successful—which leads to what I call ‘the bigfoot,’ says Mary Abbajay, president and co-founder of the District of Columbia-based organizational and leadership development firm Careerstone Group and author of “Managing Up: How to Move Up, Win at Work, and Succeed with Any Type of Boss.” Like King Kong, they stomp in, take control, and change everything without getting to know the current team members and processes.
King Kong destroys buildings and homes and our metaphorical bigfoot can create distrust and animosity because they automatically assume their way is the right way without factoring in team members’ opinions. “Instead, new managers should start by getting a clear sense and understanding of the team’s needs, wants, and challenges, says Abbajay, “Take the time to learn what is and isn’t working and involve the team in creating better products and processes.”
4. Pushing people off the ladder:
Everyone wants to climb up the corporate ladder. Help them up instead of pushing them down or keeping them paralyzed on one rung until they lose patience and quit. One of the most frequent new manager mistakes is to only discuss development goals during annual reviews. You’ll fail to teach people new skills and share their knowledge. “They use the ‘throw people off the cliff’ approach to development,” says Halelly Azulay, president and founder of the Los Angeles-based leadership development firm TalentGrow. “They don’t tolerate failure and criticize or punish mistakes. Or, they try to ‘save’ people from mistakes and don’t allow them to learn and experience consequences,” says Azulay. There has to be a middle ground between having a sink-or-swim attitude and micromanaging forever while your team members are still wearing floaties.
“To fix or avoid this mistake, new bosses should develop people and make it safe to make mistakes,” says Azulay. Consider having weekly or monthly one-on-one meetings to talk about long and short-term goals and help people achieve them through teaching, not micromanaging.
5. Being a people-pleaser:
Raise your hand if you’d rather go to the dentist than have a difficult conversation and give constructive criticism. But your direct reports can’t grow and exceed your expectations if they have no idea what you want. By not giving feedback that you perceive to be harsh, you’re hindering your team more and falling into one of the common new manager mistakes. “It’s far kinder to tell your team what you’re thinking than to spare their feelings by avoiding the topic. Before you know it, you’ll be six months into the job and, rather than helping your team succeed, you’ve been watching them fail over and over again in the same ways,” says Kimberlee Stiens, founder and CEO of the District Columbia-based career coaching firm Ranavain.
Give feedback calmly and thoughtfully instead of yelling IRL or sending an all-caps email. (It’s called constructive criticism for a reason.) Say thank you and tell people when they are doing a stellar job. “That will build the trust needed for them to receive your more critical feedback with grace and an open mind, which will help them turn things around and help you see how important your feedback is to their careers,” says Stiens.
