Creating a Successful Transition from Individual Contributor to Manager
Written by Steven Urban and Kat Cox
You’ve got a standout employee who goes above and beyond in their work as an individual contributor, and it’s time to reward them with a promotion. They get a new title, a big raise, and a team of people to manage. But in two years, their team’s productivity has dropped, morale is low, and no one is happy. What happened?
According to Forbes, 60% of new managers fail within the first 24 months of their tenure. This is usually because they don’t have the right training, and few people have natural leadership talents. Even if an employee is exemplary at their daily work, it doesn’t mean they’re going to be able to lead people. And worse, most companies aren’t equipped to train their employees on how to be good managers – they simply hand them the keys, a few tools, and hope for the best.
As a certified professional coach and leadership trainer, I know this doesn’t have to be the case.
Why Managers Fail
We’ve all encountered bad managers in the past. They’re not usually bad people; in fact, they’re often relatable, friendly, and even very good at their jobs. A bad manager is usually the product of an organization that hasn’t prepared them properly from the role of an individual contributor to that of a manager.
Consider the Peter Principle, an observation and management principle created by Laurence J. Peter in the 1960s, which states that in a hierarchy (such as an organization), individuals tend to rise to “their level of respective competence”. In other words, employees will be promoted due to their natural work skills until they are promoted to a job where they don’t have the skills necessary to be successful. In many organizations, employees who reach this point aren’t promoted further and aren’t ever demoted, but remain in the role for the rest of their careers, even though they’re not any good at performing the duties associated with the role. This is why so many bad managers seem to be stuck in place, even if their poor skills contribute to bad work performance for their teams.
According to the Center for Creative Leadership, all good managers have mastered four main skills:
Communication
Influence
Agility
These skills may occur naturally in some people, and that may mean they’re excellent natural managers. But most people will need help developing these skills, even if they have a natural talent.
Leaders may assume that an employee who is good with time management, delegation, and communication will automatically be self-aware, but this isn’t normally the case. According to research, only 10-15% of people are truly self-aware. It takes most people coaching and training to develop self-awareness, and many companies don’t invest in the training required for their managers to have it.
Why Training Managers Matters to Your Company
According to research, a struggling manager can have an outsize impact on an organization. Team members with a struggling leader perform 15% worse than those with a high-performing manager. The likelihood of them leaving the company also increases by 20%. Having a bad manager increases stress and can push employees toward burnout, which impacts employees’ health, company morale, and the company’s bottom line.
Poor management can have consequences in the makeup of the overall organization due to poor hiring decisions. A manager who isn’t equipped to know how to hire the right people may unknowingly build poor performing teams. They may hire people who make them feel better about themselves rather than those who will be best for the job. This can also have a negative impact on diversity initiatives, as untrained managers may hire individuals based on their internal bias rather than choosing the best qualified person.
There are personal and political issues that come with being promoted to a management position as well. If your new manager came from a team of peers, the other peers may be jealous, feel overlooked, or be upset they didn’t get the job. They may undermine the new manager, even unconsciously, because they resent the promotion. On the flip side, a manager who isn’t trained in dealing with these sorts of interpersonal issues may make matters worse by reacting with retaliation or other actions that further build resentment in their team.
How to Empower New Managers to Succeed
The best way to empower new managers to succeed is to train them to develop their leadership skills and learn how to be good managers. While an introduction to management and quick orientation when the new manager starts seems like enough, being a good manager takes years of coaching and development. Good managers don’t often develop organically; they need to be fostered, nurtured, and developed.
Unfortunately, many organizations don’t have the time or resources to build a successful management training program. It can take years to develop a training program, not to mention the expense of hiring the right experts to build the program and tailor it to the needs of the organization.
Bringing in outside consultants like Build Your Alliance is an excellent way to create a manager and leadership development program quickly and effectively. The skills required of good managers are general across the board, so finding a program full of experts who already know how to teach and develop those skills saves an enormous amount of time and money. The organization can bring the program back over time to continue to develop management skills in their leaders on an ongoing or as-needed basis to ensure leaders continue to develop and can see the results of their training over time.
The Benefits of Training Managers
By fostering good leadership skills in your managers, the company will see numerous benefits. The first is better communication. When leaders are trained explicitly in how to communicate better with their teams and the organization, they’re empowered to express goals and expectations as well as report on how those goals are being achieved. This in turn leads to greater trust among employees and leadership, which means better productivity, engagement, and employee satisfaction and morale across the board.
Trained managers also learn to be more adept at managing change, from hiring new employees and integrating them into the team to managing bigger organizational changes. When a leader understands their role fully through training and development, they’ll also be empowered to initiate and implement necessary changes to their teams and the business structure, leading to greater innovation and success. These managers are also equipped to make better decisions, whether that’s who to hire or how to train those new hires in their roles.
Equip Your Leaders to Succeed with Build Your Alliance
Develop your managers’ leadership skills with Build Your Alliance’s management development courses. These 14 unique and interactive training sessions are designed to ensure managers succeed in their new roles. Organizations can mix and match the courses to build the right program for the company and individuals’ needs. Schedule a corporate experience information session to learn more about how Build Your Alliance can create a manager development program to increase your organization’s managerial success.