Promoted To Management: How To Make A Difference

Some people train for management their entire lives and are on the fast track from day one. Others labour for years lower in the ranks and only shift their attention to managing others later in life, when they feel they have the confidence of experience behind them.

While this means they know their industry, and may well have a reputation for hard work and results that will serve them, the one thing they don’t have experience of is actually managing people. This is an art in itself and the best worker may not be the best manager.

Today we’re presenting a few tips for the newly minted manager so they can make a difference in their early days.

Shake Up Meetings

It’s all too easy for people disengage from meetings and the results to drop off. If you’re inexperienced at running them, you may struggle to maintain control and interest – this is no comment on your skills as a worker or manager. It’s simply naturally difficult to get long term attendees to rally around the point at hand!

Try to shake things up by changing the setting. Look for a meeting room for hire in London and take the meeting out of the office for a change. Only if you do this once, to make an impression it certainly makes people sit up and pay attention, and works against the complacency that can set in to a weekly meeting.

Listen

If you’ve not managed people before, and especially if you’ve had a series of bad managers throughout your career, you might have formed a poor impression of what management actually consists of! ‘Telling people what to do’ isn’t what management means and if that’s the approach you take you’ll just foster resentment.

It’s your job to stand between the high level decision makers for the business and the team under you and listen to both. The C-Suite executive is responsible for the steering the business so you need to be sure you translate their priorities into targets for your team, but unless you do this with sensitivity for the people working under you, you’ll find it difficult to get anything done. If someone’s looking for more experience you can try to give them the opportunity to take the lead on a particular project. If your team is genuinely overburdened, you will need to stand up for them and make a case to management for more time, or to reallocate work elsewhere. This is the action of a responsible manager who gets results for the people above them and fosters the loyalty of those below.