Next Level Leaders – Managing Former Peers

When many next level leaders are promoted, they find themselves managing people who were previously their peers. This can be awkward in some cases, but when you approach it proactively, it doesn’t have to be.

Just because you’ve been promoted doesn’t mean that you’re superior to your former peers. They are still the talented individuals they were when you worked side by side. Their concern is likely that you will treat them differently, and may even fear that you will no longer treat them with respect.

Next Level Leaders – Managing Time and Priorities, 1

You’re newly promoted into your new managerial role. Frankly, everything is new, from your overall responsibilities to a new boss to people reporting to you. You knew how to balance tasks in the old job, but now there are many different moving parts.

How you manage time and balance priorities is one of the biggest initial challenges. Part of this is because your time isn’t your own anymore. Your direct reports want and need your attention, and, in many situations, these are different people than your previous colleagues.

Next Level Leaders

Executives often promote their best “doers” (e.g., accountant, technician, designer, etc.) into management roles with high and eager expectations. The challenge with this is that what makes people great in their doer roles rarely make them competent for management jobs.

At a minimum, to make a promotion successful, the newly minted managers need to learn about the roles that they’re stepping into and what skills are necessary to be effective in management.

Recognition vs. Favoritism

Leaders who overtly exercise favoritism make the “chosen” people feel good but often at the expense of diminishing others. Of course, it is appropriate to recognize people who do excellent work, but that recognition should not be at the expense of making other employees feel “less than”.

Our employees are human and are pleased or flattered to receive recognition, whether private or public. When public acknowledgement primarily focuses on favored employees, however, resentment can ensue.

Take Steps, Not Leaps

Can you motivate an employee whose performance is lackluster? The answer is imbedded in the distinction between motivation and inspiration: we can inspire the people who work with us, but motivation needs to come from within.

Leaders can be especially frustrated when they haven’t been able to inspire employees to perform at a higher level. One client suggested that an employee’s work was about a B- level and he was trying to raise it to an A. This is a worthy goal, but is it attainable?

Prepare By Documenting

No matter how prepared you think you are, it’s essential to be ready for staff changes that can disrupt your organization’s operational flow. People resign suddenly. They develop a debilitating illness. They have family emergencies that take priority.

Are you and your management team prepared for such occurrences? Do you know how to jump in and do the various functions that these people have done well and consistently until they aren’t there to do them?

Making More Sense of the Hybrid Workforce

Despite their best efforts, many leaders still struggle to “get it right” in terms of managing a hybrid workforce. A recent Harvard Business Review article points out five key trends for leaders to consider.

Leaders are adopting different mindsets to be successful managing a hybrid environment based on these trends. Some of the key points from the article are highlighted below.

Leading Managers

Many leaders become frustrated with mid-level managers because of the perception they’re not doing their jobs adequately. When you really dig into this observation, it’s often because new mid-level managers don’t fully understand what is expected of them.

The leader is responsible for outlining the core elements of what is expected from managers. Here are some guidelines to consider:

Meeting Madness

Do you have too many meetings in a typical week? It happens a lot, and you can suffer from “meeting madness” as a result. This is an affliction caused by too many meetings that aren’t focused, take too long, and accomplish a tenth of what you expect. Here are some tips to consider.

Start and end on time. The obvious breach is when people are late. That isn’t fair to those who are on time, especially if it means that you won’t complete what you expected to accomplish. As important, however, is having a firm end time. Stay true to the end time even if you haven’t completed the agenda. It will help build the discipline to end on time in the future.

Prioritize to Organize

In many respects, leaders need to be more organized than their team members. A disorganized leader sends a message that isn’t flattering and reinforces disorganization, rather than efficiency and being on top of things.

Being able to prioritize effectively is an essential key to successful organizing. In this fast-moving environment that we work in, however, leaders need to be nimble enough to switch gears and reprioritize when things change.

Leadership is a Mindset

Category: Managing People