So many new managers don’t receive the training or skills they need to be effective, lead their teams, and achieve meaningful results. As a result, well-intentioned, hard-working new managers often trip into these common mistakes new managers make; unnecessarily frustrating their teams, diminishing their credibility, and curtailing their influence.

When you equip your managers with the essential skills to avoid these mistakes, you’ll achieve results more quickly, have more nimble teams, reduce turnover, build a strong culture, and be able to focus everyone’s energy on serving your customers with better products and services, rather than constantly dealing with internal friction.

If you’re a new manager, eliminating these mistakes and building effective habits early will leverage your influence, build your career, reduce your frustration, and help you enjoy your work. These are practical ways you can build a strong foundation for your career.

Here are the common mistakes new managers make:

1. Avoid Accountability Conversations
2. Favor Friends and Former Peers
3. Be an Expert in Everything 
4. Be a Push Over
5. Assume People Should Know
6. Expect People Understand
7. Leave Follow-Through to Chance
8. Assume People Know How to Achieve a Goal or Express a Value
9. Use Fear to Motivate
10. Don’t Invest in Trust

10 Mistakes New Managers Make

We’ve made many of these mistakes and seen them in many of the managers we’ve worked with. The good news is, with a bit of training and focused effort you can avoid these common mistakes new managers make. Here’s a glimpse at some of the biggest challenges for new managers and what to do instead.

1. Avoid accountability conversations (magical thinking)

New managers often engage in magical thinking. A team member is late or disrespects another person and the new manager thinks “Oh wow, that wasn’t good. Well, they certainly understand that they screwed up. I’m sure they won’t do that again.”

Then it happens again, and the new manager thinks, “I can’t believe it…that’s twice now. They’ve GOT to know that’s not cool.” And the manager doesn’t say anything. In the meantime, poor performance or toxic behavior continues and becomes the norm.

What to do: Address poor performance and disruptive behavior as soon as it happens. You don’t have to make a big deal out of it or get visibly angry. You can use the INSPIRE method to show up for a conversation with curiosity. Start with your intention for the conversation, explain what you’ve noticed, and invite their perspective. Then, when it’s appropriate, you can move to a mutual commitment and align on the next steps.

When you address accountability conversations in this way, your team member knows that you care. They know you want them to succeed. They know you want to hear their perspective. You’ve invested in them, and the team’s, success.

Additional reading: How to Provide More Meaningful Performance Feedback (this article describes a step-by-step methodology to do this well)

2. Favor friends and former peers

New managers often face the challenge of leading friends and former peers who try to leverage their relationship for special treatment. But your credibility, respect, and trustworthiness depend on treating people equitably and putting the team first.

What to do: Some people will tell you not to be friends with your team, but that’s not always possible – particularly if you’re already friends. The key is to have a conversation and set clear expectations about your new responsibilities. Be clear about what success looks like for each person and the team. Help everyone (especially your friends) understand that you care about each person individually, and, you will need to make decisions that consider the team’s welfare first.

Additional reading: Leading Friends and Former Peers

3. Be the expert in everything

You were good at your job before you were promoted, and you have ideas about how everything should work. Of course, you want to leverage that confidence to inspire your team. But, you can’t possibly have all the answers – and your team knows it. Especially if you have responsibility for leading a team that has deep technical experience, they will know more about their work than you.

What to do: Earn the right to be heard by listening first. Get curious. Ask your team to teach you one new thing every day.

Additional reading: 9 Questions to Help Your Team Solve Problems on Their Own

4. Be a push-over

At the other end of the continuum is the manager who lacks strength and conviction. You want your people to like you, so you don’t address negative behaviors or subpar performance. Your top performers lose faith in you and the negative actors drag down the team’s performance.

What to do: Before you can practice consistent accountability and keep everyone on track, you need a solid foundation. So, reconnect to your values and the reason your team exists. You are in the role to support your people and accomplish a mission.

Reinforce the “why” behind every “what.”

Additional reading: Executive Presence is a Virtual World: What Matters Now

And download our Free E-Book, 7 Practical Ways to Be a Bit More Daring.

5. Assume people should know

This mistake is very common to new managers (and more than a few veterans!). The project makes sense to you. Follow-up activities are just “what you do.” Customer care is common sense. Everyone knows these things, right?

Not really.

What to do: One of the most vital steps you can take as you start in a new leadership role is to clarify what success looks like. Use a 5 x 5 communication strategy for the most vital aspects of the team’s work. That means you communicate critical messages five different times through five different forms of communication. People will internalize these key messages when you communicate with repetition and variety.

Additional reading: 5 x 5 Communication for Remote Teams

6. Expect people to understand

This is another common mistake new managers make (and again, many veterans as well). You definitely said it. You may even have said it five times, five different ways. But what did the other person hear? They may think they understand or they may be shy to ask clarifying questions. Either way, daily misunderstandings compound to create tons of wasted time and energy.

You don’t know people truly understand until you ask them.

What to do: The solution for these misunderstandings is to “check for understanding”. Communication hasn’t happened until there is a “send” and a “receive.” When you check for understanding, ask the person you’re talking with to share their understanding. If you’re not on the same page, clarify and check again.

Additional reading: Check for Understanding: A Leadership Communication Best Practice (Video)

7. Leave follow-through to chance

Many new managers leave follow-through to chance. Even when your team is competent and has good intentions, there are many factors that disrupt follow-through and prevent them from following through on what matters most. Sometimes, you might be the disrupting factor (with other priorities you’ve delegated). Other times, it can be the crush of competing priorities from other projects or departments.

What to do: Have a conversation to “schedule the finish.” This is not simply assigning a due date. It’s a frank conversation about when all parties agree to complete the task or project and how this task interacts with other priorities. The conversation concludes with both parties scheduling the next step, completion, or follow-up conversation on their calendars. Follow-through is no longer left to chance. It’s literally scheduled for both of you.

Additional reading: High ROI Leadership: Schedule the Finish

8. Assume people know how to achieve a priority or express a value

The team has discussed their goal. You’ve checked for understanding of the team’s values. Everyone can express their KPIs. Everything’s good, right?

Not yet—understanding the goal is one thing. Understanding how to achieve it is another thing entirely. Often, another of the mistakes new managers make is to focus on the goal and push people to perform without discussing the specific activities and consistent behaviors that will help everyone achieve success. People may work hard and be busy, but their efforts don’t produce results.

What to do: For every critical goal, value, and metric, take time with your team to discuss and identify the two or three critical behaviors or activities that lead to success. If you don’t know what these are, it may take practice and investigation to figure it out.

Additional reading: Creating Clarity: Strategic Activities For Human-Centered Leaders

9. Use fear to motivate

When the team doesn’t meet its goals, a mistake new managers make is to be frustrated and rely on fear to get results. Fear is an insidious leadership trap—because it works. We’ve known many leaders who relied on fear to get results because it was an easy way to make something happen.

Fear motivates effort, but with a single focus: escape the fear. Everything else shuts down. The problem with using fear to motivate is that the “something” you get is the minimal effort people need to escape the fear. They’re not choosing to give their best and they can’t be creative.

What to do: Begin by acknowledging your own fears and anxiety. If you’re tempted to use fear as a motivator, you’re likely stressed yourself. Acknowledge your emotions. Breathe through them, reconnect to your values and the reason your team exists.

Once you’ve managed your own anxiety, bring the challenge to your team. Be real about the situation, express your confidence, and ask for their ideas about how you can get there together.

Additional reading: How to Avoid Toxic Courage Crushers in Your Organization

10. Don’t invest in trust

Some new managers assume people will trust them because of their past performance or because of their title. But trust is a relationship and relationships take time and effort to build. With a lack of trust, you’ll find everything else about your leadership is far more difficult.

What to do: Trust can feel abstract, but the people who study trust have identified four elements that consistently contribute to trust (and whose absence breaks down trust). These elements are:

1. Credibility—does your team believe you know what you’re doing? (And do they feel like you believe they know what they’re doing?)
2. Reliability—can your team count on you to do what you say you will do?
3. Connectedness—do you and your team know one another as human beings? Do you know their “people, pets, or projects”? What matters to them outside of work?
4. Best interest—do your people believe you have their best interests at heart? This is an important element of trust. If people believe you have their best interest in mind, they’ll forgive some lapse in the other elements. But if they don’t believe you have their best interest at heart, perfecting the other three won’t matter as much.

As you consider these elements of trust, where do you need to invest your time and effort? For example, some managers who mean well aren’t reliable because they over-commit and haven’t learned to manage their time. If that’s you, start by carefully considering what you say “yes” to and the commitments you make.

Identify the area where you have the most room to improve and invest in showing up there more consistently.

Additional reading: How to Build Trust More Quickly With New Employees

Are you ready to accelerate team performance?

Learn practical tools to increase communication, connection and trust while driving results. Visit our Team Accelerator Program page and view the free demo to find out how.

Your Turn

These ten common mistakes new managers make are also opportunities to distinguish yourself and build a sound foundation for an incredible leadership career. Refine these habits now and your influence will multiply, results will improve, and you’ll be a manager people want to work with.

We’d love to hear from you: what are some of the other common mistakes new managers mistake (and most importantly, what can they do instead to build a strong leadership foundation?)

Additional Reading That or Clients Tell Us is Extremely Helpful for New Managers

Leadership Skills: 6 Competencies You Can’t Lead Without

The post Ten Common Mistakes New Managers Make appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

You’ve got more to do than time to do it. Your plan is going to get interrupted, and your interruptions are going to get interrupted. If you don’t have an intentional, focused way to finish what you start, it won’t happen. Effective leaders consistently achieve meaningful results and build a healthy culture–but they don’t leave it to chance or a heroic act of willpower. They schedule the finish.

Why Is This So Difficult?

Imagine I asked you for a report and told you, “I need this information soon.”

What does soon mean?

For fun, go ask your team this same question. In any group of five or more people, you’ll hear answers ranging from “right now” to “next week.” And for some people, when they hear soon, it means “this isn’t really important.”

These different interpretations of just one word can cause massive headaches and frustrations. One mistake that many leaders make is they rely on people’s good intentions, willpower, or even dumb luck to ensure that things get done. But, when you leave the definition of a word like “soon” up to chance, chaos ensues.

If you’re talking to someone who has a high internal sense of urgency, they might get it done right away. They might even neglect something that was actually more important than what you asked them to do. But if they interpret it as “when I have time to get to it,” you might wait for weeks.

The solution to these challenges is called Schedule the Finish.

Scheduling the finish means you create a specific mutual moment where you will follow up, follow through or finish the task. This isn’t a vague intention. It’s an appointment on the calendar of everyone involved.

Schedule the Finish to Remove Ambiguity

For example, let’s say you have that team discussion. And each person’s going to call their three largest clients and ask them how they’re responding to a recent change.

You’ll collect their answers and send them to Joe. Joe and his team will take that data and build a new client intake process. That’s good, but so far, it’s only an intention.

Schedule the finish with clear times and agreements. It would look like this:

We will each call our three largest clients, ask them that question and send the answers to Joe. By Friday at 5:00 PM, Eastern Joe and his team will give us the new intake process by the following Thursday at noon Eastern, everyone can put those two times on their calendars.

Now there’s no question of when the team will finish the task.

Scheduling the finish applies to many daily leadership and management conversations. Here are a few more examples:

• When you have a performance conversation using the INSPIRE method, the final step (E) is the Enforce step. Schedule a brief meeting to review their desired behavior. Eg: “Sounds good. Let’s meet at 10 next Tuesday to see how this is going and if you have any questions.”
• When you delegate, schedule a time where the other person will meet with you in person or by video to return the project to you, answer questions, and discuss next steps.
• When you lead a meeting, conclude the meeting by asking who will do what, by when, and “How will we know?” The final “How will we know?” is a scheduled commitment to the team. Eg: “We will all have our data to Linda by Friday at 4 pm. Linda will send us the new process by Wednesday at 3 pm.” Everyone puts the times on their calendar. If Friday 4:00 pm comes and Linda doesn’t have data from Bob, she calls him. If 3 pm Wednesday comes and they don’t have the process, they call Linda.

Schedule the Finish to Prioritize What Matters Most

In addition to eliminating misunderstandings around vague words like “soon” or “when you have time,” scheduling the finish forces everyone to think about the workload and whether they can do it. When you discuss delivering that data to Joe by Friday at five, everyone must think about whether they can actually do that.

And if they can’t, then you can have a conversation about priorities, what matters most, and adjust as needed.

Your Turn

Good intentions and talented, capable people will only take you so far. High-performing leaders and teams that build performance cultures schedule the finish to ensure they know what done looks like and how this priority fits with others.

We’d love to hear from you: how do you and your team ensure good intentions translate to activity and results?

The post High ROI Leadership – Schedule the Finish appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Last-minute fire drills, interruptions, and real emergencies can become a permanent way of life. Get your team back on track by planning ahead with these five steps.

It’s a common lament: “It’s so crazy around here. We never know what’s going to happen and there are so many priorities. We’ll be working on something then that gets blown up and we have to focus on the new emergency.”

Distractions and interruptions are a part of life and they can make you crazy if you let them.

5 Steps to Get Your Team Back on Track

If your day seems to be a series of distractions and your team can’t make progress on the strategic priorities that matter most, here are five steps that can help you get your team back on track.

1. Clarify what matters most.

Does your team know the Most Important Thing (M.I.T.)? What strategic priorities matter most? What are the daily and weekly behaviors that will lead to success?

Without the North Star of clearly defined M.I.T.s, your team will always be reactive and distracted by the unexpected and urgent. The first step to get your team back on track is to define clearly what “on track” looks like.

2. Expect the unexpected.

You probably know more about your emergencies, fire drills, and interruptions than you might think. We’ve worked with so many leaders who feel out of control, but when you sit down and talk through the distractions, there are usually just a few causing the majority of the problems.

Take 15 minutes with your team and you can quickly figure out how to expect the unexpected. Start by listing out your most common distractions. Once you have the list, you can map them onto this graph by asking two questions: How commonly does this happen? How disruptive is it?

The items in Quadrant I are the distractions you want to address first. You know they will happen. You know they cost you the most time, money, and energy. (And if you have more time and effort to devote, then move to Quadrant II, then III.  You can usually safely ignore IV.)

3. Plan your response.

Now that you know the interruptions and emergencies that cause you the most trouble, it’s time to plan your response.

You have ways of doing your core work, processes that you know work. Build the same processes to handle distractions and return to the MIT. This shortens the time it takes to get your team back on track.

Let’s start with an analogy: a fumbled football.

As soon as that football hits the ground, everyone nearby knows that it’s their job to either pick it up and run or else jump on it and wrap it up in their arms. That’s the plan. Once you have possession of the ball, you get back to your game plan.

Let’s say one of your common, yet important disruptive distractions is a customer who is escalating to your executive office. It’s important and needs to be handled with urgency and care. How can you and your team build a standard way of responding so you minimize the time spent addressing the situation?

Without a process, it’s easy for this urgent situation to involve more people than necessary frenetically working to address the issue, updating their bosses, and duplicating effort.

Maybe your planned response looks like this:

1. The executive receives the call and sends it to a designated “on-call” manager who will coordinate response efforts.
2. After understanding the situation, the on-call manager contacts the customer and informs them they are working on the situation, and collects any additional information needed.
3. The on-call manager also informs the social media team and any other customer communication channels in case the customer is escalating there as well, so all communication is coordinated.
4. The on-call manager coordinates the response, contacts the customer, and closes the loop with the executive office.

4. Maintain margin.

One of the most overlooked ways to prevent distractions from overwhelming your day is to plan for them.

If you scheduled your team every day with wall-to-wall meetings and deadlines that must happen today, you have a fragile system with no margin for error. Any interruption will knock over that house of cards and (predictably) ruin your results.

You’ve mapped out your interruptions and how frequently they happen. Besides planning your response, give yourself margin in your calendar to respond. You may not know what will come up, but you know it’s coming.

And if you have one of those magical days where there aren’t any emergencies, fire drills, or interruptions – fantastic! That’s more time to work on your M.I.T. or build relationships with your team.

5. Eliminate causes.

Finally, as you examine your most common and disruptive distractions, ask how you can eliminate them. Is there a problem in your user experience that you can fix? Will a new process prevent those errors? Is there a frequent communication breakdown you can address?

You don’t have to have all the answers. Bring the team together, show them what a successful idea will achieve, and then ask them for their thoughts on how to solve the issue.

How to Get Your Team Back on Track

1. Clarify what matters most.
2. Expect the unexpected.
3. Plan your response.
4. Maintain margin.
5. Eliminate causes.

It’s easy to let exceptions become the rule and turn your days into whirlwinds of frantic reactivity. Taking a few minutes to identify your most common distractions and building a routine response will save you time, energy, and help get your team back on track, focused on what matters most.

Your Turn

We’d love to hear from you – what would you add? Leave us a comment and share: How do you help your team stay focused despite the inevitable distractions?

You Might Also Like:

Download a FREE first chapter of Winning Well: A Manager’s Guide to Getting Results-Without Losing Your Soul.

5 Ways Leaders Can Focus When Everything Is Important

How to Focus Your Time and Energy for Maximum Results

How to Unlock Your Team’s Best Ideas

The post Get Your Team Back on Track – Leading Through Distractions appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

When you have a clear picture of where you want to go but your team won’t come along as quickly as you want, it can feel like you’re trying to pull a car out of the mud—it’s stuck and everyone’s spinning their wheels. Pull too hard or too fast and you risk a disaster like this:

The internet is full of towing failures like this one. There are a couple of common mistakes that plague well-meaning people trying to tow a friend’s car out of trouble—and these same mistakes can prevent you from helping your team manage change.

Help Your Team Manage Change by Avoiding These 3 Mistakes

Mistake #1: Poor Connection

A good tow depends on a solid connection between the two vehicles. For example, don’t hook your tow cable to the bumper of either vehicle. This is a weak connection. In many of those towing fails, they didn’t attach their cable to the car’s frame, and when they pulled, they tore the car apart.

Just as you want to connect a tow cable to a car’s frame, as a leader, your influence depends on the strength of your connection to your people. Share the meaning and purpose of the work. Know what your people value, and connect those values to their daily tasks.

The most meaningful connections you make are with shared values and clear reasons why activities must happen. Without these connections, you’ve probably asked your team to do something that makes no sense to them (with little chance of success).

You also strengthen your connection to your people when you include their wisdom and perspective in decision-making. Ask what they think the team is capable of, why they do what they do, and how they would improve the results they produce.

Mistake #2: Rapid Direction Change

When you tow, you don’t want to pull the car sideways or you could rip off a tire or an entire axle. Instead, start by pulling the vehicle in the direction it was going or else directly opposite that direction. This minimizes stress on the car and gets the wheels rolling.

Similarly, with your team, you have to know their current capacity, training, and priorities. If you ask something of them they don’t know how to do, or that their current workload can’t accommodate, or something that conflicts with their current priorities, you’ll end up frustrated.

We’ve worked with many User managers who respond to this scenario by pulling harder (they yell, belittle their people, and get upset). This is the equivalent of pulling at the wrong angle and tearing the axle off the car. At best, your people lose respect for you. At worse, they rebel, quit, or sabotage success.

When you need to get your team going a different direction, start by examining the capacity, training, and priorities. What can you remove from their plate? What training can you get for them? How can you help re-prioritize and get them rolling in the new direction? Even a day or two spent in making these adjustments can help your team manage change and transform faster.

Mistake #3: Moving too Fast

When you tow a vehicle, you don’t want to slam on the accelerator. When the road is muddy and you accelerate too quickly, your tires will spin and dig into the mud. When the road is dry and you accelerate too fast, you’ll damage one vehicle or else snap the tow cable.

As a manager, you have a clear picture of where you’re going and what needs to happen to get there. It’s obvious to you. But what’s obvious to you won’t be obvious to your people without significant communication—particularly in times of crisis and change.

We’ve worked with countless frustrated managers who told their team about a change in procedure once, six months ago and are now angry that their team isn’t implementing the change. To pull gently and build momentum, you’ve got to frequently communicate what’s happening, why it’s happening, and the specific tasks each person is responsible for, and then check for understanding. At the end of the discussions, ask team members to share what they understand the expectations to be.

Slow down just a little, and help your people build momentum in the new direction.

Your Turn

The towing metaphor has its limits. In fact, the better connection you build with your team, the more you help them to self-manage and prioritize what matters most, the more rapidly your team can manage change and respond to sudden shifts.

We’ve been so impressed by the leadership and rapid changes we’ve seen many teams make in response to this crisis and we’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment and share What is your #1 way to help your team manage change quickly and respond to rapidly shifting circumstances?

The post How to Help Your Team Manage Change appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

We’ve been fans of Brian Tracy’s ideas on productivity and efficiency for a long time. So we were delighted to find that we were all keynoting at the HR Asia Summit in Singapore. We enjoyed chatting with Brian about his thoughts of getting results that last and building confidence.

Thanks, Brian for your decades of thought leadership and inspiration.

Click on the image for more information about Brian’s book.

Winning Well Reflection

Brian is a master at personal productivity and you can easily see why. His advice on building confidence in your team through task completion is a core part of the Winning Well Confidence Bursts strategy. We particularly appreciated his advice to help you evaluate what is truly the MIT among the competing priorities you face every day.

The post Eat That Frog! (Karin Hurt and David Dye Interview Brian Tracy) appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.