One of the oddities of organizational life is the fairly frequent and sudden promotion of individuals from competent individual contributor to someone responsible for the work of others…supervisor or manager, without any visible sign of mentoring or support for the newly in-charge individual. “Congratulations…go get ‘em Tiger.” Here are 6 ideas to help you survive this challenging new assignment:
The first year of your first job responsible for others (supervisor, lead, manager) is the early-awkward phase. Your technical or functional expertise and someone’s perception of your potential for leadership got you here. Your as of yet undeveloped or at least under-developed communication and coordination skills are what will carry you forward. Here are 5 suggestions to help you get this right.
New leaders…either those that are first-time leaders or those that find themselves responsible for leading a new team, deal with extremely high degrees of ambiguity at start-up. They lack context for the people, the team culture, the issues, group and individual dynamics and so many important variables in the environment, that they find themselves acting on instinct or avoiding acting because of this knowledge gap. One of the critical challenges for the new leader is quickly closing this context gap.
A note from Art: My recent post, "Things I Wish Someone Would Have Told Me When I Became a Leader," seemed to strike a familiar chord for many. I'm thrilled that it struck a chord for someone that I've invited to guest post for quite awhile and until now, couldn't quite convince to put pen to paper. A good colleague and friend, Joe Zurawski, joins us today with his thoughts on early leadership missteps and lessons learned the hard way.
