Experienced Leaders’ Advice to New Managers! (a Qualitative Study)

In one of our recent studies (Sancus Leadership), we asked experienced small team leaders about the biggest mistakes they made as new leaders and what they’ve learned along the way. You might be surprised at what we learned.

Experience leaders’ advice to new managers includes not trusting your gut, assuming extreme ownership, creating boundaries, delegating everything you can, and prioritizing ruthlessly. Failure to implement these tips leads to teammates losing trust in the leader and higher stress levels than necessary.

Today I will discuss the results of a large study we performed regarding the first day, first week, 30 days, and 90 days of holding a managerial position. Here are 10 pieces of advice for new managers!

1. Don’t Assume That You Know Better and More Than Your Team

“Belief that position (being a manager) automatically gives ability and knowledge that exceeds other staff.”

This leads to a sense of superiority because it might seem that you have a higher value than others at the company. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. However, you might be harder to replace since you hopefully have leadership training, and the company has invested a lot of money into you.

But that is only true if you take a long-term business perspective, which I think your superiors want you to do. Doing this might help you realize that one of those employees might be the next CEO or the person with the next big idea allowing the organization to grow into something sustainable over the long term.

We should treat our co-workers not only concerning who they are today but also who they can become tomorrow.

2. Remember That Not All Decisions Need to “Feel” Good

“Just because you don’t like the decision you’re about to make doesn’t mean it’s not the right decision to make.”

There’s an illusion that every decision should feel good. “Trust your gut,” they say. But to be honest, in my 12 years in the army, many decisions felt really bad at the moment but turned out to be valid. 

The Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, writes in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, 

“Trusting your intuition, AKA a decision that feels good, should only be done when the situation meets specific criteria, such as when the problem is predictable, you have experience in the field, and when feedback is instant.”

If this is not the case, you should take a step back and use a slower, more systematic approach to making decisions. When you want to improve your decision-making, I suggest you book a free leadership call with me to see if we should work together.

3. Choose Your Enemies Wisely

“If you are going to work in a larger organization, do not create an ‘us vs. them’ feeling towards the rest of the organization, as it doesn’t benefit the group’s overall thinking.”

I often see organizations try to create healthy competition. But they usually end up in a situation where it’s more important that the other team loses than that their team wins.

Unhealthy competition is not what you want for a company. While competition that improves productivity is good, the problem usually lies within employees connected to the bigger picture if there’s no net gain.

In the army, this is relatively common, as platoons fight over who is the best. But as soon as you go on deployment together, everyone is a solid team with a complete understanding of who the real enemy is.

All competition between departments and teams must be aimed at outperforming other companies. If not, the competition is deemed unhealthy and should be avoided.

This is not easy to do, and that’s why most managers fail to create healthy competition. If you want to talk to someone with 12 years of experience making healthy competition within organizations, you should book a call with us now.

4. When There’s a Problem, You Must Fix It

“If you’re unhappy with someone in the group regarding behavior or performance, tell them and help them reach the goals. If that doesn’t work, think about a solution, as the problems won’t go away by themselves. Again, the group exists to solve assigned tasks.”

As a leader, you might be tempted to present yourself in a way where you don’t make any mistakes, but this is a misstep that you definitely want to avoid. It’s impossible to never make mistakes, so if you present yourself in that way, everyone, and I really mean everyone, will see through it.

This will quickly diminish trust and the confidence that your employees have in your ability to lead the team and reflect negatively upon you from the more experienced leaders above you.

A much better way is to avoid the blame game and instead take extreme ownership, as Jocko Willink put it. When it goes wrong, own it and own up to it, no matter what.

5. Restriction Is Freedom

Parkinson’s law tells us that no matter how much time we have, the work will expand to fill it. 

So the more time we have to complete something, the longer it takes. 

We will use all the available resources to complete the task, but that doesn’t mean the results are better. You could even argue that the outcome is less favorable. This is also where the Pareto distribution comes into place, as 5% of the time spent solving the task results in 80% of the wanted outcomes.

Those who don’t understand these principles will find themselves overworked, underpaid, and with a loss of engagement in the task.

Honoring the Pareto principle and Parkinson’s law means putting boundaries on how we spend our time. Nothing needs to be better than good enough, but the question is, what is good enough? 

If you’re striving for perfection, you’re wasting your time. Good enough gets the job done, allowing you to do more things and be more productive, or just take a break and recover so you can do things better for longer.

6. Clearly Visualize Your Plan

“Visualize your plan so that it can be questioned by all members. Not to criticize but to help the group solve the task.”

Communication is a fancy word that gets thrown around by leadership consultants that don’t know what the specific problem is. The specific problem is usually that leaders are unable to visually represent their plans in a way that can be understood instantly by the intended audience.

Giving instructions through text and speeches isn’t as effective as creating decision-making trees or following a standardized briefing template with figures and symbols instead of walls of text.

In the Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams, I developed a standardized way of doing threat assessments and how to visualize it together with the plan to my team in under 8 minutes. This is no easy task, but if done correctly means that you can release your people to do their thing independently since now they know exactly what is needed to complete the mission. 

Do you have a standardized briefing template so that you can visualize complex, high-risk plans with your team? If you don’t, it’s probably time to reach out and book a call with us!

7. Delegate All That’s Possible, Do Only What’s Needed

“Too much detail management; let the guys fix it and trust it gets done.”

Micromanagement–we all know the word, and we all think we don’t do it. But let me ask you this: How often do you check on your team? Once per hour, twice per day?

If you can’t let your team members work independently for at least two days, I would suggest something is wrong. Either the structure of your business isn’t set up in a way that allows people to solve problems as they arise, or it can arise from a lack of mandate, trust, or fear of being punished if something goes wrong.

Running a team this way is slow and sequential, and things lay around waiting to be “approved” by a manager. 

But what if you delegated the “task of approving,” and employees could check themselves? This is how a high-performance team operates. Each individual knows and is trusted with their tasks, and they have clear mandates that tell them exactly when to contact management, not too often, not too sparsely. 

This makes work faster and more productive!

8. Give As Much As You Request

“Acting selfishly, feigning expertise, asking more from one’s subordinates than oneself.”

Don’t ask others what you’re unwilling to give yourself. This is a golden rule of good leadership, and those who don’t implement it will quickly see bitterness manifest in the business.

Last week, a friend told me a story about her boss. When the entire team was working overtime, this toxic boss decided to leave early so that she could make it to the planned after-work event. 

When arriving, she sent a photo to the team chat showing a drink in a fancy restaurant. This, of course, upset everyone on the team since they were busting their asses to finish the tasks that she set up for the team.

Don’t be that manager. If you think someone should give their all, you should be prepared to do the same! A great leadership trait is to lead by example.

9. Decide What Needs to Die

“Prioritizing doesn’t mean ranking, but rather removing.”

Just putting things further up or down on a list will surely make you and your people overworked and underpaid. 

My toughest everyday mistake as a leader is choosing what things are not worth doing. This usually means saying no to someone higher up the chain of command, which often comes with conflict.

But if you don’t, you can bet the house that it will lead to overworking your team, and sooner or later, people will drop off. Trying to solve all the tasks that come your way is not only ineffective but also irresponsible and foolish.

But let me give you a million-dollar tip.

Figure out which tasks are worth doing and which nobody will neither check nor have any impact if they are left undone.

Tip number one: Ask if you can do it three weeks from now. When you get the answer that it needs to be done now, respectfully ask what the consequences are if it gets done later. More often than not, people start twisting and turning and can’t come up with an answer. 

Perfect, now you should have three more weeks to complete the task. 

Tip number two: If you get your three weeks, analyze whether a) the task will have a positive impact on the business and b) task completion will be checked by a superior. If you say no to both of these, don’t do the task.

If you find that the task needs to be completed, do it as late as you can, and hope that the situation changes so that the task becomes obsolete, making you a timesaver master.

If it is urgent and needs to be done right now, then dedicate all available resources and finish it as best as you can as fast as you can. This is a high-priority situation! 

Conclusion

New managers often think they’re far superior to everyone on their team and that they don’t need to improve. Or, they might think they need to make sure everything needs to be done or even micromanaged. If they were to relax a little, they might be able to inspire their team to be more productive in less time.

If this sounds like what you want, schedule a call with me today!