First Time Managers Tips: Gaining a Management Perspective

With contributions by Marla Rosner

Are you a new manager? Maybe you’ve just been assigned to “team lead” or train a group of people.

As a new manager, there are numerous adjustments you'll need to make, some quicker than others. You were undoubtedly promoted because you’re able to perform your job tasks quite well. One of the first lessons you’ll need to learn is that you can’t do it all. You’ll need to learn how to get results through others rather than performing certain tasks yourself.

You’ll also need to understand that the viewpoint of management is a little different from your old viewpoint. Think for a moment of how a scene might look from the peak of a hilltop compared to that same landscape viewed from the forest floor. It's the perspective from the hilltop you need to obtain in order to lead your team through the forest.

You may already have a clear understanding of the bigger goals of your organization by virtue of having worked at the company prior to becoming a manager. You may be tempted to think that you don’t need to worry too much about the manager’s perspective, especially if you’re only leading a small group.

It’s important to realize, however, that your value to the company as a manager is in leadership. Even if you’re only guiding a small group, you now hold a meaningful role in helping your company achieve its goals.

Don't ever trivialize your team's contribution. Every group and every individual plays an essential role in the organization, especially when they're all aimed at the same corporate goals. Managers or supervisors who "get" the big picture will always stand out because they direct their teams in alignment with the needs of the business.

To understand the big picture, do your homework. Set aside time each week to gather information that helps you understand the company’s business needs. This is an area you probably haven’t thought much about in the past. Take the time now to learn how you fit in with the big picture. This step is vital to the success of your entire team.

Many businesses units operate in "silos"—that is, they're not connected to other parts of the company. You may have worked for your unit for quite some time but not be aware of its other products or customers. For example, if you’re a new manager in a senior living community that is owned by a large, multi-facility company, you may not even know that your company also operates home care agencies.

The company website can be an excellent source of information. If you haven't dug into the company's website before, do so now; you may discover some aspects of the company of which you weren’t aware.

Though this information may not be relevant to your daily responsibilities, having this information will help you to understand where your team and you fit into the larger picture. It may also suggest opportunities you'd like to pursue that you hadn't previously considered.

Read articles related to both your company and your industry. You'll learn a great deal about competitors and where your company fits in. You may get new ideas of how improve your work. Read local newspapers, too, to learn about what’s happening in your industry and community. It may help you understand how your company looks to the public and how you can improve its image.

Share your observations with your boss at an appropriate time. It will not only show your boss that you’re working hard to understand the company from the hilltop point of view, but will also give your boss a chance to validate or correct your observations.

Taking these steps will help you to become a better leader. The next step is to learn how to connect your team's activities to the company’s goals and objectives. That’s a topic for a future article.

Great leaders excel at everything?

"Our goal for today is to help our audience become better leaders by simultaneously excelling in four areas of their lives: work, home, community and self."

This is the introductory sentence to the Harvard Business School interview, posted on YouTube (see below to watch the whole video). The speaker is Steward Friedman, author of leadership books and articles.

I don’t know about you, but that intro sentence alone makes me choke. “Excel?” How about “survive?”

I’m busy running my company, and, yes, I do identify my own success with the success of my business, but, really, am I excelling at work and home, let alone community and self?

The speaker (and interviewer, by the way) assumes that our life’s goal is to become the best leader we can be. Learning to excel at the other three areas – home, community and self – will help us become better leaders.

And on MY tombstone, I want to see the words, “She pulled it all together. She excelled at everything. But at the end of it all, she was a Great Leader.”

Perhaps I’m being a little harsh. It does grate, just a little, that the reason we might want to join a non-profit board is that, ultimately, it benefits "the company." The main reason we may want to pay attention to our mind, body and soul is to improve our “performance at work.”

I’ll let you watch the video to hear the rest of his argument, but his recommended exercises – determining your core values and the legacy you’d like to leave, among others - are worthwhile activities, no matter if you’re struggling for survival or on the verge of perfection.

As managers, even mid-level managers, we ARE leaders. The people around us watch us. Whether we like it or not, we set the tone of at least some aspects of our work.

We have the power to make coming to work a high point of someone else’s day; or the thing they least enjoy doing.

Our praise and words of encouragement can shape the behavior of the people around us as certainly as the sound of the doorbell shapes the behavior of my dog.

We are all leaders. Whether excelling at this task should be our biggest aspiration in life is certainly debatable, at least to me.

But I do agree with Stew on this: when we are true to ourselves; when we know clearly what is important to us in our lives; when we have focus, commitment and passion, we’ll be awesome, powerful leaders.

Even if our tombstones just read, “Beloved wife and mother.”

Get the pre-training advantage in hiring qualified people for your openings

It’s one great employers’ job market right now. If you’ve been hiring recently you know exactly what I mean. You can get someone with great qualifications – out of an applicant pool many times larger than typical – because of today’s high unemployment rate.

I hate to hire new people, even though we need them from time to time. It’s time consuming and, frankly, a pain in the you-know-where to review applications and resumes, schedule interviews (I can’t fit everything in my day I’ve got to do now – how am I going to do quality interviews, too?), and check references.

Desperation breeds good ideas, I’m told. Here’s the latest idea that we’ve come up with – in part from my own hiring desperation. It’s also a response to the huge need and demand from unemployed people looking for a way to enter the fields of caregiving, health care and senior care.

It’s a pretty simple concept: Job pre-training. It’s sort of like job re-training, except that we’re not focusing on the transfer of skills from one industry to another.

We’re looking for a way to help the unemployed person get into our field – and at the same time get even more qualified applicants.

With job pre-training, we’re offering you the chance to hire someone who already has the type of training you might otherwise be giving him after hiring. You’ll still need to do the other tasks of interviewing and reference checking (sorry; can’t really shortcut these steps). But if the person passes on those steps, you can hire the individual, complete a competency evaluation (watch him in action, signing off on competency areas for documentation in his file), and put him to work. Put a copy of his pre-training certification in his file, and you’ve documented initial training, as well as the competency check off, in many cases.

We’re getting ready to launch this program of job pre-training within the coming weeks, so keep your eyes and ears open.

In the meantime, click here to see how you can get involved – and get a little publicity for your community, too!

It’s a win for you – you get a job candidate who was demonstrated his initiative, his ability to learn independently and online, and has a certification to prove it.

It’s a win, too, for those folks out there who want to get a good, meaningful job. Maybe it’s a job they wouldn’t have considered even one year ago; but maybe it will end up being the very best job of their lives!

Change we'll embrace

“People hate change.”

Have you heard, thought or even said those words lately?

I know I have, especially when I was trying to change the way things were done during the daily routine of care.

Change shift start time? Change paydays? Change dress codes? Nope, it’s not going to be easy.

Change the culture of the way people treat each other – even tougher.

And yet we continue to strive to implement change – and we continue to run into walls.

At the same time, most of us want a little change in our lives. We crave change in our diets – eating the same foods every day would be boring, not to mention not very healthy.

We look for new TV shows, new movies, and new experiences.

We embrace new technologies that help us connect with our friends, check out new products and prices and take our favorite tunes everywhere we go.

Heck, we even VOTED for change in this past election – and we’re very likely going to get it, ready or not!

Here’s what every good manager needs to know: to get people to embrace change, you have to market it. You have to look at it from their perspective and ask, “What’s in it for me?”

Because when the changes we’re trying to make are changes that will improve the lives of our employees, they’ll embrace it.

If it’s change they can have a voice in shaping, they’ll embrace it even more.