First-Time Managers Leading Themselves with Strengths

Part 1 of First-Time Managers Leading Themselves with Strengths. You got promoted for your own output. Now you get paid for somebody else's, and nobody hands you a new scoreboard.

Last month I wrote about a ladder. Learn about yourself, then about others, then about your team. This month I am turning that ladder on its side and handing it to one person. The one who just got promoted.

This is the first of five articles about first-time managers. Not about managing people, which is where most of the training starts. About the part that comes before it, and that almost nobody schedules.

How it usually goes

You were good at your job. Good enough that somebody looked at you and thought, we should put this person in charge of other people doing that job.

So they did.

Monday morning you sat down at the same desk with a new title and almost nothing else changed.

Except everything did.

The shift nobody says out loud

The thing that got you promoted was your own OUTPUT. The thing you get paid for now is somebody else's.

That is the whole shift.

And almost nobody says it out loud to a new manager. Mostly you get a headcount and an orientation on the expense system. (Or if you are like me, nobody showed you and you taught yourself Concur.)

What this looked like for me

My top five are Achiever®, Futuristic®, Competition®, Learner® and Individualization®.

Achiever® means I need to finish things. Competition® means I will turn almost anything into a scoreboard. Put those two in a sales job and you get the guy who was number one (points at myself). I rode them from intern all the way up.

Those same themes were there when I started leading people.

But what helped me succeed as an individual contributor is exactly what made me a bad leader.

My Competition® had spent years telling me to be the best. Now it wanted to compare me to the people who reported to me. I was competing with my own direct reports, on a scoreboard only I could see.

My Achiever® set a standard nobody on that team could live up to, and then quietly resented them for not meeting it.

Within about six months I had become Michael Scott from The Office (world's worst boss).

Nothing about me had changed. That was the problem.

Why manager training usually misses this

Most first-time manager training starts with the mechanics. How to run a one-on-one. How to write a performance review. How to give feedback that actually lands.

All genuinely useful. All aimed at the wrong problem.

A skills gap is not what breaks a new manager. The new manager already HAD skills. That is why they got the job.

What breaks them is that the target moved and nobody told them.

You spent years aiming your talent at your own results, and it worked so well that somebody handed you a team. The wiring did not change. The thing it points at did. So the instinct that used to produce your best work now lands as pressure on somebody else.

Same engine, new direction, no warning label.

That is not something a module on delegation fixes. You cannot manage an instinct you cannot see, and mechanics training never asks you to look.

Five questions to find out where you actually are

Answer these honestly. Nobody is watching.

1. What were you proudest of this week? If it is something YOU finished, your scoreboard has not moved yet.

2. Can you describe what each person on your team accomplished this week in the same detail you can describe your own week? If not, you are still the star of your own report.

3. When someone hands you work that is eighty percent of what you would have done, do you coach it or do you fix it? Fixing it is faster. Fixing it is also how you end up doing two jobs and getting resented for one of them.

4. Have you quietly taken something back? Not reassigned. Taken back, because waiting was harder than doing it.

5. When you tell somebody about your week, whose work are you describing?

None of these mean you are bad at this. They mean the wiring that got you promoted is still pointed exactly where it was on your last day as an individual contributor.

It does not repoint itself.

The first job

So the first job of a first-time manager is not learning to manage.

It is learning what you are actually made of, and how those same ingredients that turned you into employee of the month are quietly sabotaging you and turning you into the world's worst boss.

The mechanics can be taught in an afternoon. Knowing what you are made of takes longer, and it is the part that decides whether the afternoon was worth anything.

You cannot lead other people on purpose until you can lead yourself on purpose.

That is what the next four articles are about. One idea, five parts.

Not everybody gets handed a new scoreboard. Some of us have to build one.

---

More in this series

Part 1: What Nobody Tells You When You Become a Manager for the First Time (this article)

Part 2: Why Naming Your CliftonStrengths® Themes Is Not the Same as Knowing Them

Part 3: When Your Strongest CliftonStrengths® Theme Starts Costing You

Part 4: How to Build a Management Rhythm Around Your Own CliftonStrengths® Themes

Part 5: How to Tell Your Team the Way You Work, Before They Have to Guess

If you are planning a workshop

I facilitate CliftonStrengths®, team development, and first-time manager workshops. A first-time manager workshop built on CliftonStrengths® is one of the cheapest ways to keep a good individual contributor from becoming a struggling manager. If your company is moving people into their first management role this year, connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me about it: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reubenpoon/

Social Media

Watch some free videos online via my social media accounts!