As start-ups grow rapidly, team members will often move into management, in many cases for the first time or with limited experience. The management learning curve is lumpy, with smooth periods of feeling increasingly competent, punctuated by intensely challenging and stressful new experiences.
Using our time in start-up leadership roles and reflecting on the managers we’ve come across along the way, we’ve put together the 5 common mistakes made by new managers, along with pointers that a new manager can use to avoid them:
Most new managers try to keep doing their old job and their new management responsibilities at the same time. Bad idea! If you have just become a manager then your responsibilities have changed significantly and you must delegate much of your work if you are to free yourself up to actually manage your team.
When new managers fail to delegate their old work, their workload ramps up, often leading to frustration or burnout. For example, if you’re not able to delegate, you may not feel happy going on holiday - we’ve seen this happen many times before and it doesn’t take long for a manager to become exhausted without leave.
Often these issues happen because nobody has explained that to manage well, to avoid becoming a bottleneck and to look after your own wellbeing, you must pass on your old responsibilities to your team.
To develop a plan for how you will delegate, you should ask yourself the following questions:
Remember, delegating responsibilities to your team is an opportunity to increase their sense of empowerment!
Being a friend to everyone isn’t helpful and in some cases it’s downright cowardly. New managers need to realise they’re not here to be everyone’s friend. They exist to provide stability, support and direction to the team. Instead of trying to be liked, focus on being fair and build trust and respect; the rest will follow.
Leading in a start-up means you’re almost certainly going to have to manage individuals or your whole team through really difficult times. These moments are when your integrity will be most tested but also when you have the chance to prove your courage. Establish yourself as a stable, trusted manager, by thinking through the following:
To be an effective manager you will need to do at least one, and likely most, of the following: manage upwards; give your team clarity, such as explaining leadership team decisions or company goals; build relationships across functions; and present to the organisation.
Poor communication causes many issues. Wasted or inefficient work because team members aren’t clear on their role or individual tasks. Demotivated team members who feel they’re not kept in the loop. Your own manager feeling you’re not on top of things, because you’re not keeping them up to speed. No alignment with other areas of work. These are just a few.
A few questions to help you consider whether you’re communicating effectively:
Whether you’re inheriting a new team or building one from scratch, it’s imperative that you make sure you and everyone else in the business understand what your team does and does not do. Why? When responsibility isn’t clear, the same work can be duplicated between teams or it can fall through the cracks and not get done. Both scenarios can reflect poorly on you and your team, even if it’s not your fault.
Take the initiative. Speak to your manager and explain that to motivate your team and ensure total focus on the priorities of the team, you need to make sure there’s clarity on what your team owns and what sits elsewhere.
You could do this by producing a RACI with your manager/peers/other leaders in the organisation. A RACI is a list of the activities carried out in an organisation which also shows for each activity which person/people are Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed. Going through this exercise will likely throw up a few discussion points where colleagues have different views on who owns what, which is to be expected. Once the exercise is finished, you can feel assured that your team are focusing on the right things and you can devote your time to delivering this clear set of priorities.
You’re leading individuals who each need different support to do their best work. We’ve seen people treat their team as though they’re robots whose only purpose is to carry out the tasks they’re assigned. 99% of people do not want to be treated like this. And those 99% all have different wants and needs.
Get to know your team. At the very least you should have the answers to the following questions. How do they like to communicate e.g. in person, over email etc? How will you know when they are stressed? How often do they like meeting? Is there anything they want to make you aware of about how they like to work/be managed?
Following our tips on new management won’t always be easy. Becoming a new manager is challenging and you won’t always get it right. But if you try to apply the lessons in this blog, you’re likely to save yourself the time and headaches that many new managers before you have experienced. Good luck!
At Greenhouse we’ve gathered a team of start-up leaders, practitioners and leadership thinkers and put together the leadership and management programme that we needed when we started out. Click here to find out more.
