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"What do
I do now?"
Craig
looked plaintively across the desk at me. He'd come
to me for help adapting to his new role as a
manager. He was having a lot of trouble.
Craig had
thought he wanted to be a manager. He'd supported
himself through college by running heavy machinery
in the construction industry. He was a hard worker.
When he
was hired by the company that made some of the
equipment he used to run, Craig was ecstatic. He
liked the people in the construction industry and he
thought his new employer was as fine a company as
there was.
Craig was
hired as a sales trainee, but his goals were
something else. He wanted to be an executive and
climb the corporate ladder. He started out by
turning himself into a great salesperson. He let his
bosses know that he wanted to move up.
His
opportunity came after only a couple of years. The
company tapped him for a sales manager's job. At
first he was ecstatic.
Now it
was three months later. Craig didn't like the things
he had to do in his new job. He missed the freedom
of selling on the road, spending time on jobsites
and talking with people he liked.
"I used
to love going to work," he told me. "Now, I get
slammed from all sides. My boss wants me to make my
numbers. Half the people who work for me just don't
seem to cut it and they're always whining about
something."
"I don't
know how to handle that. Plus, my bonus is now tied
to how these other people do. It was easier when I
just had to work a little harder or smarter to make
my numbers."
"Anything
else?" I asked.
"When I
was selling, the deals I cut grew naturally out of
our relationship with the customers. Now, I've got
my people asking me to approve deals and I'm just
not comfortable deciding. It's constant pressure."
There are
thousands of people out there like Craig. They start
out with the idea that what they want is a
management job. Then, they get one and it's nothing
like what they expected. How can you keep that from
happening to you?
Here are
some questions to ask yourself to help decide if a
management job is the right career choice.
What will
I be giving up if I move into management?
This is
very important to ask. Companies promote top
performers. If they want to promote you to
management, the odds are good that you were an above
average performer as an individual contributor.
The odds
are also pretty good that you like the work you're
doing. So, are you willing to give it up?
You may
have to give up more than work you love. If your
management job requires lots of travel or more late
nights or a more demanding schedule, you may give up
some time at home, too. Are you willing to do that?
In some
companies, promotion to management comes with an
automatic relocation. Are you willing to move? Is
your family willing to move?
Finally,
check the income figures. Sometimes, getting
promoted means a drop in regular income because
commissions or overtime pay goes away.
Do I like
helping other people succeed?
One of
your jobs as a manager is to help the people who
work for you succeed. That's not a job everyone
likes to do. If you like helping other people do
better, it will make your job as a manager much
easier and it will make you more likely to succeed.
What if
you don't? Then understand that you will probably
have to put conscious effort into the work of
helping others on your team. Only you know how
difficult that will be for you.
Am I
comfortable making decisions?
As a
manager, you will have to make decisions about all
sorts of things. My life experience tells me that
this is not something you can learn to be
comfortable with. If you are comfortable making
decisions, you can improve your technique, but no
amount of training will make you willing to make
decisions.
Think
about how you live your life. Do you make decisions
as needed? Or do you put them off or hope that
someone else will make the decision for you?
This
one's pretty simple. If you can't make decisions you
won't be an effective manager.
Am I
willing to confront people about their behavior or
performance?
Management is the art of controlled confrontation.
Every day you will need to talk to people who work
for you about their behavior and performance. You
will need to confront some of them with how they're
doing and what they need to fix.
We're not
talking about big, blow-up, "Jerry Springer"
confrontations. Most of your confrontations will be
about small things. But you'll have to do them every
day.
If you
can't confront people who work for you about their
behavior and performance, it's not likely you will
do well as a manager.
Am I
willing to let the group become my destiny?
This is a
tough one, because it flies in the face of how we
talk about management. We like to say that when
you're in management, you've got power. But that's
not true.
When you
get promoted, you'll have less power than you do
now. Think of it this way.
When
you're an individual contributor and you want to
improve your evaluation or income, all you have to
do is work harder or smarter. When you want to
achieve the same thing as a manager, you've got to
convince your team members to work harder or
smarter.
As one of
my trainees put it: "The team is your destiny." Your
success and your rewards are based on their
performance. Are you ready for that?
Craig's
problem was that he took a management job without
thinking through whether it was something that he
would like and be good at. He hadn't thought about
what he liked and didn't and he hadn't considered
the changes he would have to make.
Craig
went to his boss and laid out the issues he and I
discussed. His company decided they'd rather have a
happy and successful sales rep instead of an unhappy
sales manager and they let Craig pick up his old
job.
All of
that could have been avoided if Craig had done some
analysis in advance. One of my other clients, John,
was a person who did.
John was
working with me on career issues for about a year
when he was offered the opportunity to move up to
management. We'd already discussed many of the
issues, so he was in much better shape than Craig.
John knew what he wanted and figured he could do a
good job as a manager.
On the
plus side, John really loved working with people and
helping them develop. The move to management would
make that a key part of his job.
Because
he was a good performer as an individual
contributor, John was a little leery about giving up
the freedom he'd earned and about moving out of his
comfort zone to a new job. In his case, relocation
or money were not issues.
John
thought he was a good decision maker, but he
admitted to sometimes taking longer than necessary
to make a decision. Sometimes he even let others
make decisions he might have made better. We marked
that as an area to work on in his personal
development plan.
John had
coached sports teams and figured that the
confrontations about performance that he did in that
role would help him as a manager. That has turned
out to be the case.
John's
biggest issue was with whether he could live with
the fact that his team's performance would define
his results. There wasn't any clear evidence in his
background either way, but he thought he could learn
to do it. We marked the issue as one for our
coaching sessions.
Things
worked out well for John. There were some rocky
points, though. Everybody has them.
It turned
out that the confrontation issue was far more
difficult for him to master than either of us
expected. But with concentrated effort, John
mastered that and other skill issues.
When you
get promoted to management you must do different
kinds of work than what made you successful as an
individual contributor. You gain some things and
give up others. It's not a transition that everyone
wants to make, but asking some key questions in
advance means you can increase your odds of success
when promotion comes calling.
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