MBA1943 Guest Teacher – Mikil Taylor – How to Support a First-Time Manager

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA show. Because rain or shine, you gotta show up and be your best for your business. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zed Home. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started with my co founder back in 20 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes I bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. And today we have Michael Taylor and he'll be teaching you how to support a first time manager. Michael is the author of the Beginner's Guide to Managing. I really wanted to get Michael to teach this topic on today's episode because as small business owners we want to buy our time back. A lot of our time is spent managing other people, managing projects, managing work. So naturally as we scale, we hire a manager or we promote somebody to becoming a manager. But how do you support that new manager? Somebody who's learning on the job and figuring out how you want to do what you do right? But as a new manager, as somebody who's a new hire or just new to managing, how do you support them? How do you make sure they're successful? There's so much to consider. One being that the reason why you're hiring this person is because you're so busy you just need them to get on with it. But that's not how things work. As we know in the real world, we have to make sure that they're prepared for success, that we set them up for success that we create a plan so that they can win at this new role. And ultimately you win because you supported and created a great manager for your business. We got a lot to cover in today's episode, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Today's guest teacher, Michael Taylor is the author of the Beginner's Guide to Managing Today. He's also the vice president of data science and analytics at Healthcare Blue Book. And he's gonna show you how you can make sure that first time manager that you hire, that you promote is successful in your organization. What you need to do to make sure they're successful, throwing them into the pool of business and telling them to sink or swim is not a strategy. You need to set them up for success and support them along the way. How? Well, that's why I brought on Michael. He's gonna be teaching you how. I'm gonna pass it on to Michael right now to teach his guest teacher lesson. But I' to wrap up today's episode and share a few insights from my own experience. But for now, take it away, Michael.

Hi, I'm Michael Taylor. Today I'll show you how to support a first time manager. One of the greatest credits to a leader is when they have the ability to create other leaders. You as a manager will have the opportunity in your career to promote others into management positions. What I'd like to show you today is how to successfully show somebody how to go from an individual contributor to a great manager. The challenge with being a first time manager is that the skills that got you into this position are not the skills that will help you to succeed as a manager. Your job is to help this manager recognize that they are now a rookie and have a long way to go and to support them in that development. So today we'll talk about four things that you need to do to support your new manager. Number one, recognize that new managers need a lot of help. All of us in our first time as a manager had we weren't perfect at it. When we first started. We had trouble figuring out what to focus on or how to discipline People or how to get the best out of our teams. Recognize that just because you might be a good manager today doesn't mean that you are a good manager on day one. Number two, you need to be prepared to support this new manager as they struggle. Again. All new managers are going to struggle in their new positions and that's not necessarily an indictment of their abilities to succeed. It just means that they need some extra training. Everybody's a rookie and everybody has to grow in that position. Sometimes that means you've got to struggle. Number three, you, as this new manager's manager need to set aside time to spend with this manager actually talking about management. Just because you're supportive of this new manager doesn't necessarily mean you can be of help. Unless you're actually setting aside time to spend with this person talking about how to be a good manager. Lastly, number four, you need to create a written plan, share it with the manager and stick to it. So not only do you need to spend time with the manager, but you need to spend specific directed time helping them understand how to handle situations that either have come up or are going to come up. So let's move back to number one and talk about it in a little more detail. So the first and most important thing for you to do to support a new manager is to recognize that new managers need a lot of help. Think back on your own experience as a first time manager. Now you today as a successful manager of people are probably pretty good at it, but it's really easy to forget just how hard that first year was. That first time where you had to correct somebody's work or discipline somebody, or fire somebody, or show somebody what that next step in their career looked like. Those things don't come naturally and a lot of us can struggle or at a very minimum need to bounce ideas off of other people in order to understand where we need to go in managing these other people. So you as this person's manager need to be there and recognize that they're going to need a lot of support, even if that new manager doesn't necessarily recognize it yet today. So think about it this way. If you're teaching a child to swim, you're not going to drop them in the deep end immediately and trust that they'll figure it out. It's the same thing with managers. They need to be specifically taught how to do their new job rather than just being dropped in and subsequently ignored. Two, you as the manager need to be prepared to support this new manager in their struggles. Every single person who gets into this role is going to doubt their abilities, they're going to struggle with taking the right approach, they're going to make mistakes. Now again, you, as an experienced manager, you've been in these shoes, you've seen these mistakes, you've probably made plenty of them yourself. So you need to be gracious with this new manager as they make those mistakes and help guide them out of how to avoid wallowing in those mistakes and how to ultimately make the right final correction that they need to make in order to really succeed. So for example, if somebody is a little bit sharp with one of their employees and maybe rubbed somebody the wrong way because they were over critical of something that's going to happen, we've all done it. Heck, I've done it lots of times. But really what a successful manager does is recognizes when they make mistakes or when they're wrong and actually goes back and corrects those. They'll go and apologize to the person who they've wronged or they'll make plans to not do that again. Set systems up for themselves where they're not going to, where they're going to review that work before they give their opinion and rub somebody the wrong way in that. So you as a manager don't need to expect this person to be perfect the first time. They're going to make mistakes, they're going to struggle and they're going to do things that you wouldn't necessarily do. That's okay. But you, as the person training this new manager need to be able to help show them where they're making mistakes, guide them to correcting those mistakes. That leads right into number three. So you need to make sure that you are specifically setting aside time to spend with this new manager, talking about the active act of management. You're probably promoting this person to management because you personally don't have the time or the ability to manage that team. And you probably don't have a whole lot of time just in any given day. That's why this person is a manager, so that they can do the things you can't do. Which makes it really challenging to carve out time in your day to help them do things that you've already recognized you don't have the time to do. Regardless, I think it is an obligation for every manager of managers to find the time to actually help this manager succeed. So you need to be setting aside specific periodic time to sit down and to talk about what being a manager actually looks like to help walk them through the mistakes they've made to Talk about things that they're maybe not sure about, or things that they maybe don't even recognize that are issues yet. Setting aside that specific time to do that, as simple as it sounds and as challenging as it can be in practice, is one of the most important things you can do to help this new manager be successful. Lastly, that time that you're going to set aside to sit down with this manager is going to be a lot more useful if you actually have a specific point plan that you're going to adhere to when thinking about what to discuss during these meetings. Now, any manager is going to have things come up that they didn't necessarily anticipate. Part of being a manager is being able to juggle the stuff that comes up in any given day or given week and being able to react nimbly to those challenges regardless. We know as experienced managers that there are issues that are just going to come up regardless. They may come up in your first 30 days, they may come up, you know, a year from now, but you will have to deal with them at some point. It's things like hiring, things like employee discipline, things like helping coach somebody through their career. Whether or not you have to deal with it today, you will definitely have to deal with it at some point. And you, as the supporter of this new manager, need to help walk them through what it's going to take for them to actually do those things, get them ready for those events when they occur. So what I like to do to support my new managers is to set out a list of specific things from the day that they start that we're going to talk through. So in the first 30 days, I'll have three or four meetings with this new manager to talk about how do you take over a team successfully, how do you get to know your team and help walk them through the work that they're going to have to do maybe in the next 30 days. It's things that may not be as immediately necessary, but will definitely be necessary in the long term. So things like that setting a long term vision for your team, or hiring your next person, or thinking about career development for some of your more talented employees. So setting out that list of topics that you're going to talk about from the day that they start is really important to have and to share with the manager. So that way you know that you are doing everything you can to help them be prepared for when those issues come up. So again, as a recap, the four things that you as a manager need to do to support a new manager are 1 Recognize that new managers need a lot of help. 2 Be prepared to support them as they struggle. 3 Set aside time to spend that time with your manager and four create a plan and stick to it. I'd like to thank you for taking time out of your day to learn about how to best support new managers. If you'd like to learn more, you can visit my website at M I k I l taylor.com or you can purchase the Beginner's Guide to Managing, available at Amazon or any online bookstore of your choice. Now back to Omar.

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What a solid lesson filled with great insights by Michael Taylor. If you want to learn more on this topic, go ahead and check out Michael's website. That's m I k I l taylor.com and over at his website you can even order his book, the Beginner's Guide to Managing. When it comes to this topic, one of the things that we learned in our own company is as your manager grows, so does your training of that manager. They're going to have new challenges as the they go from, you know, being a manager for six months to a year to two years to five years. And they're gonna have to learn and decide what kind of manager they want to be. They're not gonna be a carbon copy of you. They're gonna have their own style. But what I found is most helpful is just ask the right questions for them to answer. For example, one time one of our managers had a conflict with one of the team members that they were managing and instead of me just telling them, hey, this is how you should have handled it. One of the best things that I've learned is just to be a sounding board and allow them to figure it out on their own. Ask questions like, how do you think that whole situation went down? What do you think was the cause of it? What are some things that you think you could do better or will do the next time around? How can you make your life easier and prevent this from happening again. And it's basically like coaching rather than telling them how to do it. One of the things I found is really helpful as well is just to let them know that you have their back, that, hey, whatever you do, whatever you decide, whatever decisions you make, I got your back. I trust your decision making abilities. That's why I hired you. That's why I have faith that you're going to do great in the future. Because they will make mistakes and you just have to have their back and let them know, hey, it's okay to take some risks and make some decisions and learn from them. Let's just try not to make the same mistakes over and over. They'll really value that. They'll feel like they're empowered, that they have autonomy and it's probably one of the reasons why they'll continue to work at being a manager. Try to remember your own experience when you started managing people. It's scary, it's intimidating, but at the same time it's exciting. So allow them to learn and allow them to have their own experience. Just support them and make sure that they know that you got their back. Guys, thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love it, you hear hit subscribe, hit follow whatever it says on your phone. Favorite podcast app that you like to use to listen to podcasts so you don't miss an episode. In tomorrow's episode, we talk about how to make real, meaningful connections at live events, at dinners, at networking parties, at office parties. Now that things are starting to open up post Pandemic, we're going to need to learn how to be social again. But even if you are social, even if you are an extrovert, I'm going to share with you some strategies that my co founder, Nicole and I use all the time. When we go to an event, when we know we're going to meet some people, when we're going to be networking, how do we actually make real relationships rather than just small talk? It's actually quite strategic and I can't wait to share with you in tomorrow's episode. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the privileges of being a business owner is being able to help not only your customers, but your team members. You help them grow, you help them learn, you help them become a better person, a better professional than they were yesterday. It's so incredible to see somebody that you hired as a new manager or promoted as a new manager, transform themselves over the course of a few years and really add value not only to your company, but their own lives. They feel significant in what they've done. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 LMBA show. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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