Becoming A New Manager — A Parenting Experience

I was recently offered an opportunity to be a manager for a new project and a new team at my company. It was a refreshing challenge where I had to hire, train, and manage a team of freshers ( read: millennials ) right out of college and get them corporate ready while completing a project.

Eight months into the role, I figured being a manager is like being a parent

You recall what your manager ( read: parents) did right

If you are a new manager, at every crucial stage your instinct will kick in and you will ask yourself, sometimes subconsciously as well ‘how would my manager react in this scenario’, and more often than not, you will mirror your manager’s reaction.

Nurturing matters: Your manager shapes up how you would be as a manager

If you have or had a manager who was robotic with minimal empathy, you will tend to not let emotions come in your way as a manager. Fortunately, I had a great mentor and I prioritized empathy and tried being a person while being an employee and a manager.

If you have or had a great manager, managing your own team will come naturally to you. The key to focus on is having empathy while being goal-oriented.

You think about what you would want to do better ( in parenting )

Let’s be real, we are all humans. Humans who would want a little more than what they have. Always — a little more. You might have had a great manager — but there would still be something that you would want more.

This is actually a boon in disguise. While it might be easy for you to replicate all the good habits, great ideas, and priceless principles that you might have learned from your manager to be a great manager, the shortcomings of your manager will help you identify continuous areas of improvement — for yourself and your team.

Think about what could your manager have done to help you grow further, become better, or rise faster at your job. Was he lenient and didn’t push you enough? Was he hard and expected unrealistic results at times? Did he focus too little on ‘you’ and too much on ‘your work’?

The more you think this through, the better chances you have to grow beyond and enable your team to be successful.

You recall how you were as an individual contributor ( read: kid )

When you would have joined your first company as a fresher, were you able to understand all the feedback given to you? Did you do a great at 99% of your job and missed out on trivial 1% aspects such as taking notes on pen and paper ( as expected by your manager ) vs sticky notes on the laptop? Were you able to make the best kickass presentation but came in 10 minutes late for the meeting? Were you able to make a good content strategy but forgot to email on time?

Well, I did. And I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong for the better part of the year. I felt that my manager didn’t like me and I just could not figure out why.

I finally figured it out after I had one of my interns do the same. He was one of the best in the batch but would make small mistakes and then be ignorant about them. He would schedule a meeting and then forget. He would promise a deliverable and then be late. His work would be phenomenal and probably worth the time but hey, he wasn’t even in the top 20 and most likely would have been let go.

I decided to give him honest feedback and share my personal failures. He got nominated for an RnR award this quarter. :D

You can read the words and the silence — Use It

Having been on both sides of the table, you understand your own responsibilities as a leader in the company with business-critical goals and targets to meet and you also understand your responsibilities to ensure that your reportees grow as individuals and professionals.

What helps, is being fresh with the experience of both sides. You will be able to understand what your reportees want to say but are not able to put it into words. Based on their concerns, reaction, and body language, you would understand better because you were probably doing exactly the same a few months back.

Moreover, now that you are on the other side as a manager, you understand the company vision and team goal more thoroughly. But you also understand how you would like to be spoken to or how should your manager communicate to you. The key to communicating better is to try to position yourself in their shoes and think about how should your manger speak to you to communicate the same business goals.

Being a new manager is a great experience to understand yourself — how you are as an individual, as a mentor, as a person, as an employee but most importantly — how are you as a leader?

And while your manager’s parenting might have shaped up how you fare as a manager, I would just repeat what my manager said after assigning this role to me:

Yes, the company has a brand and will continue to have one. And while your merit as a manager might make a positive or negative impact on the company’s brand — what’s most important is YOUR OWN BRAND.

You ingrain your professional DNA in every reportee, every mentee, and every temporary intern. And it’s up to you to justify your own brand and leave a positive impact.