Picture this: One minute you’re happily immersed in your own role at work, focused on honing your skills and improving your practical contribution to the team or organizational goals.
The next, you have an entire team of people to worry about too. You’re now responsible for their impact, their contribution, their problems and their destiny - as well as yours. All while managing your day job.
Most people don’t set out to be line managers. Most of us develop a strong skill set and expertise over time, apply it in an industry or field that interests us, and aim to give the best we can. But often, the only way to progress is to take a line management role.
Everyone says it’s natural progression, but is it? You’ve become great at your job and have a lot to offer the organization, so they’d like you to share that knowledge and skill with less experienced colleagues and help them perform at their best. How hard can it be?
Pretty hard, if curiosity, patience and empathy aren’t your strong points, or if you’re just not that great with people, or if you’re team is already disengaged as is so often the case. Moving from being solo contributor to line manager is not an easy transition.
The focus of promotions is often more about opportunities to be seen by senior management, to gain more exposure to bigger clients, secure more pay (maybe that one is first on the list!), enjoy better employee benefits or experience more collaboration with other departments. The idea of managing other people’s results and professional development is rarely our first thought, and we might lack the interpersonal skills needed.
A new manager might be an outstanding salesperson, engineer, marketer or finance guru. Their skills, expertise and perspective shines through. But the people-managing part of their career progression may fail if they feel overwhelmed by or under-equipped for new responsibilities. Fragile egos can take a bashing, especially under scrutiny by bosses observing the transition.
New managers need the right training to help them transition and be effective in their new roles, and they need it immediately.
Within weeks they can cause problems that are hard to squash. Worst case: half the team leaves because of the awkward new dynamic, and the remainers struggle to feel inspired, nurtured or supported by their new boss.
A promotion should be energising and inspiring, not filled with apprehension. Rather than letting new managers just sink or swim, or worry disproportionately about all of the above, empathetic organizations can commit to offering interpersonal skills training, mentoring and peer support. Empathetic leaders, HR teams and L&D teams can help new managers to:
A new manager’s instinct might be to plunge in quickly and make their mark with inspiring ideas, plans and decisions. But listening comes first, and part of that listening is to find out how people prefer to work. Right at the outset, new managers must be prepared to ask “what’s important to you and how do you prefer to work?”, and to act compassionately with the answers.
All of this reinforces the need for new managers to build other-awareness as well as self-awareness.
The Insights answer is to introduce the team to a very human framework and common language for understanding other people (and ourselves) better.
This common language can make our dealings with people feel less overwhelming. We do this at Insights using the language of color energies. This helps us understand our colleagues in terms of their dominant and less dominant color energies…
Teams often include a combination of stable, consistent, fact hungry team members and dynamic, changeable, ideas-friendly colleagues. Building on their (individual and team) Insights Discovery profiles and workshops, and their knowledge about which colleagues lead with which color energies, new managers can learn to adapt their style.
Using the language of color energies, we might summarize typical workplace personalities and preferences something like this:
Cool Blue energy: Pragmatic, analytical colleagues who often want more detail than others in how they give and receive information. It’s not that they need handholding, it’s that they’re driven by logic, order, accuracy and the ’why’ of decisions and plans. Without the security of the detail, they may not trust instructions or suggestions as easily as their contrasting types.
Adapt: Share bullet-point info before meetings. Allow them time to review facts and ask questions.
Fiery Red energy: In contrast, prefers brevity, directness, goal-talk, clear action plans and a focus on momentum and outcomes over process. Unlike Cool Blue, they prefer shorter meetings and may seem impatient if too much detail is covered.
Adapt: Give clear overviews, talk about vision, responsibilities, desired results and deadlines.
Earth Green energy: wants to know that all meetings and decisions - both the content itself and the way the content is delivered - are aligned with the organizational and individual values. This is about prioritising human connections and taking an egalitarian approach. They may appear stubborn if they don’t see this.
Adapt: Create space for consultation, provide human impact stories and don’t rush their response.
Sunshine Yellow energy: these more extroverted colleagues typically seek opportunities for collaboration and interactivity. They’re open to discussion and brainstorming before committing to one fixed, undynamic course of action.
Adapt: Keep your interactions less formal and allow the team to brainstorm ideas where possible
Without this foundation – the vital teamwork to uncover who values what and why – new managers risk creating a vacuum where they or their colleagues may be perceived on a bad day as somewhat nit-picking, abrupt, sensitive or unfocused. It might be hard to fathom why, to or know what to do about it.
So it follows that if a new line manager can understand their colleagues’ values and beliefs, even if they don’t agree with them, it can help them to communicate and solve challenges in a way that’s meaningful to their reports. It helps the people they’re managing feel validated, seen and heard, rather than feel judged or disrespected for the values they hold dear and feel unable to change.
We’re only human, but we can become more aware humans! All managers, even experienced ones, need proactive, human support from their employer to effectively manage others and get the best out of them. This is a deeply interpersonal, human challenge and unlike many typical workplace challenges, not one for AI.
That’s why self-awareness is so important. Without a developed awareness of how they and their colleagues prefer to operate and communicate, new managers run the risk of being misunderstood, feeling unsupported and losing heart.
But if they can understand contrasting preferences, look for important clues and equip themselves to get the best from different personality types, they’ll be a step closer to managing a motivated, high performing team.
*Stats from Gallup (2015) and SHRM (2020) respectively
Insights Discovery and its language of color energies exists to help everyone – new managers included - be more empathetic, effective and successful at work. Our flagship program, Insights Discovery, is the world's leading psychometric profile, trusted by the Fortune 100s to generate measurable ROI. Insights Discovery has already changed over 10M lives around the world and is available in 33 languages