New Manager Challenges

Employers often promote strong individual performers to
supervisory roles with little instruction. But people who
excel among the rank-and-file don't automatically have the
skills or knowledge to manage well.

New managers who are forced to learn to be leaders through
trial-and-error find the transition difficult because they are ill-
prepared for all the routine things that managers do. Much of
training goes to help managers comply with workplace rules on
issues like sexual harassment or teach them financial basics
such as budgeting. Little training time is spent on "soft skills"
such as coaching, leading, disciplining, giving feedback and
resolving conflicts.

Whatever the field, one of the toughest issues for new managers
is supervising former peers. As a result, new managers struggle
to strike the right tone with former peers and tend to confuse
staffers with intermittent or conflicting feedback. The bottom line
is up to 40% of newly promoted or recruited leaders fail to move
up to the next level.

Leaders often fail for a few common reasons: due to unclear or
outsized expectations, a failure to build partnerships with key
stakeholders, a failure to learn the company, industry or the job
itself fast enough, a failure to determine the process for gaining
commitments from direct reports and a failure to recognize and
manage the impact of change on people.

Executive onboarding coaching of the newly recruited or
promoted manager can turnaround this high rate of failure.

Source: Managing by Erin White in The Wall Street Journal
November 21, 2005

_________________________________________
John G. Agno, certified executive & business coach
Signature, Inc., PO Box 2086, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
Telephone: 734.426.2000 (US Eastern Time Zone)
Email: mailto:info@CoachThee.com

The most critical knowledge is self-knowledge.
http://www.MentoringandCoaching.com