Challenging times on the frontline – how to help your first-time managers thrive

When your employees step into their first management role it’s often the biggest transition of their career. Can they quickly morph from an individual contributor into a leader? If not, there’s pain for the new manager, their team, your customers and the organisation as a whole. Here’s how to set your first-time managers up for success.

With 25% of employees seeing career progression as important for work success (and 34% prepared to change employers without it), career progression has become a useful carrot in talent retention. What’s more, with the fierce competition for talent, organisations are realising the need to prioritise internal mobility to build their leadership pipeline.

The first step in doing this is to recognise your internal talent and promote promising candidates into their first management role.

Becoming a manager for the first time is the biggest professional transition your employees will have made to date, but because it’s so commonplace the significance of this shift is often overlooked.

Transitioning into a leader, manager or supervisor role requires a significant mindset change and often new skills. If it doesn’t go well, there can be serious consequences for the individual and the organisation.

Failure to gain momentum in those first few months can leave employees overwhelmed and feeling stuck. In contrast, an effective transition sets the manager and their team up for long-term success.

First-time managers face many challenges

First-time managers are often promoted because of their technical expertise and not because of their leadership capability. However, the skills required for an individual contributor are starkly different to those required for success as a manager: instead of relying on their own expertise, these new managers need to set the agenda for a team. Too often, they’re unprepared. Organisations are quite simply overlooking leadership development for this population of leaders. Often the budget is spent on senior and executive level leader groups.

What are some of the other risk factors that should be considered when it comes to other challenges and traps that new managers fall into?

Stress and burnout

First time managers can sometimes focus on the wrong things, setting off a negative cycle that’s hard to escape.

There’s an infinite number of tasks that a new manager can do, yet only a few tasks are vital. If they’re accustomed to being praised for generating a high level of output as an individual contributor, then they’ll be tempted to double down on their own work.

Being busy is an addiction that helps us to feel successful and important. The downside is that busyness can distract us from asking if what we’re doing is adding value to the organisation, or even for ourselves.

New managers can easily get caught in a busyness, stress and burnout trap – mentally locking up when they get pulled from task to task faster than they can refocus. And if the new manager doesn’t get the most important things right to start with, it can make their role more difficult as time goes on.

Stress and burnout is a too common problem. According to our Resetting Normal research, a worrying 54% of Gen Z and Millennial leaders suffered from burnout in the 12 months to June 2021.

And the leaders of these younger managers feel unequipped to support them. More than half of all managers find it hard to identify when staff may be struggling with mental wellbeing (53%) or overwork and burnout (51%). Exacerbating this issue, new managers often think that as the boss they should have all the answers, and frequently fail to ask others for help.

Isolation

To be effective, a new leader needs to tap into informal information sources by engaging with their team, peers and customers. Yet the compounding impact of ‘busyness’ and the physical isolation of hybrid work can make it hard for the new manager to establish these connections. What’s more, new managers may also inadvertently discourage their team from sharing information – either because they haven’t built trust, or their team fears the new manager could react badly to bad news.

If not corrected, isolation can be an insidious issue leading to uninformed decision making, a loss of credibility and further isolation. It’s key for new managers to build connections, trust and belonging – fostering a psychologically safe team environment where they’re open to their team’s feedback and team members feel safe enough to speak up.

Micromanagement

New managers can sometimes be controlling because they’re used to knowing the detail of their own work. So, when they step up into a management role, they’re tempted to micromanage their teams because understanding every detail makes them feel comfortable.

Another risk is that the new manager may decide their way of working is the only way – and then be unable to adjust or admit they were wrong. Either way, the result is a disempowered and disengaged team.

This can have a direct impact on business performance. Over the past decade, studies have repeatedly found businesses which rank within the top quartile for employee engagement outperform their competitors.

Failure to build a positive team culture

New managers can send negative messages through their words and actions without realising it. A frontline supervisor becomes a true leader once their teams trust them and actively want to follow their direction.

Most (74%) team members expect their managers to promote and nurture strong team morale and culture. Yet only 37% of non-managers say their manager is encouraging a good working culture.

Significantly, 43% of employees are dissatisfied with their managers. By some estimates, 68% of non-managers don’t get the regular guidance and check ins that they expect from their manager, and 64% fail to get the resources, budget or technology they need.

Making plans to leave

New managers get promoted because the organisation sees their potential, yet too often this potential is unrealised because they stumble at the early hurdles and struggle to catch up again.

Once trapped in a cycle of burnout, often the easiest path presented to these new managers is to leave. A sizeable 35% of staff are already making plans to change jobs due to burnout and a desire for better work/life balance.

Worryingly, 17% of staff plan to change jobs to get away from their manager. Younger people are the hardest to retain. Millennials (60%) and Gen Z (58%) feel that they have the power and option to choose where they work.

9 traits of a successful frontline manager

When stepping up into a management role, expectations upon that individual are high - they have been successfully promoted and are excited to get started, but what will make them successful and what makes this potentially the biggest transition of their career? To be successful a new leader must:

1. Shift focus from managing self to managing others – from getting results through their own work to getting results through others.
2. Develop leadership proficiency rather than technical proficiency.
3. Motivate, enable and develop others.
4. Expand their sphere of influence to others in the organisation who can help the team get results.
5. Establish credibility, build a culture of trust and share responsibility.
6. Resolve conflicts constructively.
7. Exemplify and role model the organisation’s values.
8. Empower staff to take initiative.
9.  Ask others for help.

A small investment can have a big impact

So why does this matter? According to Boston Consulting Group (BCG), these frontline managers collectively oversee as much as 80% of an organisation’s employees.

Frontline managers are therefore among the chief drivers of improved employee engagement and customer satisfaction, and play a crucial role in the success of a business. Despite this, they receive a relatively small percentage of a company’s leadership development initiatives.

Without adequate support, these new leaders often find themselves bailing out their teams when things go awry by doing the work for them. This can split their focus away from their administrative responsibilities and prevent their charges from learning how to do their jobs properly.

The solution to these problems is often very simple: investing in new manager development.

Surprisingly, few organisations invest in accelerating the development of their new frontline managers, instead leaving them to sink or swim. BCG’s Research found frontline managers typically receive only 20% to 30% of their organisation’s leadership development initiatives.

Over time, flatter reporting lines and wider spans of control have shrunk the amount of time that senior leaders can devote to developing each of their first-time managers. This means the HR function must take greater responsibility for ensuring new line managers get the leadership skills they need to succeed.

HR functions are already adept at helping their organisations invest in leadership development. Too often though, this investment is concentrated on the organisation’s senior executives. First time managers are a forgotten population – but have a critical need for skill development.

Our recent Global Workforce research found developing leadership skills is important to 68% of lower-level managers yet remarkably, only 22% have done or are doing a course in leadership skills. Younger generations place an even higher value on leadership skill development (Gen Z at 86% and Millennials at 84%).

Imagine how effective these new managers could be – and how many would choose to stay with an organisation - if their transition into leadership was accelerated? What if they got the skills training and support they need rather than fumbling their own way through?

The bottom-line impact of even a 10% improvement in new manager effectiveness would be considerable. An organisation could achieve more sooner, better retain managers and their teams, delight customers and foster a talent pipeline of skilled workers.

5 key first-time management skills to invest in

1. How to prioritise and manage time.
2. How to delegate.
3. How to facilitate team decision making.
4. How to influence others.
5. How to give feedback.

Learn More

Leadership success hinges on the ability to navigate the adaptive world we live in today, preparing for multiple transitions and reinventions.

Help your leaders and managers embrace change, and develop competencies and behaviours that will boost individual, team and organisational performance.

Please contact us for more insights or to discuss how we can help you support your leaders.

Sources used:

• Global Workforce of the Future, 2022
• M Smith, Harvard trained psychologist reveals 3 signs your addicted to stress, CNBC, 7 May 2023, accessed 31 May 2023.
• M Watkins, The First 90 Days, Harvard Business School Press, (1st ed) 2003.
• Adecco, Resetting Normal: Defining The New Era of Work, 2021.
• J Wiles, ‘What is employee engagement’, Gartner HR, 15 October 2019, accessed 9 June
• V Bhalla et al, ‘How Frontline Leaders Can Deliver Breakout Performance’, Boston Consulting Group, 21 November 2016, accessed 9 June 2023