Challenges for First-Time Leaders

When you move from being an individual contributor to a manager, you must learn a wide range of new skills, including delegating, holding people accountable, developing direct reports, building a team, selecting people for positions, and so on. In terms of leadership, you must value the ability to get work done through others.

Rather than enumerate every value and skill that comes with this passage, let’s consider the challenges people face as they deal with these new values and skills.

Challenge 1: Losing an Identity

Most newly anointed leaders begin their new job with great enthusiasm and energy, excited about the chance to lead rather than follow. Almost immediately, however, many neophyte leaders experience a sense of dislocation. Those who have a professional affiliation—accountants, engineers, technical experts, and others—find that they’re being asked to give up or at least subordinate this identity. This is not easy to do, even with the intellectual awareness that it’s the right thing to do.

People tend to want to cling to the identity that has made them successful. The technical person, for instance, has been immersed in the world of software, hardware, and systems, always thinking of himself or herself as a computer expert or technology guru. As a manager, however, the primary responsibility is people problems, not software problems. As much as the technical person might grasp the rationale for this transition, the reality is a shock to the system. She has to forge a new identity as a manager, and that can be difficult because she must give up her professional identity in the process. She may respond to the prospect of this identity loss somewhere between two extremes—by micromanaging or, at the other extreme, completely abdicating responsibility. These reactions are a way of coping. When the manager looks over her direct reports’ shoulders or ignores them completely, she doesn’t have to take on a new managerial identity.

One of the most significant development experiences in my career was my first supervisory position, where I was responsible for developing, evaluation, selecting people—something I couldn’t get done sitting at my own desk. That to me was very significant in my own growth.

Bob Glynn, chairman, CEO, and president, PG&E Corporation

Challenge 2: Seeing Your Star Dim

The people who often have the most trouble with the predictable passage into leadership are the ones who were stars—the star salesperson, the tech genius, the brilliant numbers-cruncher. They were stars because of their individual contributions and, as managers and leaders, they can no longer rely exclusively on their individual talents. Their challenge is to become willing and able to help others become stars. This can irritate people who relished being in the spotlight and receiving credit directly. In a very real way, this passage challenges people about whether they want to be leaders. Do they want to give up a measure of personal glory in order to bring glory to the team?

Challenge 3: Balancing People and Tasks

This simple requirement of leadership can completely confuse new leaders. Sometimes new managers feel that leadership, in addition to being time consuming, requires the patience and wisdom of a Zen master to achieve the right balance between people and task.

In a managerial role, you need to focus on getting things done and motivating, developing, and communicating with people. In certain instances, getting things done may require you to push people very hard, to demand more than they believe they can deliver and ignore their needs for the moment. In other circumstances, you may have to allow your people room to fail and learn, sacrificing results for development, retention, or commitment. Because there’s no magic formula for achieving this balance, first-time leaders often find themselves in a quandary about whether tasks or people come first in a given situation.

Let’s look at how two executives we know dealt with these challenges in different ways.

The Rugged Individualist: Ron

Ron was a salesperson at a large pharmaceutical company who had done extremely well in his four years with the company. A former military officer, Ron was strong-willed, disciplined, independent-minded, and smart. He took to sales immediately, and his supervisor recognized his talent and gave him a great deal of autonomy. Ron spent most of his time in the field, calling on physicians and detailing products; he developed terrific relationships with doctors and hospitals that resulted in a tremendous number of sales for his division and personal rewards for himself.

Naturally, Ron wanted more than financial rewards for his work, and the company responded with a promotion to sales manager. From the moment Ron took the job, he hated it. He found himself bewildered when his salespeople didn’t deal with situations in the field as he had. He had no insights into how to coach his team or give them useful feedback, and he felt as if he were wasting his time and energy when he had to conduct performance reviews or have discussions with people about “their priorities” rather than the priorities he had identified for them to address. Ron also felt uncomfortable in his managerial role. Just about every day when he was in the office, he came up with reasons to get out into the field. He missed the interaction with physicians and the recognition he received from others when he made a big sale or was sought after for advice on medical issues. Being a strong individualist, Ron didn’t talk to anyone about his feelings. He never complained to his supervisor, and he convinced himself he should tough it out, figuring he’d grow into his new role, especially as so many around him believed that being an effective manager was the path to getting ahead.

He didn’t grow into his role, and a little more than a year after his promotion, Ron was recruited to another pharmaceutical company as a senior salesperson. Ron couldn’t face “going back” in his own company, and so he had to leave.

The Reformed Individualist: Denise

Like Ron, Denise was a star in Ron’s company who was also promoted into a managerial role. Denise was a physician who had joined the pharmaceutical company with the hope of balancing her personal life with her role as a doctor. She was assigned to a research team, and because she did very well in moving a compound into early phase trials, she was promoted to manager.

We met Denise a few years after this promotion. We had been called in to coach various executives at her company, and we were reviewing the results of 360-degree feedback with them. We were struck by how uniformly positive Denise’s feedback was.

All the members of her team noted that she was an excellent communicator and highly empathetic, and that she did a good job setting clear goals and objectives and holding people to them. When we discussed this feedback with Denise and told her how uniformly impressed we were with what we observed, she laughed and told us that we would not have been so impressed three years ago. She explained that her first 360-degree feedback results shocked her. Her people claimed that she was lacking in people skills and consumed by her focus on breakthrough research. When she was a researcher, she had worked long hours as a member of a research team, and as a new manager she expected her team to exhibit that same relentless drive on their projects. As a result, she did a poor job of meeting the “tasks versus people” challenge, communicated unreasonable expectations to her team, engendered frustration and even resistance among her direct reports, and was on her way to being terminated.

Fortunately, that initial 360-degree feedback alerted Denise that she wasn’t handling her first leadership position effectively. She had a good, development-oriented supervisor who talked with her about the problems she was experiencing and followed up by assigning Denise an external coach. The coach helped Denise uncover some of her assumptions about leadership, and Denise thought long and hard about whether she was willing to change her approach or if she was better suited to be a researcher. Ultimately, she decided that she could have the most impact as a leader and made a successful effort to learn and grow in her new role. She learned to consciously adjust her expectations and motivational style to the unique needs of each person who worked for her. She committed herself to being an outstanding coach by practicing listening. She didn’t lower her targets for her team, but she did become an excellent motivator of people.