by Elyse | Sep 4 | Leadership, New Managers
Becoming a new leader is an exciting and challenging journey. You are not only responsible for yourself but also for the team you lead. One of the most crucial skills you will need to develop is the ability to set effective goals and prioritize tasks. Mastering goal setting as a new leader will not only help you stay focused but will also lead to meaningful results, boosting your confidence as a new leader.
Goal Setting as a New Leader
Goal setting is a critical skill for new leaders because it provides a clear roadmap for success.
As a new leader, you are navigating uncharted territory, and the expectations from both yourself and your team are high.
Resources:
Learning how to set effective goals will help you clarify your vision, focus your efforts, and use your time and resources efficiently.
It also enables you to communicate your expectations clearly to your team, aligning their efforts towards a common objective.
Additionally, setting and achieving goals boosts your confidence and credibility as a leader, helping you gain the trust and respect of your team.
Ultimately, mastering the art of goal setting will empower you to lead with purpose, drive, and direction, increasing the likelihood of success for both yourself and your team.
SMART Goals
Goal setting is a fundamental part of leadership, but not all goals are created equal. To set yourself and your team up for success, it’s essential to set SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
- Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve. Avoid vague goals like “increase sales” and instead aim for “increase sales by 10% in the next quarter.”
- Measurable: Make sure your goal can be measured. This way, you can track your progress and know when you have achieved your goal.
- Achievable: Your goal should be challenging but attainable. If it’s too easy, it won’t motivate you or your team. If it’s too hard, it can lead to frustration and demotivation.
- Relevant: Your goal should be relevant to your overall vision and mission. It should contribute to the bigger picture and align with your values and long-term objectives.
- Time-bound: Set a deadline for your goal. This creates a sense of urgency and helps you stay on track.
When Not to Use SMART Goals
While SMART goals are useful, they are not always the best approach.
For example, they may not be suitable for long-term, visionary goals that are not easily measurable or time-bound.
Similarly, if you are working on a creative project or innovation, setting too specific and time-bound goals could stifle creativity and innovation.
In such cases, it might be more appropriate to set broader, more flexible goals that allow room for exploration and innovation.
Prioritization is Key for Goal Setting for New Leaders
Once you have set your SMART goals, the next step is to prioritize them.
As a new leader, you will likely have multiple goals and tasks to manage. It’s essential to prioritize them to stay focused and organized.
Start by listing all your goals and tasks. Then, categorize them based on their importance and urgency.
A helpful tool for this is the Eisenhower Box, which divides tasks into four categories: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important.
Focus on the tasks that are both urgent and important first, followed by the ones that are important but not urgent.
Resources:
- 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free guide)
- What Makes a Good Manager (blog post)
- Five Habits of Successful Career-Driven Women (blog post)
- How to Plan Your Next Quarter (blog post)
Preparing for Obstacles
No matter how well you plan, you will inevitably face obstacles along the way.
It’s crucial to anticipate potential challenges and develop strategies to overcome them.
Start by identifying possible roadblocks that could arise, both internally and externally.
Then, create a plan to address them.
This could involve developing alternative strategies, seeking additional resources, or getting support from your team or other stakeholders.
Remember, obstacles are a natural part of any journey. The key to overcoming them is to stay positive, be flexible, and remain committed to your goals.
Conclusion
As a new leader, setting effective goals and prioritizing tasks is crucial for your success. SMART goals are a great tool to help you stay focused and organized, but remember that they are not always the best approach for every situation. Be flexible and adjust your goal-setting approach as needed. Finally, don’t forget to anticipate potential obstacles and develop strategies to overcome them. With a clear vision, a solid plan, and a positive attitude, you can achieve meaningful results and boost your confidence as a new leader.
by Elyse | Mar 2 | Management, New Managers
What makes a good manager? People who become managers because they enjoy working with people want to know the answer to the question: how do I become a good manager?
What does it entail? What should I be doing? How should I be doing things?
Being a manager can be very fulfilling as a career path, but it can feel like a lot to learn and a little guidance when starting.
There are actions, habits, and behaviors that make good managers. And these things are learnable because a lot of them are skills.
So, what makes a good manager?
As the author states in the introduction of the book, The First Time Manager, “The advice in this book centers around two overarching messages: Be thoughtful in your actions and always conduct yourself with class.”
After all, management is dealing with people, so the most critical aspect of being a good manager is to care about the people you are managing.
“Management is about controlling, and leadership is about inspiring.”
-The First-Time Manager
Management is directive and starts as very involved in managing projects and ensuring that projects progress. The goal is to eventually get to a point where you become a leader in your management role.
For more, see Management vs. Leadership.
Since management focuses on people, it requires a very different skill set than those needed as individual contributors. Being a good manager means being good at your job and recognizing when someone else is good.
It can be a standard trap for managers to overfocus on the direct reports working in your previous domain to the detriment of the other functions you are managing now.
You must be able to recognize success in those that you manage.
Focus on people.
People want to feel that you care. And you can show them.
By listening to them and their ideas.
By helping them develop their careers and work on projects, they want and are engaged with.
By inspiring them to do their best work.
By being honest with them.
By being clear in your communication with them
By supporting them.
By not judging them.
People want to feel supported, heard, and cared for.
Emotional Intelligence
Another skill crucial for good managers is emotional intelligence.
Good managers are emotionally intelligent. According to the book Primal Leadership, emotional intelligence can be improved. The book also posits that emotional intelligence is the number one factor in determining if someone will be a successful leader.
The book classifies four domains of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
Within each of these domains, there are specific skills. And because they are skills, they are learnable if you want to learn them.
Improving your emotional intelligence skills is one the most impactful things you can do as a manager since those will affect everything you do in your organization.
A Final Note
As a manager, you have a lot of influence over the people who report to you. It is something that should not be forgotten, and it is something that should be handled with care.
People want to know that you care, and they want to see that you are competent. You can demonstrate these things with emotional intelligence: communicating with them, having good relationships throughout the organization, making sound decisions and listening to people, and being fair.
“As a manager, think of class as ‘style and elegance in one’s behavior.'” –The First-Time Manager.
by Elyse | Nov 3 | New Managers
Learn the best time management tips for new managers so that you can easily transition, be an effective manager, and feel confident in your new role.
1. Take a moment to celebrate!
This is an underrated time management tip for new managers but one of the most enjoyable.
You have worked hard to reach this point in your career and finally step into a management role. Make sure you take a moment to celebrate and recognize yourself for what you have accomplished.
It is important to celebrate your accomplishments and make sure you are taking time for yourself. You are about to undertake many new responsibilities and tasks that will pull you in many directions, so taking this time for yourself is crucial to your self-care.
Celebrating yourself and your accomplishments also signals to your brain that you are important and matter. These messages will become more and more critical as you become responsible for more and more people.
2. Set aside time to learn
It may feel like you have too much to do and too much on your to-do list to set aside time to learn, but learning how to be an effective manager is a crucial skill.
The influx of your workload is a lot to handle when you are a new manager. It feels like there is too much to do, not enough time, and you don’t even know what you are supposed to do in the first place.
It can be overwhelming, stressful, and frustrating, especially if you are navigating your new role alone and without the help of your manager or a mentor.
This is why learning about management and setting time aside to learn about being a good manager is vital. You do not need to set aside hours daily to do this learning.
Even if you set aside just fifteen minutes a day for four days a week, that is an hour a week that you spend learning. You can learn a lot in an hour!
There are many different ways to learn about management. You can read management books, listen to podcasts that cover management topics, and learn through mentorship or executive coaching.
3. Plan now to save time later
It can feel like there is not enough time to plan your day or schedule, but that type of thinking leads to feeling rushed and stressed when you are working.
Planning your day, projects, and goals for the next quarter and year will save you so much time later.
As a manager, you need to be forward-thinking and think of not only your work but your team’s work as well and how your team’s work fits into your organization at large. This requires effective planning, especially if planning is not one of your strong suits.
Being a manager means planning becomes more important than ever before, and not planning is a mistake new managers often make.
New managers need to think about the vision they have for their team. They need to get clear on their team’s goals and the ongoing projects and plan for how future projects will fit in.
Planning upfront lets, you think through priorities, strategies, and obstacles and confront them before they happen instead of in the middle of a project.
Planning is one of the best time management tips for new managers.
The higher you rise in an organization, the more important planning becomes.
4. Focus on results instead of being busy
Being busy is widespread, and it seems like everyone is always busy. But being busy does not necessarily produce results.
When you plan, start to plan the results you are going to create instead of the activities you will do.
For example, a result would be:
- write and submit Sarah’s review
- schedule a meeting with human resources
- submit 50 lines of code to project
These results scheduled as activities instead would look like this:
- work on writing my team’s reviews
- talking about how you need to schedule that meeting with human resources
- working on your code
When you schedule results on your calendar, you have a clear outcome that you are going to accomplish. This helps keep you focused on the results that you want to produce instead of feeling productive but being busy not moving projects forward. You become much more efficient at work which is important because as a new manager you will have a lot more work on your plate so learning how to manage your time in a way that works for you will help lessen the stress that you feel.
If you want to learn more about how to change how you are thinking and planning, you can download my free guide, 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work.
5. Learn how to get work done through other people
This is the biggest shift for new managers to make when it comes to getting work done. You are no longer the one who is doing all the work. Instead, you must learn how to work through others.
This can often be a hard shift to make, especially since you probably got promoted to manager because you are a skilled and efficient worker. It seems like it would be easier for you to just step in and fix the problem or do other’s work for them because you are faster, you know how to do it better, etc.
As a new manager, you must learn to work through others.
While this doesn’t sound hard as a task, it can be a lot harder to let go than people initially realize. It sounds very easy to work through other people but the reality is much harder.
This is an emotional process and it can take a lot of inner work to become the person who can let go of control and grow into someone who lets people do things in their own way. This is why coaching can be so valuable at this time in your career, you have someone who is there to listen to you, validate you and work through the difficult emotions that these new situations may bring up.
A Final Note
These are five time management tips for new managers. Implementing these strategies as soon as you become a new manager will help your transition so much.
