The Most Critical Conversation to Have With Your New Managers

The most critical conversations to have with your new managers

The crucial conversation that will get your new managers off to the right start. 

Woo hoo! You just promoted your top sales exec into the manager of the regional sales team. This should be a cakewalk right? She’s self-motivated, disciplined and organized. She’s beaten her quarterly goals for 5 quarters straight, and she knows the product inside and out.That’s why you promoted her in the first place. Now she just has to show everyone else how to sell as well as she does, and you’ll be cruising your way to those aggressive revenue goals and that big annual bonus.

If only it were that easy…

In some instances, this might work out great. In others, without the proper context and preparation, this could spectacularly fail. I know, because I’ve experienced both in my career. 🙂

The bottom line is that managing and running a team is fundamentally a different skillset and mindset than being a team’s top contributor – whether we’re talking about sales or engineering. The good news is that it is a learnable skill. The bad news is that most executives don’t take the time to properly teach someone how to successfully transition from an individual contributor to a manager.  This doesn’t mean you have to invest hours and hours of your time. A few crucial, initial conversations can be a great way to setup an ongoing dialogue that will give your newly promoted managers the best chance for success.

One of the most important things to do early on is to align expectations. A Gallup poll showed that more than 50% of people at work don’t have a clear understanding of what’s expected of them. This is an important early conversation that can set your new manager up for success and open the door for open communication as they ramp up in their new role.

EXPECTATIONS

The first and most important conversation you can have with your new team manager is one around expectations.  If both of you can come out of your conversation with a clear, mutual understanding around the following questions, you’ll have laid down a critical foundation that can serve as a guide they can return to again and again.

  1. What are your expectations of them?
  2. What are their expectations of themselves?
  3. What expectations should they have of their team and direct reports?

#1: What are your expectations of them? 

This doesn’t mean that you lay  out all the things you expect them to do. That’s for them to figure out. In fact, it’s better if they come up with the goals and plan for what they should be doing – they’ll feel more ownership and commitment to it because they created it. But it’s important to give them guidance in the following areas:

  • Share any executive or company wide goals that their team feeds into. For a sales team, this means knowing the topline number and potentially a range you think they need to hit. If you want to purposely keep it vague to “see what they come up with”, at least give them a sense of what a max/min might look like. For a product team, this might be the broader product roadmap and the area that you want them to own. It helps them to see the bigger picture and understand how it all fits together.
  • Share any expectations you have around communication, collaboration and reporting. Basically, how do you want to work with them? Keep you cc’ed on everything? Or only the large clients? Do you want them to try to solve problems on their own first? Come to you with buttoned up plans? Or do you like diving into the brainstorming process with them? Do you want them to email you a weekly progress report? Or are monthly in person check-ins enough? Some of these processes might be in place already – but some might change, b/c they are now overseeing a team. Be sure to communicate where you may have different expectations than before.
  • And finally, and maybe most importantly, its important to recognize that given all of the above, this is a new job for this person. One that is particularly hard to “learn” other than just jumping into it. If you can share that in spite of all your expectations, that you understand that this will be a learning process, it will pay dividends in helping them feel more comfortable with the “unknown” and potentially coming to you with feedback/advice BEFORE a disaster. 🙂

#2: What are their expectations of themselves?

This isn’t some weird trick question. Oftentimes new managers fail b/c they set extraordinarily high expectations on themselves and what they think they “should” be doing as a manager. Check out this article on common new manager worries. If you’re promoting A+ talent to management they are usually constantly pushing themselves to grow and learn and generally “be better”. This is awesome, but can sometimes backfire when it comes to management b/c of the inevitable and often visible times that they screw up.

I remember the first few months I was promoted into leading a team. Those were some of the most stressful times in my career, because I kept carrying around this notion that I should know what to do. And have all the answers. And get everything done. It took me awhile (and I’m still learning) that we can’t do it all. And that we’ll make mistakes. I remember one day, my boss came to me and said, “You look stressed.” I think I actually told him – “Well, we have so much to do!” I hadn’t realized that it was so obvious, but also couldn’t understand how he could NOT be stressed. He looked at me and said, “We do. But it will always be like this. It doesn’t help your team to see you completely stressed out.” We went on to have a great conversation about it.

What helped me was understanding that my boss was stressed too. It also helped that he shared that he knew we would never be able to get to everything. Just knowing that he didn’t expect it made me question why I would expect that of myself. I started to see where some of my expectations were unrealistic, or potentially too aggressive for what I could reasonably achieve without losing my mind. Knowing that I could actually share those thoughts with him and that he understood that we would need to make trade-offs was eye-opening.

It probably would have helped if we had talked about it earlier. 🙂 But better late than never. The big breakthrough this question can trigger is a discussion about how the expectations they set for themselves may not necessarily be your expectations for them. And that in some cases, they may be harder on themselves than needed.

#3: What expectations should they have of their team and direct reports?

This can range from – how should they think about setting goals for their teams, and how should they hold them accountable to those goals? How they should communicate their expectations to their teams? And how do the overall department and team’s goals get trickled down into each individual? This conversation isn’t about trying to nail down everyone’s OKR’s.  It’s about sharing your thoughts on how they could approach managing and leading their teams in a way that aligns with your expectations.  General guideposts and guardrails can work well here, as you want them to also really start to develop their own style as a leader of these teams. And if they need more help, check out our posts for common new manager mistakes and how to survive the first few months as a new manager.

And there you have it. If you’re efficient, you can even tackle this in your first 1:1.  An hour here, many hours saved later. 🙂

Subscribe to Our
Newsletter

Stay up to date with new releases, features, how-tos, leadership tips, and more. (Don’t worry, we won’t flood your inbox or share your address.)
Subscribe
Related Articles
REQUEST A DEMO

We Develop The World's Most Impactful Leaders

Sounding Board offers virtual and scalable enterprise learning solutions that are flexible enough to adapt to rapidly changing work environments. Powered by behavioral science and core leadership capabilities, our proven coaching methodology drives measurable business impact.

Niall MacGearailt

SVP of Finance
Niall MacGearailt leads Sounding Board’s finance division as the SVP of Finance and Operations. Niall earned a solid track record of improving P&L and operational expense management for leading companies such as Whirlpool, Logitech, Avaya and most recently Soraa, where he prepared the business for acquisition by leading hi-tech lighting company, Ecosense. In his role, he is responsible for building and leading the finance & relevant operations functions for the company.

Ron Buell

VP of Engineering
Ron Buell is the VP of Engineering at Sounding Board and an accomplished software professional with extensive experience in leadership, software engineering, project management, and product management. Ron has led the development of highly scalable systems and applications across a variety of technologies for companies including OpenFeint (acquired by GREE), Rdio (acquired by Pandora), Lyris Technologies, and Lotus/IBM Software Group. In his role at Sounding Board, Buell is responsible for all engineering efforts in developing, deploying, and maintaining the enterprise software platform and team for the company.

Tommy Perkins

SVP OF SALES, PARTNERSHIP & CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Tommy is at his best helping clients think through complex challenges in order to create a positive impact on their organizations. He thrives when interacting with others whether helping his team succeed or working with clients to build long-term partnerships. He has extensive experience consulting with organizations on driving their employee experience, guiding organizations through change, and working to ensure organizations are moving the needle when it comes to their results.

Most recently, Tommy was a Client Services Leader overseeing some of GP’s most prized accounts on a global level. His responsibilities included overall client growth strategy, retention, and satisfaction. He represented all of GP Strategies’ major business lines including leadership, coaching, and engagement, digital transformation, outsourced services, and technology implementation solutions.

Before GP Strategies, Tommy spent several years with TTEC Digital (formerly rogenSI) where he led the sales team,  eventually becoming the regional Learning & Performance practice leader for North America. While managing the P&L and sales team he also led the largest global relationship for the firm (Deloitte Globally). During his time at TTEC, he focused on delivering blended learning solutions that incorporate technology and hands-on training. Before TTEC Digital, he spent several years dedicated to strength-based leadership disrupting the business landscape regarding performance management and employee engagement with thought leader Marcus Buckingham at The Marcus Buckingham Company / TMBC (now ADP).

Tommy has had the privilege of working with some of the most well-known global brands in professional services, retail, technology, and healthcare including Deloitte, Facebook, Microsoft, Bank of America, Novartis, Gap Inc., lululemon, and Intel. Several projects he led for Deloitte were Global GNPS, New Partner Pivot, NextGen Partner Program Deloitte China, Present to Win, the RPM project on performance management, and Unconscious Bias.

Tommy holds a BS in Health Sciences from Texas A&M University, and an MBA from Universidad del CEMA.

Drive hiring, retention, engagement, and DEI initiatives with Sounding Board’s leadership coaching solution

Sounding Board is the first leadership development platform that combines technology to scale with world-class coaches – empowering companies to solve urgent people-problems and gain a long-term talent advantage.

Join our coaching team

Our expert coaches combine top notch coaching, business acumen and organizational savvy to truly become your leadership “Sounding Board”. Sounding Board coaches are all industry certified and strongly vetted going through a 3 step qualification process and receiving ongoing supervision and development.

Lori Mazan

Co-Founder & CCO Sounding Board, Inc.
Lori Mazan is the Co-Founder and Chief Coaching Officer of Sounding Board, the preeminent global leadership development enterprise platform changing the face of leadership development through innovative technology for leaders at all levels of an organization. Lori is a seasoned executive coach who has guided hundreds of corporate executives through 1:1 coaching focused on business outcomes and developing critical leadership skills. Client companies advanced by Lori’s expertise include Fortune titans such as Chevron and Sprint as well as high growth and public companies like Intellikine, and Tapjoy, plus 10XGenomics, which became a public company in 2019 while top executives worked with Lori and the Sounding Board team.
Lori has spent the last 25 years coaching C-Suite executives to leadership excellence. Many of those public and private company CEO’s expressed that they would have liked this caliber of coaching earlier in their careers. Inspired by these experiences, Lori joined with Christine to launch Sounding Board as a feedback-driven, cloud-based leadership coaching platform that could maintain best-in-class leadership coaching while lowering costs to make it affordable and scalable for leaders at every level of their careers.
Before founding Sounding Board, Lori received her Masters’ in Adult Educational Psychology/Counseling from the University of San Francisco and a Bachelors’ in Psychology from the University of Virginia. Lori is an educator and has spent over 10 years as a professor of social psychology and group dynamics while acting as the interim Dean of Students at Holy Names University, She is certified by the industry’s gold standard, the Coaches Training Institute, and is a founding member of the Genentech Preferred Network of Coaches. Sounding Board is one of <3% of sole female founded startups receiving venture funding. In 2019 Sounding Board was selected as 1 of 7 startups (out of 100+ applicants) as part of SAP’s HR tech cohort, a group that represents the rising stars of the next-gen HR ecosystem.

Christine Tao

Co-Founder & CEO Sounding Board, Inc.
Christine Tao is the co-founder & CEO at Sounding Board, a Silicon Valley startup redefining how organizations are developing their leaders. Her extraordinarily rapid career growth to executive management in the media, mobile and tech sectors of Silicon Valley became her inspiration for founding Sounding Board. As she began to manage larger teams and be responsible for growing revenues, it became clear that she needed a “sounding board” to coach her on the development of her leadership skills. That’s where her Sounding Board co-founder, Lori Mazan came on the scene. A seasoned executive coach focused on leadership development, Lori coached Christine on real-world leadership skills that had a direct impact on business outcomes. Based on her positive and impactful experience with leadership development, Christine was driven to make leadership development coaching accessible to people at all levels of the organization.
Christine advises several startups, is a budding angel investor and is also a Tory Burch Foundation Fellow, a foundation dedicated to investing in the success and sustainability of women entrepreneurs.
Prior to co-founding Sounding Board, Christine was a Senior Vice President of Developer Relations at Tapjoy, a venture-backed, leading mobile advertising & publishing network. She led the growth of Tapjoy’s publisher advertising business from 0 to over $100 million in revenues in less than 3 years. Prior to that she led e-commerce partnerships and strategy at YouTube. Christine holds an MBA in Marketing & Operations from Wharton and a BA in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.