If you have recently been promoted, congratulations! You have obviously worked hard to get where you are, and you deserve to be rewarded for it. However, although this was your end goal and the culmination of a lot of years of work, this is not the end of your journey. Now you have to recognise and adapt to a position and the next chapter of your journey.
This may be harder than it looks from the other side but, with this guide, you will learn how to survive your first year in management and beyond.
Build Relationships
You may find that your relationships with your old peers change now that you have been promoted. You are now ‘one of them’ rather than ‘one of us’ and although your friends will be pleased for you, they may now treat you differently. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as putting a professional distance between you will improve your working relationships, especially if you have to appraise or reprimand them. It can be tough but learn to build new relationships with old colleagues and be assured that the best friendships will survive the power shift. Concentrate on building relationships with your new peers among the management team and you will soon find that you have a new bunch of friends to chat to eat lunch with and bounce ideas off.
Find a Mentor
Finding a mentor among the management team can be invaluable to you. Look for someone who has a wealth of experience to share but has not become too jaded by their role. You don’t want their negativity to bring you down too. Don’t be afraid to ask lots of questions and learn from others. Observe the managers around you and see how they deal with issues. This will give you an insight into coping with common issues that will arise during your career.
Personal Development
You can take control of your personal development in much the same way you did before you got promoted. Read all you can on what makes a good manager. There are a lot of performance management tools that you can use to help make your job easier and to help you manage your subordinates, such as StaffCircle. As well as performance management tools, Staff Circle offers a wealth of support and helpful information, and some of the information you may have come across previously. It is likely that you have used a personal development plan or some goal-setting ideas to get you into management, and now you have to research how to support your employees on their career path too. Read all you can in the first year and try some of these tools and techniques for yourself.
Training Courses
If your company offers you management training courses, make sure you take advantage of them, even if they are not mandatory. You will be busy running your team day to day and you may not feel you can find the time to go, but the more time you can spend training in your first year, the more knowledge you will pick up. Training courses are also useful in that they give you the opportunity to network with your peers and ask any questions you might have of your course leaders. This can set you on the right career track for years to come.
Identify Your Successes
Everyone makes mistakes at work at some point, and this is even more likely to happen when you have just stepped up into a managerial role as you will be finding your way around unfamiliar territory. You can learn a lot from the things that have gone wrong, but once you have learned your lesson, move on from it. Dwelling on the past and beating yourself up about what you should have done differently will make you lose confidence and stop you from doing the job well in the future. Concentrate instead on the things that have gone right and celebrate your successes, even if it is just with a bubble bath or glass of wine when you get home. This will help you to concentrate on the positives and you will be able to become more confident at your job.
Don’t Neglect Your Life
It can be easy to neglect your life outside work when you are focusing on a new job, but this can lead you to feel stressed and burnt out very quickly. Don’t forget to eat healthily and get enough sleep every night. Keep your weekends and evenings as work-free as possible and remember that you have a social life and hobbies outside work too.
Follow this guide to survive your first year in management and beyond and you will find you can thrive and be happy in your new environment without fear of failure.
