Leadership Development For New Managers
Leadership Development For New Managers
Leadership Development for New Managers
You Promoted Them Because They Were Good at Their Job. Now Help Them Become a Leader.
Most new managers aren’t promoted because they’re good at managing people.
They’re promoted because they’re good at something else.
They may be your strongest technical specialist, an experienced professional, a reliable employee or someone who consistently delivers results.
Then one day their job changes.
Instead of simply being responsible for their own performance, they’re responsible for other people’s performance as well.
And that’s an entirely different skill.
The Australasian Leadership Institute works with organisations throughout New Zealand to help new and emerging managers make the transition from doing the work to leading the people who do it.
Our leadership development is practical, tailored to your organisation and focused on the situations new managers actually encounter.
Promotion Doesn’t Automatically Create a Leader
One of the most difficult transitions in someone’s career is the move into management.
Yesterday they were part of the team.
Today they’re responsible for leading it.
They may now have to delegate work they previously did themselves, give feedback to former peers, address poor performance, motivate different personalities and make decisions that won’t always make everybody happy.
At the same time, they are often still expected to maintain some of their previous technical responsibilities.
It’s hardly surprising that new managers can struggle.
The problem usually isn’t a lack of potential.
They’ve simply been given a new job requiring skills they haven’t yet had the opportunity to develop.
Does This Sound Familiar?
Perhaps you’ve promoted technically excellent people into management roles but their teams aren’t developing as expected.
Your new managers are still doing too much themselves rather than delegating.
They avoid difficult conversations because they don’t want to damage relationships.
They struggle to hold people accountable.
They aren’t sure how to manage people who were previously their peers.
They believe treating everyone fairly means treating everyone exactly the same.
They provide solutions instead of developing their people to find their own.
They struggle to motivate employees who don’t think or work the way they do.
They wait too long before addressing poor performance.
Or perhaps they are working incredibly hard but haven’t yet understood that being a successful manager isn’t about personally doing more work.
These are common challenges.
And they’re teachable.
The Biggest Change: From Doing to Leading
New managers often arrive in leadership with a history of being rewarded for getting things done.
There’s a problem with that.
The instinct that helped them become successful can make management more difficult.
When an employee struggles, the fastest solution may appear to be doing the work themselves.
When something important needs completing, they take responsibility for it.
When someone asks a question, they provide the answer.
Individually, these decisions can seem perfectly reasonable.
Collectively, however, they can create a manager who is overloaded and a team that becomes increasingly dependent on them.
The fundamental transition into management is understanding that your success is no longer measured solely by what you accomplish.
Your success increasingly depends on what you enable other people to accomplish.
That’s one of the most important mindset changes we help new managers make.
Leadership Development Designed Around Your Managers
We don’t believe organisations should have to fit their people into an off-the-shelf leadership course.
Before delivering development, we talk with you.
What are your new managers struggling with?
What behaviours are you seeing?
What does good leadership look like in your organisation?
Where are managers currently getting stuck?
And most importantly:
What would you like them to do differently?
We then tailor the development around those needs.
The objective isn’t to teach leadership theory for the sake of theory.
It’s to give managers practical ways of approaching the situations they’re likely to face when they return to work.
What New Managers Need to Learn
The exact content can be tailored to your organisation, but there are several areas that consistently matter when someone moves into leadership.
Understanding the Role of a Leader
New managers need to understand that leadership isn’t simply a more senior version of their previous job.
We explore the difference between managing tasks and leading people, what employees need from their manager and how leadership behaviour influences team performance.
Delegation
Delegation is one of the most common challenges for new managers.
We help managers understand why they hold onto work, how to determine what should be delegated and how to provide appropriate support without taking responsibility back at the first sign of difficulty.
Accountability and Performance
Managers need to be able to establish clear expectations and address situations when those expectations aren’t being met.
That means understanding how to create accountability without becoming controlling and how to address poor performance before small problems become significant ones.
Difficult Conversations
Leadership inevitably involves conversations we’d sometimes rather avoid.
New managers need the confidence and skills to address behaviour, performance and disagreements directly while maintaining respect and productive working relationships.
Emotional Intelligence
Good leadership requires more than technical knowledge.
Managers need to understand how their behaviour affects other people, recognise their emotional responses and adapt the way they communicate depending on the person and situation in front of them.
Motivation
Different people are motivated by different things.
New managers need to move beyond assuming that what motivates them will automatically motivate everybody else.
We help managers understand their people as individuals and create the conditions in which employees are more likely to perform at their best.
Psychological Safety
High-performing teams need people who are willing to speak openly, challenge ideas, raise concerns and admit mistakes.
Managers play an enormous role in determining whether employees believe it is safe to do those things.
Coaching Rather Than Solving
One of the most valuable skills a new manager can develop is learning when not to provide the answer.
Instead of creating dependence, managers can learn how to ask better questions, develop their people’s thinking and gradually increase the capability of the team.
Managing Former Colleagues
For some new managers, the most uncomfortable part of promotion is suddenly being responsible for people who were previously their peers.
Relationships change.
Someone they used to complain about management with may now expect them to represent management.
A friend may now report to them.
They may worry about appearing arrogant or becoming “one of those managers”.
As a result, some new managers become reluctant to establish boundaries or address performance because they don’t want relationships to change.
Others go too far in the opposite direction and believe they need to become noticeably tougher to demonstrate their authority.
Neither extreme is particularly helpful.
We help managers understand how to establish credibility in their new role while remaining authentic to who they are.
Leadership Isn’t About Having All the Answers
New managers can place enormous pressure on themselves.
They believe that because they’ve been promoted, they’re now expected to know what to do in every situation.
They aren’t.
Leadership isn’t about never being uncertain.
It’s about knowing how to respond when you are.
We want new managers to become comfortable asking questions, seeking advice, acknowledging what they don’t know and making thoughtful decisions without believing they need to pretend to have all the answers.
That’s not weakness.
It’s leadership maturity.
The Workshop Doesn’t Finish When Everyone Leaves the Room
One of the challenges with leadership training is that understanding an idea in a workshop is relatively easy.
Using it during a difficult conversation three weeks later is much harder.
That’s why our approach doesn’t have to finish at the end of the workshop.
Participants can have an individual coaching session following the development, giving them the opportunity to talk privately about a leadership situation they’re experiencing.
Perhaps they’re struggling with a particular employee.
They need to have their first serious performance conversation.
Delegation isn’t working.
They’re experiencing self-doubt.
Or they’re simply unsure how something from the workshop applies to their particular situation.
Individual coaching helps bridge the gap between understanding leadership and actually doing it.
What Should Be Different Afterwards?
We don’t judge the success of leadership development simply by whether participants enjoyed the day.
We want something to change.
A manager who previously avoided a conversation has it.
Someone who was doing everything themselves starts delegating.
A manager stops automatically giving people answers and begins developing their thinking.
Expectations become clearer.
Performance problems are addressed earlier.
Employees receive more useful feedback.
Managers become more aware of how their behaviour affects their teams.
And new managers begin to understand that their job isn’t simply to be the best performer in the team.
Their job is to help the team perform at its best.
That’s the change we’re looking for.
From One Workshop to a New Manager Development Programme
Some organisations need a single in-house workshop.
Others want to create a more structured development pathway for new and emerging managers.
The Australasian Leadership Institute can design development around the needs of your organisation, combining workshops, individual coaching and follow-up where appropriate.
Rather than prescribing a fixed programme before understanding your needs, we start with your organisation.
Who are you developing?
What experience do they already have?
What challenges are they facing?
What kind of leaders does your organisation need them to become?
We can then recommend an appropriate approach.
Why Work With the Australasian Leadership Institute?
The Australasian Leadership Institute is led by Chief Leadership Coach Mark Wager, who brings more than three decades of leadership experience to his work with managers and organisations.
Mark has worked with leaders from organisations including the New Zealand Defence Force, Ministry of Justice, Department of Internal Affairs, ACC, Fisher & Paykel, St John, Red Cross, Barnardos, Weta Workshop, UNICEF and Amnesty International.
Our approach to leadership development is straightforward:
Practical. Evidence-based. Personal. Tailored.
We use established leadership and psychological research, but development is always connected to the realities managers encounter in the workplace.
Because leadership development shouldn’t simply give people more things to know.
It should help them become better at leading.
Leadership Development for New Managers Throughout New Zealand
The Australasian Leadership Institute provides customised leadership development for new and emerging managers throughout New Zealand.
In-house development can be delivered in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and regional locations, with online development and coaching also available where appropriate.
Every organisation is different.
That’s why the starting point isn’t choosing a course from a catalogue.
It’s understanding what your managers need.
You’ve Promoted Them. Now Help Them Succeed.
Promoting someone is an expression of confidence.
You’re saying:
We believe you’re capable of more.
But promotion shouldn’t be where their development stops.
It should be where a different kind of development begins.
If you’re developing new managers, preparing emerging leaders for greater responsibility or seeing technically capable people struggling with the transition into leadership, talk to us.
You don’t need to know exactly what programme you need.
Tell us about your managers, the challenges they’re experiencing and what you would like to be different.
We’ll start there.
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