Welcome to the New Manager Podcast. I'm your host, Kim Nichol. Hello and welcome. I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well. Today's episode is all about learning. How do you learn to be a great manager? And the 1st place to start is by acknowledging that when you become a manager, managing people is a different job than the thing you were doing before. You might be a really great designer, but managing a team of designers is a different job.
You might be a really good attorney, but managing a team of attorneys and non attorney staff is a different job. You might be a really good engineer. Managing a team of engineers is a different job. You get the picture here, right? And so often we get promoted and nobody will actually tell you that managing is a different job and that there are different ways. You'll need to be thinking about what your role is and what it means to be successful as a manager.
Especially if you are managing people who have different styles of communication than you, if you are managing people who are motivated a little bit differently than you. Because we often think about managing others the way that you want to be managed, we think, oh, a good manager is someone who would manage me exactly the way that I would like. And then when you become a manager, it's easy to forget that not everyone is exactly like you.
And so part of developing a suite of skills and tools about being effective as a manager is keeping this in mind that what works for you as a person might not translate exactly for others. As a manager, you want to be able to be effective with a range of people and a range of personalities, because that's what you're most likely to
encounter in the workplace. Now this also becomes important because when you transition into managing people, it can be so easy to feel like a failure if you're not sure what the job is or you're not sure if you're doing a good job. One of the things I see happen a lot, and especially when you know you get promoted to imagine manager, it's often because you're really good at the thing that you do and then it's like great, you're so good at this thing.
Now we're going to let you manage people who are also good at this thing. There can be this disorientation where you go from feeling high competence, high confidence. I know what I'm doing, I know what success looks like, and I have a track record of achievement. To now stepping into this new role and not having that clarity around what does success look like?
How is this role different? How do I feel competent and confident when I'm doing something new and maybe I'm a little bit worried about whether I'm doing it right or not? And so it's very natural. A lot of times when we're trying to understand, am I doing a good job? We look to the emotions of others. And specifically what that sounds like is are my people happy? Is my team happy? Are they happy with me? Are they happy with the work? Is my boss happy? Are they happy with me?
Are they happy with the work? And one of the real challenges here is to remember that sometimes people are unhappy and it has nothing to do with you. Something else might be going on in their life. And so they're showing up at work and they are unhappy and they are impatient and they just do not have a great attitude. And it's possible it has absolutely nothing to do with you, has nothing to do with the work. That's just kind of where
they're at right now. And so as a human, that's the quality of attention and energy that they're bringing with them into the workplace. The other reason you want to be really mindful of this is because there will be times when your job is to make a decision. Maybe to delegate something or to not to give a promotion to somebody who wants it.
Or you simply make a judgment call based on information that you have, that maybe someone on your team does not have that perspective or that information, or they simply have a different opinion about how they think things should go. But the job of making the decision falls to you. And so it's in your judgment and it's your responsibility to make a decision and then follow through on it. And people might not be happy with that.
And sometimes that's okay. It is okay that they are unhappy with the decision that you've made. And it can be difficult to hold the truth of those two things. Especially when you're someone who has a lot of compassion and a lot of care and you really want people to like coming to work. And you want people to feel, you know, purposeful and appreciated and becoming aware of what are, you know, like what is the emotional tone of the folks around you and how much weight are you giving that?
What are you doing with that information? Are you giving too much weight to how they are feeling and then trying to do your job to get people to feel a certain way? And that can really lead us astray? And so I wanted to mention that too, because when you're not sure about what is the measure of success, how do I know? When I'm doing a great job, it's really natural to look to the emotions of others as your only source of information, your only
checkpoint. And instead I want to remind you it's only one data point in the bigger context, in the bigger picture. So that's one of the things that I, you know, work with my clients on often when they're first starting is trying to get them oriented into, let's talk about what does success look like, How will you know when you're doing a good job and how are you thinking, like, what is your mindset around what the role of a manager is? There are different ways to think about it.
Sometimes we think of it as, oh, my job as the manager is to remove obstacles. My job as the manager is to clarify priorities and direction so people know what to do. Sometimes my job as a manager is to advocate for the team and to make sure that they are resourced, you know, appropriately for the task at hand. Sometimes the job of the manager is to be the one who makes
decisions. So there are lots of different ways that we can look at this depending on what your situation is, what is happening in your organization. But when you have clarity in your own mind about what the job is and how you will know when you are being successful, that goes a long way to starting to reduce the stress and the anxiety and that little background voice of self doubt
and second guessing. So with all of that in mind, there are three things specifically I wanted to share with you when it comes to How will you learn to be a great manager? How will you learn to be effective? How will you learn to be, you know, the leader that you want to be for your team, and there are three things that I've identified that I see as really important, and so I want to share them with you here. Number one, you need safety to learn.
That means that if you're afraid of making mistakes, if you've got a lot of anxiety about doing things right and you're really worried about getting it right the first time, that becomes harder to learn. When you feel more safe. When you feel safe to not be perfect, it becomes easier to learn. Sometimes you might make an error, but the important thing then is how you will deal with it. If you feel like any error is going to, you know, kind of ruin everything, you're going to walk
on egg shells. You're going to second guess yourself. You're going to procrastinate in making decisions. There will be so much time and energy that gets sucked out of your life when you're afraid to learn. So you want to have, you know, like a dedicated place, whether it's a specific person you talk with or whether it's in a class or just creating space in your own mind where it's safe to ask questions, where you can be real about what's hard and not feel like.
You have to present this all knowing you know straight a student image right out of the gate. You want to have a place where it actually feels safe to learn because you will learn faster. You can also think of this as process over perfection. This can be a tough reminder when you're used to doing things at a very high standard and you're doing something new and it feels a little wobbly at
first. So remember, the goal here is process over perfection and when you create safety to learn inside yourself, like when you are not judging yourself harshly, criticizing yourself, thinking, oh, I should know this by now. Am I supposed to know this by now? Is there something wrong with me that I don't? I don't magically and immediately know how to do things when you're able to remind yourself, look, I'm learning something new.
I haven't done this before. It is safe for me to learn and in fact it's very important that I create safety to learn because then I will learn faster. That's the attitude that we're going for. So process over perfection. The number two thing that you need when you're learning how to be a great manager go for bite size learning.
And this is specifically because it can be very difficult to step out of, you know, the full flow of daily life to attend a long, you know, like 1/2 day or a multi day training on manager skills. And I think of that experience as kind of like binging. Like we lift you up out of your workplace, we drop you into a classroom, you know, workshop setting maybe with some of your colleagues or some of the other
folks that you work with. And then we're going to dump all this information at you and we're going to just, you know, it's like you're going to try to binge learn all of these tools and frameworks and attitudes and practices. And then we're going to pick you up and drop you back into your work and say OK, go apply that. And the reason I don't like binge learning is because it's often not that effective.
We tend to forget most of what is learned in a big multi hour long training and when we are feeling stressed or pressured or just like we're feeling tense and like we we really have to go quickly. What you will tend to do is you will do the most familiar thing. You will do the thing that you are most practiced at, which is not the new skill. You just spent three days, you know three days on you will do the things that you have been doing.
You will not apply that new skill and this is something that I have experienced both on the student side as well as being on the trainer side. You know, like when I was doing these day long trainings, they were so much fun. People really enjoyed them. They had an amazing time. But the ability to then take all of that learning from that one day and apply it consistently and sustainably over time, that part didn't really happen like it was. It was really more left to each person.
It wasn't structured in a way that made that easy to do. And so if you think about instead of bingeing your learning, think about looking for bite size learnings that you can lift easily. That's something that doesn't feel so heavy, but something that you can lift and begin to apply immediately. Something that you can bring into the flow of what you're doing to become a little bit more practiced, a little more effective, and to start building your confidence with small things.
If we try big things too quickly, it's so easy to feel frustrated and to feel like, oh, it's not working, you know, like this. This isn't working with my specific people or in my specific situation and so it becomes a lot more doable when you start with something small. Think of it like you know a small step makes a big difference because you will actually apply them. Small gets it done. Done is better than perfect. That is what will actually make a difference.
And remember, it was a just around 10 years ago or so when I had been promoted to the manager of my team. So we had worked together for many years and then there was an opportunity to apply to the manager role because somebody had left. I applied, I got the job. It was like, Oh my gosh, amazing. I got promoted. I'm neither now the manager.
And first, there were some interesting relationship dynamics because I went from being their peer to now being the manager and having insight about everybody's salary, for example, and now being in a position of real formal power over people. So there was all of this relationship dynamic that I hadn't really understood until I was in that role. So that was something that I had
to reckon with. And then the organization that I was working for, they said, oh, you know, we have this manager training coming up. It'll be in like 4 months from now and it'll be you know, on the East Coast and we're going to send you and like 10 of 10 other people from the company and you'll all do this training together and it's 3 days and I was like, OK, but in the meantime, you know, between now and then I still need to figure out how to do my one on ones,
how to do team meetings. I needed to learn about the formal performance review process, like how does that tool work and when do I need to do things. Like there was all this other stuff, you know, that was happening in the meantime before I got to the training and then when I went to the training. Number one, it's it is kind of weird when you're learning with people you work with because there are relationship dynamics happening there too.
I didn't feel like I could be totally open about the things I felt confused about or I felt uncertain about because I'm also trying to, you know, manage my relationship and manage a little bit of of how I'm presenting to my colleagues. And so I was a little bit guarded. And that's just a real thing that happens when we're learning with people that we know. Sometimes it's much easier to learn with people that do not know you because you can be so open about what's actually going on.
The other thing that was interesting is that we were there for three days and of course in between our sessions everyone's trying to check their e-mail and catch up to what's happening at work because it's, you know, it's a, it's a a while to be away. And then they taught us these different frameworks and they said, you know, we we know that you won't remember everything, but it's okay. We have some materials for you to bring home with you.
And there was this huge binder, this 3 ring binder. It was so heavy I had to pack it in my luggage and it was so heavy. And I thought, I am never going to open this binder. I'm going to bring it to my office, I'm going to put it on the shelf. I cannot imagine wanting to consult this binder again, like that is just not how I learned. And the other thing they gave us was a little wallet card. It was a little card that had a summary of some of the concepts that they had taught.
And I looked at this and I thought, you know, I understand why you're giving this to me. But honestly, I cannot imagine being, you know, at my desk, getting ready for a oneonone and then thinking, oh wait, let me pull out my wallet card and remind myself of how to structure this conversation. It it just was not how reality was going to work. So, you know, when I started coaching and teaching, I thought I want to do this in a different way because the binge learning
is not so effective, you know. But that's I think very much the mindset of how learning was happening at the time. Like it was easier to administer a training where you, you know, fly 10 people from one company into this, you know, training at this other location and then everybody just immersive binge learns and then hopefully when they go back there's enough learning that gets applied in the moment.
I don't know. I mean I try to have compassion for it because I've been in the learning and development and teaching space long enough to know the best of intentions can still create less than ideal results. But I am have become a very firm believer in the value of bite size learning rather than trying to kind of pour all this information into you and hope that you're able to take it and apply it all perfectly to all the nuance and unexpected circumstances that happen along the way.
Instead, let's make it bite size. You know, when I first started teaching the essential skills for new managers back in 2017, I envisioned it as a Swiss Army knife. The class was only 90 minutes long, and my mindset was if I only talk to you for 90 minutes, that's the only time we ever get. I am going to equip you with the equivalent of a Swiss Army
knife. Meaning that it's small, it it's light, it fits right in your pocket, it's intuitive to use, it has a lot of different tools, and you'll be able to pull it, you know, from your pocket into any moment that you that you need it. And you'll be able to start to integrate some of these teachings right away. So what initially started as a 90 minute class, Of course it's now expanded into, you know, a bigger program and this podcast
and all of that. But it really came from this mindset of we don't need a huge immersive information dump. What is most effective is what you will use, and what you will use is something that is bite size, something that is an easy lift, something that you can really hold in your hands and use it in your particular work situation.
So this is #2, go for bite size learning, remember that small gets it done and you'll also start to build your confidence when you find success in applying small concepts. Bite size concepts. The 3rd. When you're thinking about how do I become a more effective manager, I know there are things I need to learn. The third aspect that you need is continuous learning. So remembering that this is not something like you cram for the night before and you learn it once and you're done.
But remembering that the objective is to be learning as you go to think about continuous learning, something that you will continue to actively engage in, and that sense of learning is never done. It's not like, you know, you take the test, you get the grade, OK, done like move on.
It really is this curiosity, this mindset of growth and discovery, because as you go in your career, you're going to learn so much more about who you are as a person and what type of leader and manager you are and want to become. You will be learning things all the time from the people around you, both from the people whose style of managing and leading you really admire and and start to learn from that example. But you will also learn from the people that you see who are just
maybe not doing so great. And you might think, wow, I can't believe they they did that. I I would not, I would not want to lead or manage my team in that way. Like, no, Like, we've got to do this better. We've got to do this differently. There will also be times when you simply learn from your experience being a human and you realize, ooh, the way that they're, you know, managing this that is so, so good. I'm having such a great experience of being managed in this situation.
I'm going to use some of what I am experiencing and learning and bring that into my team. And honestly that's one of the things I love the most. Because when you think about learning from your direct experience, then it locates the zone of expertise in you as opposed to in some external
expert. You know, I sometimes have a little bit of a bias because I remember when I was trying to understand how to be a better manager, it just seemed like there were some very academic messages that felt so distant from the messy reality of daily work in a changing industry with all of the personalities that I had to work with. And it just felt not that applicable. And some of the most powerful and inspiring leaders that I have known and that I've had the pleasure to work with.
So much of what I've observed and learned is that the learning, like the way they were able to learn to do that was so much through their lived experience and not primarily through an academic study. So I really like this kind of organic approach. And I also have this philosophy of people want to work well together, people want to have a
great experience at work. And we are human, which means that we have emotions, it means we get tired, it means we have different priorities and different things that motivate us. So the more that we can stay curious and be interested in continuous learning, then it starts to relieve the sense of pressure.
It starts to make learning and leading something that's more like, you know, it's engaging and it's fun and we're always finding ways of getting better and it just feels like less pressure, more momentum, more confidence, and you start to see your progress. That's also what becomes more
sustainable. And I think sustainability wins at the end of the day, because if you're trying to learn in a way that isn't connected to sustainability, you're not learning in a sustainable way, you're not applying what you're learning in a sustainable way, then what is the point? Like, why? Why learn if you're not going to be able to apply it? Or why you know?
Like if if you're not able to really take it in and make it yours and make it work for who you are and the circumstances and the work situation and the personalities that you're with, then you know is it Like how valuable is that learning if you're not making good use of it. So these three things you know when you realize okay, So I'm now a manager and there are going to be some things for me to learn, some skills to develop, but also some mindset
to shift. There's going to be a lot of learning as I step into this role. Three things that will help you safety to learn bite size learning and continuous learning. And once you tap into that and see and understand that you'll then have less stress, less anxiety and pressure. You'll also start noticing these small wins and that is what builds your sense of confidence and progress and momentum and that is a good thing. So that is what I wanted to
share with you today. If you want to work with me one-on-one, go into the show notes, book a consult and let's talk. If you want to join my group program, I have the next cohort is starting this week, I think it's starting tomorrow from when this episode will go live. So there's still time. If you're listening to this on a Monday to join the group program, in the show notes, you'll find the link to learn more about that. Otherwise, stay connected, keep listening to the podcast or join
my e-mail list. You'll hear about when the group is offered next. Have a great one. I will talk to you next time. When you're more effective at work, you're happier in your life. And when you're happier in your life, you're more effective at work. I can help. Go to my website, kimnickelcom and sign U for a coaching consult. It can get better.