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Performance Management

Published July 2010

Effective Management Transitions

 

  Lorrie Lykins

While personal efficacy is critical to successfully transition into a first-time management position, leveraging talent has become a strategic imperative to facilitate this process. Selecting and promoting new leaders is critical, but talent managers know that the lion's share of the work begins in earnest with the actual transition.

The primary challenge in managing a transition for a first-time manager is to aid two critical shifts. According to Joanne McInnerney, director of global talent development at Noevlis, addressing the change in hierarchy and the dynamics of relationships with colleagues and team members is key.

"The first thing that has to shift for the first-time manager is their perception of their relationship to the organization and their role," McInnerney said. "It's about how the manager approaches team members who were once peers but now are direct reports and how relationships with those former peers must significantly change.

"The second shift is how new managers spend their time, and that's a pretty significant core change. If you keep coming to work interacting with people and spending time in the same way that you did as an individual contributor, you're not starting off your leadership role the right way."

Managing effective job transitions can be accomplished with limited resources. McInnerney said she learned a great deal about supporting new leader development at the height of the financial crisis in her former role as an HR consultant with AmTrust Bank. She said the organization remained committed to developing new leaders and facilitating a smooth transition for first-time managers in spite of the fact that the financial institution was in an economic free fall. AmTrust coped with dwindling resources by working with Ohio State University to adapt its off-the-shelf e-learning modules to help equip new managers with the skills and techniques they needed to do their jobs.

"We created a curriculum, kind of a path of expectations that served as a baseline for first-time manager e-learning courses. It worked because it met our needs and the university charged us $3 per course," McInnerney said. Further, the strong coaching culture that already existed in the organization served as a supplement; managers were expected to meet for 30 minutes each week for coaching dialogues with their managers, which were documented.

"Part of that coaching session was feedback on what the new managers were learning in their e-learning courses and making sure they were getting what they needed," she said. "Gaps and opportunities were defined by review of the coaching session documentation, which provided a baseline for establishing where first-time managers stood and determining what they did not know. The weekly feedback and coaching sessions optimized the performance of new managers by assessing progress managing new responsibilities and supporting their growth and development."

Findings from the Institute for Corporate Productivity's (i4cp) 2009 "Internal Job Transitioning Pulse Survey" indicate that many new managers struggle to find their footing during the transition. Fewer than one-quarter of the respondents gave their organization high marks in assisting employees to transition from individual contributor to manager, and one-third reported their organization uses tools such as 360 feedback or performance metrics to determine the efficacy of such transitions.