New managers often feel like they’re in over their heads. Responsibilities pile up. Employees need constant attention for one reason or another. It’s a dive into the deep end of multitasking. It’s easy for a new manager to fall into some classic mistakes without noticing. So, let’s look at some common management mistakes you might not know you’re making.
1. Over-Working Your Best Employees
High performers often have an innate can-do attitude that makes it especially easy to give them more work. On top of that, they’re often the most experienced employees. Yet, as you pile on the work, the employee can view the added responsibilities as some form of penalty for good performance. You leave them feeling overwhelmed in the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, all of that extra work actually makes them physically sick.
Takeaway: Piling work on your best employees will only make them worse employees. Some may even quit to escape you.
2. Not Bringing Junior Employees Along
This is just the flip side of over-working your best employees. If you hand off every crucial task to a seasoned employee, it means you’re never handing off more important tasks to junior employees. As a manager, part of your job is bringing junior employees along so that they can become high performing senior employees. That means giving them progressively more important work until they acquire the experience and skills necessary to promote.
Takeaway: Employees quit when they don’t see career progression. Never getting more important work is often interpreted as a sign that they’ll never advance.
3. Not Providing Enough Feedback
More than half of all employees don’t feel like they get enough feedback, so this is a failure across management generally. What employees don’t want is some cookie-cutter pat on the head. They want to understand how they’re doing in the present. This can prove especially crucial during long-term projects where project feedback might not appear for six months.
Takeaway: It’s up to you to find time in your day to talk with employees. It doesn’t need to be a half-hour conversation, but it does need to happen.
New managers can find the position and its demands overwhelming. That helps explain why so many new managers fall into classic management mistakes like overworking star employees or neglecting feedback. Carve out at least a couple hours each month to do a self-review of how your hand out work and your recent handling of feedback. It can help you avoid alienating good employees.
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