The new manager needs to learn how he or she will be evaluated and how the team will be evaluated. There needs to be a clear discussion about milestones: What are the goals and how will they be tracked. There needs to be a clear feedback system between the new manager and the boss, and between the new manager and the team. And there must be a system of social gratification, which is the rewards and signals that keep a person engaged and energized—what I call social cocaine. And because each new manager has different strengths and weaknesses, this coaching and training should be designed so that it embodies institutional values and norms, but also addresses the specific capabilities of the individual. All these things are as necessary in a normal work environment as they are in today’s changed workplace; the difference is that they need to be institutionalized, even in a company of 20 people. Every new manager should get two or three days, even a week, of training with a coach. In my experience, the boss needs to be the coach. If you’re going to promote somebody, you need to coach them; and the company needs to ensure that it happens every time and that the boss is competent to do it. Most bosses aren’t skilled at coaching, so they will need to be taught, too. The good news is that the pandemic and remote work provide a reason to build that institutionalized coaching, which as I said most companies do very badly. You shouldn’t need to bring in outside help. Any company of 250 employees has several superb leaders, and they should be able to teach others. Nor do you need to create a mentoring program. Most mentoring programs don’t work, because the existence of a mentor absolves the boss of responsibility for learning how to coach. A person who really wants to learn will find his own mentor. If you know what you want to learn, if you have an agenda, then mentoring is easy. You don’t need a complicated process. Make the real people who are supervisors do the coaching and make them accountable for it. Why should this be any different from sports? It’s important to help the new manager understand that the change from individual contributor to manager is the most radical change in a leader’s career, with the exception of the change from functional leader to CEO. The steps between manager and CEO may seem like big steps, but, really, the change is just incremental. The two radical steps are the first one—becoming a manager for the first time—and the last one—becoming the CEO. It is important to get that first step right. _____________ Ram Charan is a world-renowned business advisor, author and speaker who has spent the past 40 years working with many top companies, CEOs, and boards, among them Toyota, Bank of America, Key Bank, ICICI Bank, Aditya Birla Group, Novartis, Max Group, Yildiz Holdings, UST Global, Fast Retailing (Uniqlo), and Humana. He has written oover 30 books since 1998, including The Leadership Pipeline, (co-authored with Stephen Drotter and James Noel) and Execution, which he worked on with former Honeywell CEO Larry Bossidy. His articles have appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, BusinessWeek, Time, Chief Executive and USA TODAY. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources and has served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Corporate Governance.
6 I ACHIEVENEXT HELPING YOUR MANAGERS SUCCEED
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