The most common mistakes of rookie managers – #1
Years ago, I began compiling a list of the most common mistakes made by rookie managers. All of these I learned firsthand in my own management career or afterwards during 34 years of personally coaching thousands of new and experienced managers—from the Board and CEO level on down.
Not all of the insights arose from Instinx R&D, many predated it, but they were all given context and clarified by it, and certainly all of them arose from my lifelong fascination with the natural instinctive human learning process. So it is appropriate to include them on this Great Instincts platform.
I will share them here, one mistake at a time, in a series of postings … trying to keep them more or less in order of descending frequency, but sometimes the destructive consequences of a mistake will give it precedence over more common errors. On that note, one of the most common mistakes of a new manager, and certainly one of the most costly, is:
#1 – Forming a clique with subordinates who think more like you.
The most important advantage of having a team is NOT to share the load. That obviously helps, but even more important is—if you’re smart enough to arrange it—covering weakness with strength.
We all bring strengths & weaknesses to our work. Nobody is good at everything that is needed (although some might be good at pretending to be). The more you can arrange your team’s duties so every task is addressed with strength, the more effective you will be.
“The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system’s weaknesses irrelevant.” —Peter Drucker
It may feel safer, when you’re green at your new role, to assign work to people with similar strengths to your own, but you will be wasting over 60% of the potency of your people. The primary psychological task of every manager is to discover and appreciate the differences in their team members; the primary supervisory task is then to harness them.
