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SOURCE: Harvard ManageMentor PLUS | Becoming a Manager | Core Concepts (website visited Sept. 2003)
Congratulations—you’re becoming a manager! You’ve worked hard, and now you’re preparing to take a big step into a whole new role. Perhaps you’re entering the realm of management from any of these directions:
You’ve scored impressive achievements as an individual contributor—for example, as a top salesperson for your company. Your supervisor has promoted you to a team-leadership position—for instance, head of your regional sales force.
You’ve built a successful one-person business of your own. To sustain that success, you now need to hire and manage staff for the first time; for example, an administrative assistant, a bookkeeper, or salespeople. Wherever you’re coming from, you can boost your chances of continued success in your new role by understanding what managers really do. To begin, let’s look at a number of all-too-common myths about management—and replace them with their corresponding truths:
What skills managers need
How much power they have
How much freedom they have
How they feel about their jobs
How they can best learn to master their new role
Myth #1:
New managers and individual contributors need the same skills Many new managers believe they’ll be using the same skills they used as individual contributors—except that they’ll need to apply those skills to more challenging projects.
Reality: The skills that lead to success as an individual contributor differ markedly from those needed to manage. For example, suppose you’re being promoted from salesperson to regional sales manager. As a salesperson, you probably possessed a number of essential, specific skil ...