Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

—GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON

Welcome to management! You have achieved a significant career milestone. You may have been promoted because you were the most skilled or most productive independent contributor among the candidates or perhaps because you demonstrated management and leadership potential. Ideally, you were promoted for both reasons. What you do with this opportunity will set the stage for your future success. Now is the time to show that you are a high-potential executive with an aptitude for leadership. Start by waving good-bye to your independent contributor mindset. As a first-line manager, most of your time will be spent mastering the management mindset. Your performance will be measured by how well your people perform—not by the results of your direct efforts. Your past accomplishments as an individual contributor, no matter how many accolades you received or how big your bonuses were, are not relevant to your future success.

The First-Line Manager’s Role

Your role is to manage a team of independent contributors to perform specified tasks on schedule and according to budget while meeting quality standards. You probably know how to do the tasks well, which is one reason why you were promoted. Your performance will be graded on what your team produces (the management side) and how well you engage and inspire your people to become top performers (the leadership side). The third determinant of your success is how efficiently your team works together. Some leaders intuitively balance the management and leadership mindsets—but most high potentials have to figure it out as they go along.

Your first challenge is to avoid thinking that your people will mimic what you did in their position. They are not you, so they naturally will not do things the way you did them—nor should they. They each have unique strengths to leverage. The second challenge is to clearly communicate what must be done, who will do it, by when, and how they will be evaluated and rewarded. The third challenge is to form relationships that motivate your high potentials to perform. There is a good chance that some of your direct reports wanted your promotion and were disappointed when they did not get it. Demonstrate by your leadership conversations that you were the right choice.

Conversations by First-Line Managers with Their Boss

You have the opportunity to excel in a new position and adapt to change. You have not been anointed as the master of a kingdom. You are one of the king’s knights—but just a step above the laborers. Save the celebration until after your first review. In most organizations, your boss will offer training and coaching to you—avail yourself of those resources. Conversations with your boss will be vital in helping you learn, perhaps for the first time, how to produce results through others.

• Building relationships. Ask for frequent baseline and feedback conversations with your boss, and demonstrate a thirst for learning during those conversations. Also accept coaching from other people, and pass the lessons on to your high potentials. Seek to understand and emulate the effective relationship behaviors that are used among senior executives in your organization.
• Developing others. Show your boss that you are willing to learn and to lead your team’s growth. Ask what strengths led to your promotion and probe for areas to improve. Request ongoing feedback from your boss. Be flexible, but do not allow your boss to skip those feedback sessions. Show your boss that you can resist the urge to be a hero: delegate work to your people and coach them.
• Making decisions. Learn and apply the process your boss uses to make decisions and engage your people in your decision making. Ask for an explanation when your boss makes a decision that does not seem to fit the facts as you see them. Do not challenge the decision; rather, try to understand it. In fact, do not rebut your boss’s decisions unless you have vital new information. But when you do, speak up. Use the same practice in dealing with your people: invite them to ask you to explain your decisions and encourage them to offer their viewpoints.
• Taking action. Ensure that there is agreement with your boss on (1) your team’s goals, (2) external people with whom you must coordinate, (3) resources you control, and (4) the boundaries of actions you may take on your own. Plan before you act, and review the plan with your boss. Tell your boss when a major change occurs or there are sizeable deviations—either positive or negative—from the expected results. After completing a major initiative, review with your boss the actions you took to determine how even better results can be achieved next time.

Conversations by First-Line Managers with Their Peers

Experienced first-line managers are your new best friends. They know the ropes and can teach you the secrets. This is a two-way street: you are expected to assist them as well. You will find that you have strengths that other first-line managers are missing, and they have capabilities that they could teach you. Peer coaching and mentoring can propel everyone to higher levels of success.

• Building relationships. Respect and trust others, and learn how to earn their trust and respect. It may seem as though you are competing with them, but you cannot win the high-potential lottery by operating independently. They will be your peers for years to come, so be a resource to each other. Everyone wins when you all exceed your goals. Develop best practices together, find ways to assist each other, and celebrate your successes.
• Developing others. You are learning the mechanics of leading and managing—share your experiences, discuss them, and learn from them. Coach each other to offer and accept feedback as part of these conversations. Focus on what, not who, is right. Collaborate to identify and develop your high potentials.
• Making decisions. Ask your peers what decisions they would make given the facts you have. They often will offer views that you did not see. Base your decisions on the organization’s goals, not just your goals. At times, it may feel as though you have to give up something to endorse a mutually beneficial decision, but in the long run you will find that everyone succeeds at a higher level when decisions are made in that context.
• Taking action. Joint actions generally turn out better because more people are vested in their success. Discuss the industry and organizational changes you are seeing. Any change that affects you probably affects them too. Consciously try to transform changes and problems into opportunities. Be frank with each other about actions that worked and did not work; let your learning benefit everyone.

Conversations by First-Line Managers with Their High Potentials

Some who now work for you were your peers before your promotion. Hold baseline conversations to discuss mutual expectations and have regular feedback conversations to make sure each of them is reaching his goals. Observe how your boss and other executives treat you and how their actions make you feel. Develop your unique management and leadership persona by emulating the best practices you have seen, consciously avoiding bad practices, and developing new ways to manage and lead.

• Building relationships. Recall bosses who inspired your growth: bring that inspiration to your team by borrowing techniques from them. Recognize high potentials who offer fresh ideas. Demonstrate the importance of relationships and how to build them by forming transactional relationships to help your high potentials reach their goals. Remember that your mood affects your people’s performance; if you are having a bad day, do not let it ruin everyone else’s day.
• Developing others. You are responsible not only for your own development but also for developing the technical and management skills of your people and for modeling good leadership. Learn to mentor and coach your staff. Take a genuine interest in their growth, celebrate their successes, and recognize their contributions. After all, you liked it when you were treated that way.
• Making decisions. Become curious and infect your people with curiosity. Ask your high potentials for their ideas and views on key decisions. See what they have to offer by asking insightful questions to assist them in making effective decisions. This approach will make it clear who the high potentials are on your team.
• Taking action. Involve everyone in developing plans and defining measures of success. Do not make assumptions—instead dig for the facts and the underlying reasons for what is happening. Caution your people that the best-laid plans often change; thus feedback and flexibility are essential as they take action.

We have posed sizable challenges for conversations with your boss, peers, and high potentials—but assistance is on the way. The next chapter will guide you through the assessment that measures your skills in each of the four types of leadership conversation. The good news is that as a first-line manager, you are not expected to have a perfect score. When you complete the assessment, you will receive feedback that identifies areas where in your leadership conversations you are performing at and below your current position. Using your assessment results, you will prepare a personal action plan using tools at myleadershipconversations.com. The website will also be a resource to answer your specific leadership and management questions.