By Jonathan Hussey
The Chartered Management Institute found that 82% of people moving into management in the UK have had no formal management training when they start. And I was one of that 82% when I became a Probation Manager.
Gallup’s research suggests managers account for around 70% of the variation in how engaged their teams are. So it is interesting that the transition nobody prepares you for is the one that shapes the team most.
Here are five things I would tell anyone in the first year of the move to do. Each one is something I learned by not doing it.
One. Give the hard work back.
As a new probation manager, if a difficult case came in I would quietly take the hard part myself. The risk assessment, the tricky home visit, the breach. It felt like support. It was really a way of staying where I felt competent.
Years later, running a business, I watched myself do it again. We were mobilising a new service for a police force area, with a fast go-live date. Rather than hand the referral pathway and the operating policies to the project lead I had appointed, I wrote them myself because it felt quicker and I knew what the commissioner wanted. The documents were fine. The project lead spent the first month of a job they were good at watching me do it, and I spent it not managing the twenty other things only I could see.
When the hard piece lands, work through it with the person, then let them do it. Your job is now to make other people better at the work, not to be the best at it in the room.
Two. Draw the line early, and say where it is.
I had come up through the team and did not want to be the one who changed. So I softened feedback and let standards drift. What the team experienced was a manager who was hard to read.
Project managers do this with scope. The client asks for one more thing, the new PM says yes because they want to be helpful, and three months later the project is over budget and the team is working weekends. Saying no early, and explaining the cost of yes, is what protects them.
In the first month, tell people what you expect and what you will not accept, once and plainly, then hold to it. Being clear is a kindness. The people I managed best were the ones I was most direct with.
Three. Make one-to-ones about the person, not the work in front of you.
As a practitioner I could talk about cases all day, so supervision became case discussion with a manager in the room. I found out about burnout in my team the way most managers do, when someone went off sick.
In project teams the same thing happens with status. Every one-to-one becomes a RAG report: where are we on the milestones, what is blocked, what do you need. Nobody asks whether the person is coping with the pace or wants to be doing this in a year. Turnover on delivery teams is usually a surprise to the PM and to nobody else.
Split the two. Have status reviews and case reviews when you need them. Keep the one-to-one for the questions that do not have a case number or a Gantt line.
Four. Translate every change, and let the team see what you do not know.
When something came down from above, I forwarded it. New target, new form, new process. I did not explain the reason, or say when I disagreed, or admit when I did not fully understand it myself. Practitioners are trained to be sceptical of instructions with no rationale, and so are good project managers, analysts and delivery staff.
The private sector example is the reorganisation announced by email. The team learns their reporting line has changed from an org chart with no explanation, and the manager who should have translated it stays quiet because they are unsure themselves. Trust goes, quickly.
For a long time I thought the job was to look certain. The turning point for me came on a project where the plan was not working and I stopped pretending it was. I told the team what I did not know, where I thought I had got it wrong, and what I needed from them. The change was immediate. People started raising problems earlier instead of hiding them, the quieter members of the team began contributing, and we delivered something better than the original plan. Nothing about the project had changed except how much of myself I was willing to show.
The research points the same way. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety, and Google’s own study of what made its best teams effective, both found the same thing: teams perform better when people believe they can speak up, admit mistakes and ask for help without being punished for it. That starts with the manager going first.
Before you send anything on, add three things. What this means for you, why it is happening, and what I honestly think about it, including what I am unsure of. Vulnerability in a manager is not weakness. It is the fastest way I know to get a team to tell you the truth.
Five. Judge people by results, not by how much they work like you.
I was fast, informal and comfortable with risk, so I rated slower, more methodical colleagues as weaker. Some were better than me. They caught things I would have missed, and their service users trusted them.
Every project manager has a version of this. The one who thinks out loud in meetings undervalues the one who says nothing and sends the correct answer afterwards. The one who likes detail rates the big-picture thinker as sloppy. Both are managing to their own template.
Look at what each person actually produces. Compliance rates and assessment quality in probation; delivery on time, defect rates and client feedback in a project. Then notice how different the people producing good results are from each other, and from you.
What the transition actually is
All five come from the same place. The skills that made you effective as a practitioner, a project manager or a delivery lead are the ones that get in the way once the job is to get the work done through other people. Few organisations, public or private, spend much time helping people make that switch. You are expected to work it out, and the working out happens on real people.
If I were designing development today, I would spend less on strategy courses and far more on the first six months of a new first-line manager. That is where the habits form, and where the right support makes the biggest difference.
I am generalising from my own experience, so I would rather hear whether this matches yours.
If you have made the move from doing the work to managing it, in any sector, what is the one thing you wish someone had told you to do?