To become a good manager, it is important to be prepared beforehand. Even before reaching this stage of your career, you can:
Develop strategies to achieve the objectives assigned to you and the associated action plans. Many first-level collaborators let themselves be carried away by the day-to-day and manage files as they go along. Since much of the role of a manager involves planning and managing the resources you're in charge of, you'd be well advised to start managing your own time, and therefore your priorities.
Practice "management by influence". Are you a Product Manager or Logistics Manager? Make the effort to spend time with sales or production teams. When your priorities are clear (see previous point), make it a point to meet with them with a defined topic in mind, and with the intention of finding solutions with them that would allow you to achieve your results faster. Knowing how to set up "win-win" solutions will be important in convincing them to help you. This know-how will be very useful to you as a manager, because your employees will be more motivated with this this way, rather than by simply receiving instructions.
Prepare (psychologically) your colleagues. If you have a tendency to talk negatively about your supervisors or some of your colleagues with those close to you, you will be challenged as a manager. Once you are promoted, they will keep talking behind people’s back and since you will no longer be able to do it with them, it may turn against you. Take a step back now and force yourself to keep discussions with your colleagues constructive.
Express your wish to become a manager. Many employees think that it is enough to do your job well and that leaders will see all their efforts and promote them. Unfortunately, this is very often false; Those who progress the fastest are often those who ask for it. Indeed, if they are identified as "good" in their job, the organization will be too afraid of losing them and will prefer to promote them rather than someone else who has more abilities, but shows less impatience.
Make your manager appreciate you, contributing to his good reputation. There is a good chance that you will become a manager the day he is promoted to another job, to replace him. So, make sure you build a strong and trusting relationship with him. To do this, anticipate his needs as much as possible and communicate to your colleagues in other departments what he does well. You increase his chances of being promoted faster, and, subsequently, your own chance to be nominated as his replacement.
By doing these four things, you will develop skills that will be useful for your position as a manager. In addition, you will send the signal to the leaders in charge of selecting future managers that you are ready for this next step. This is also “influence management”.
Once you have been promoted, we invite you to implement the following actions:
Train yourself: management is a skill. I am always surprised to see the few managers who have been trained in the communication techniques necessary in management. I even encourage you to negotiate this as soon as you receive the offer of a promotion, ideally with a mix of training and individual coaching.
Make the effort to truly understand each of your employees; their aspirations, their preferences at work, what stresses them, etc. Most young managers tend to unconsciously favor people who function like themselves and it takes them time to understand that to build a truly effective team, you have to be able to delegate files and structure work according to the profile of each of your collaborators. Of course, this starts with knowing yourself well; To this end, you might consider using personality tests. (My preference goes to the DISC Workplace)
Set up rituals: team meetings and individual meetings with each of your employees. Here, frequency is more important than duration. So, I suggest 30-minute meetings every week rather than 2 hours every month. This will allow you to identify the topics to be addressed very early, and therefore to make the team gain in productivity.
Negotiate with your managers so that your employees flourish and develop. Of course, the best will want to work for you if they know you have their best interests at heart. Even if money is not your engine, be aware that it can be what drives your employees, and ask that they receive raises or be promoted as soon as you see a reasonable possibility.
Set up a dashboard of your team and make sure everyone can see it. It will be a question of rendering indicators that are key for the performance of your team, for example the number of files processed and the number of anomalies. Thus, you create the foundations for meritocracy to emerge, in which your employees will focus on the job to be done.
Never raise your voice and make sure you are always courteous. Employees remember the interactions that put them under stress more intensely than others, and sometimes, there is no coming back.
And finally, prepare your successor and make it visible. It's all the more easier for your leaders to promote you to the next level if you're perceived as easily replaceable.