Peace of Time
I feel for the first-time managers. Yesterday I had a Zoom chat with one of them who decided to get some support in the middle of a New Zealand national holiday. She was working.
Lina (not her real name) had been in the company for a couple of years as a successful expert in her field. The company’s quick growth has put an extra burden on the management, and they created several front-line manager roles a few months earlier. She was one of the new managers. Now Lina is managing a team of eight former colleagues.
Lina was in tears after a few minutes. She was exhausted and did not know what to do because there was so much to do.
– How do you plan your work, I asked Lina?
– That’s the problem, my boss has a habit of throwing me every day something new, and everything is a top priority and needed to be done by yesterday because his boss is going to a board meeting and needs this and that. For example, this weekend, I put together a report that he could have done himself but didn’t know how to use Excel properly. I have still some stuff to do before tomorrow.
– Can you push back, I asked?
Long silence. Then Lina said: — I heard that when somebody last time pushed back, it wasn’t an excellent move for her career. But don’t get me wrong, my boss is a lovely and supportive person. It is his boss that sandwiches him.
We talked a long time, and Lina managed to get back some of her usual bubbly sense of humour and saw her situation from a bit wider perspective. I helped her to apply my TimePeace method to manage her time and some handy hints to deal with her boss, too.
Usually, it helps to talk to somebody. But, more importantly, it is to find new ways of solving these stressful situations where new managers so often are. You need to learn quickly and a lot if you are a new manager without previous experience in leadership roles. The lack of onboarding and induction to the role was evident from the call. I think this is not an exception but more a rule. Lina was thrown into the deep end, and no lifeboats were near.
I am currently writing a book for new managers, and your lived experiences would be the most welcome material. Do you have similar or nicer experiences? I would be very interested in hearing them. So, send me a message if you would like to chat with me in confidence; or send me your experience by email.
