How much training have you had as a manager? Often, people go from excellent individuals to team leaders or managers with little or no training. That isn’t how the business planned it, but perhaps you got promoted just after the last training program ended. Maybe it’s the reality of too much to do and not enough time to do it right now. Whatever the situation, the impact is that, at least for the time being, you need to figure it out yourself. And that can mean making mistakes without even realizing.
Below you’ll find a list of 12 common mistakes managers make and how you can avoid them. Read through them in order, or go directly to any you might be making, and take steps to change those first:
- How to recognize your mistakes
- 12 mistakes you might be making:
Recognizing your mistakes as a manager is the first step
In between grueling schedules, extra duties and pressures, it can be easy to commit manager mistakes that have a negative impact on your people. The wrong sort of approach or attitude can kill engagement, reduce performance or cause wellbeing issues. And that’s before your employees choose to walk out the door for good.
Don’t beat yourself up if you spot yourself making these errors – everyone makes them from time to time. The fact you’re looking to learn from your mistakes and make changes to your management style already makes you one of the better managers. So, let’s dive into the common mistakes managers make and give you a few practical steps you can take to avoid failing into them.
12 mistakes you might be making as a manager and how to tackle them
Manager mistakes often fall into one of three buckets:
And the results can be devastating. Performance drops, motivation disappears, people’s physical and mental wellbeing is affected (including your own). And, worst of all, you create yourself a recruitment headache while replacing the people who decide to leave.
So, this is all about recognizing the mistakes you could be making and doing something about them. Start by thinking about which you struggle with most and focus on developing those skills. And, if you aren’t sure what’s creating the biggest impact on your team, you could always ask for their feedback or ask a trusted colleague to share their observations of your management style.
Common communication mistakes that managers make
Failures in communication can cause untold damage and yet they’re pretty simple to fix. So, let’s take a look at the most common mistakes you might be making as a manager and what you can do to change them:
- Failing to provide frequent feedback
- Not listening to employee feedback
- Spoon-feeding solutions
- Micro-managing your team
1. Failing to provide frequent feedback
For employees, constructive feedback is critical for their personal development. But many managers fail to provide feedback that’s timely. As a result, individuals don’t know what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong, or what needs to improve. And all because managers are making the mistake of not talking to their team enough about performance.
It isn’t enough to hold an annual performance review and do largely nothing in between. Instead, introduce more regular forms of feedback, like employee check-ins and scheduled 1:1s. These improve performance, address issues quickly, and they reduce the amount of time you lose completing annual reviews at year-end. Win-win!
2. Not listening to employee feedback
Have you watched a colleague lose excitement about their role and weeks later tell you they’ve resigned? Most of us have. And the reason they go is often because their manager didn’t listen to them. Feedback isn’t just about performance. It’s also about monitoring employee wellbeing, understanding someone’s commitment to their role (sentiment) and identifying problems with workplace culture.
Poor managers ignore vital cues and comments, create teams with lower performance, limited career growth, and next to no trust all because they aren’t actively listening. So ask questions about your employees’ experience, ideas and opinions, and make sure you listen to the answer.
3. You’re making the mistake of spoon-feeding solutions
Good managers enable their teams. They present opportunities for individuals to develop and fine tune their skills. Bad managers, on the other hand, give their teams all the answers. They don’t allow people to even begin to solve their own problems. They tell them how to do something – a classic manager mistake which leads people to switch off and disconnect from the business.
What you want is for employees to seek the solution. In many cases, their ideas might be better than yours. So encourage them to try new things and come up with their own suggestions and, at the same time, give yourself space to achieve more too.
4. Micro-managing your team is a big no-no
Your role as a manager is to help employees do a good job. To ensure they deliver and meet the expectations of the role. That doesn’t mean breathing down their necks and commenting on every action.
Lack of personal control over how you do your job is one of the biggest contributors to workplace stress. And micro-managing by constantly requesting updates or vetoing decisions can have a hugely negative impact on morale, wellbeing, and confidence. Avoid this mistake by setting regular review points with your teams, and agreeing schedules for updates that are realistic for them to meet.
Challenges around building relationships
Managing people can be tough, especially when it’s a new skill you’re developing. But avoiding these common pitfalls will help you build rapport and strengthen connections with your team:
- Being too hands-off/not caring
- Failing to build trust with your employees
- Forgetting to view employees as people
- Managing through power or ego
5. Being too hands-off makes it feel like you don’t care
There’s a difference between not micro-managing and not caring. Employees might want to be able to make decisions, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore them entirely. They still want direction and support from you.
Many employees have aspects of their role they don’t understand, so take the time to go through things with them. Check understanding and help them remove obstacles to success. It’s your responsibility to set clear expectations, and that means following up to make sure nothing has been missed.
6. The mistake of not building trust between manager and employee
Managers aren’t all naturally good at building rapport. Some can, some need to work at it. Yet it’s a fundamental skill you can’t ignore without significant impacts on the team. You can’t do everything, otherwise you wouldn’t need other people, so you need to be able to let go. And that means trusting other people to do what needs to be done.
When you trust people, life gets easier. You can delegate reliably and that trust you have goes both ways. Your team members will deliver more because they find it easier to work with you, and your relationship will strengthen as you can each benefit from the others’ skills. So ask questions, present opportunities, and use feedback to make steps in the right direction.
7. Forgetting to view employees as people
It would be nice if forgetting that employees are people wasn’t one of the more common mistakes that a manager can make, but it’s often one of the major driving forces behind burnout and turnover. Yet many managers get so focused on the bottom line, they struggle to see anything else.
It’s your responsibility to support your employees’ wellbeing. So don’t reward presenteeism or diminish physical or health concerns. Consider the impact your behavior and decisions have on the people in your team. And treat them with compassion and sensitivity to get the best results.
8. Managing through power or ego
Have you put yourself on a pedestal? Please don’t. It destroys morale and turns people against you. And letting your ego and pride take priority in decisions is one of the biggest mistakes managers can make.
Instead, work on your own self-awareness. Managers who understand themselves and their teams do much better in the end. They’re able to bring people with them and create a vision others can support. It’s much more productive than having your entire team plotting your downfall, and hoping it will end your managerial career.
Manager mistakes linked to responsibilities and expectations
Some of the simplest mistakes managers can make is lacking clarity around who should be doing what and why. Without these boundaries, employees lose direction, or you start picking favorites. And that can cause problems you could really do without. So, let’s look at how you can avoid the mistakes of:
- Not taking personal responsibility
- Ignoring problems until they escalate
- Asking things of your employees that you don’t expect of yourself
- Getting involved in social politics and picking favorites
9. Not taking responsibility
Whose responsibility is it if an employee fails to deliver? A good manager shares in both successes and failures of their team. It’s your role to put the right people on the right projects and to help them address issues they can’t resolve on their own.
A key manager mistake is assigning blame whenever something goes wrong. You look for whose fault it is, rather than at the learnings. Stop yourself from falling into this trap by taking personal responsibility. Were you clear enough? Did you offer the right support? And do you allow your teams to make mistakes? The best managers learn from what happened and look at how to avoid it next time.
10. Ignoring problems until they escalate
When it’s a small problem, it’s easy to ignore. Someone turns up five minutes late one morning, no big deal. So you ignore it. It happens again. By day five, it’s annoying you and other members of the team, and your ability to be rational is disappearing. And their engagement is dropping as they feel “the looks” but don’t understand why.
The same is true when people are working on a project. Have regular check-ins to see how things are going. Set milestones and goals so people know what they’re working towards. And identify any issues early so you can correct things as you go. Far better than saving up your annoyance for an annual review when the issue has long gone, but the resentment has festered for months.
11. Asking things of your employees that you don’t expect of yourself
Employees are very good at picking up on workplace double standards. When you ask employees to “go the extra mile” make sure it isn’t a one-sided thing, otherwise it’s going to impact morale.
Some managers make the mistake of thinking employees have to do all the giving. That you can head out for personal errands while they need to man the phone. But if you model the behavior you want to see in others, employees are more likely to be flexible, giving a better result for everyone.
12. Getting involved in social politics and picking favorites
There are always going to be some people you get on better with than others, especially if you’ve been in the business for a while. The issues come when you struggle to be objective – getting involved with gossip or giving great projects to your mates.
It’s important you have strong relationships – that’s how you build trust and can allow people to show up as their best. Just make sure you’re avoiding the mistake of getting involved in things you need to rise above. And be clear on your rationale for making decisions. After all, workplace transparency is so important, and if employees get so much as a whiff of preferential treatment, their engagement will crash and burn.
How to learn from your mistakes and become a better manager
Being a manager can be rewarding. But there are lots of skills to learn and mistakes to avoid. The best managers are open to learning new things, and asking for feedback. So get input from your team on where you should start.
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