Perils of a Young Manager (And what you can do about it)

During one of my career counseling sessions to a group of MBA students, almost every one of them would like to become a manager straight after their graduation. Knowing better that people management skills is something you pick up through years of working experience, i put it back that it may not be that realistic.

Most of them weren’t very pleased with my reply and some even became clearly agitated. It wasn’t pretty.

I started managing my first employee when I was 25. I have no management skills to speak of. All I could do is to think back on all the bosses I had worked under, their good and bad traits, and try to refrain from the latter.

I thought that would be good enough. But as we hire more, the reference I could use became more and more exhausted. Conflicts between co-workers? Didn’t see that in my last workplace. Employee selling out the company? Er.. is there a guidebook for that?

Still all these call for appropriate (and immediate) actions and as a manager, you just have to do what’s right in the best interest of the company whether you like it or not.

That meant terminating employees caught applying for other jobs, face booking the whole time and neglecting their KPIs, giving them a kick in the backside when they are habitually late for work.

This isn’t something I (or anyone else I believe) love to do. As a person I prefer to prevent conflicts. But many a times, you need to light a spark in order to solve a bigger problem.

I learned this the hard way. Working in a call centre straight after my NS, I was put in a supervisory trial after a year+ to manage a team of my colleagues for a brief period. From a peer to a team lead over people I know, how hard could that be?

That is until some of my colleagues started to take extra-long breaks in the pantry, login to the system late and some even decided to go home after lunch. All I need to do it keep quiet about it. And I did.

Things like this can’t be kept from the management for long and it was found out soon enough. It didn’t take long before I was suspended from the trial and back to doing what I did.

If I had the courage to confront those situations, things would be different. Yes, they may dislike me at that point in time but as a team lead, I am paid to ensure things are going in accordance to plan.

I am still learning the role of a manager every single day. If you are just like me, carrying the liability of a baby face, here is what you could do:

1. High level of self-awareness – Regardless of the personality you carry, be it extrovert or introvert, one has to have a high level of self-awareness. People who exhibit the lack of it would be those who think that they are perfect, refuse to admit mistakes. I was like that in my teens and I’m glad I’m over that otherwise I would not have reached where I am today.
2. Delivery of speech – The same power point slides will be delivered differently by different people. The same content can communicated across in vary ways. It may be work related but we are still dealing with emotional human beings here. That meant no reprimanding in public, no curt emails. Again learn from the past responses you sense from the way you used to communicated (rule no. 1).
3. Always the big picture – I failed in my supervisory trial as I was concerned my colleagues would dislike me if I had done things appropriately. I failed to look at the bigger picture and operate on what would be more important, the company’s interest and also my career development opportunity. Do not hesitate to point out something you believe is wrong but do it in the most appropriate manner taking into consideration the emotional factor (Refer to rule no. 2)

Management is something we really learn from real-world experience and not something an MBA or PhD could impart. And it started with having a consistent value and upholding it regardless of situation. Testing that value under different unforeseen situation will play a big part in sharpening your management acumen and better prepare yourself when the role arises. 

- Adrian Tan, Managing Director