World Views In the News

New Manager Training

Last November, veteran nurse Dianne Baker was named acting supervisor for the outpatient cardiac rehabilitation center at a hospital near Philadelphia .

Ms. Baker, whose new duties included managing three other employees, quickly found herself at sea. She wasn't sure how to oversee former peers and stumbled over the paperwork and finances. Monthly financial reports were "like reading gibberish to me," she says. After operations meetings with a hospital executive, she asked colleagues, "What is he talking about?"

"I'm a clinical expert in what I do, and that doesn't always translate into skills for management," she says. "You have to learn all new skills."

It's an experience all too familiar to new managers. Employers often promote strong individual performers to supervisory roles with little instruction. But people who excel among the rank-and-file don't automatically have the skills or knowledge to manage well.

Companies call it "'on the job' training, but it's really trial by fire," says Robert Kelley, an adjunct management professor at Carnegie Mellon University 's Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh . New managers mostly learn by trial and error, he adds, and find the transition difficult. "They're very ill-prepared for all the routine things that managers do."

As corporate profits rebound, employers are spending more on training, but most are skimping on help for first-rung managers. Much of that training goes to help managers comply with workplace rules on issues like sexual harassment, or to teach them financial basics such as budgeting.  That leaves little time for training on "soft skills," such as coaching, leading, disciplining, giving feedback and resolving conflicts.

As a result, human-resource consultants say, new managers struggle to strike the right tone with former peers, with some trying too hard to stay one of the gang and others asserting their authority too harshly. New managers are also notoriously inconsistent, confusing staffers with intermittent or conflicting feedback.

Whatever the field, one of the toughest issues for new managers is supervising former peers.  Ms. Baker, the Pennsylvania nurse, faced such an issue when one of her former colleagues told her about a personal problem. Ms. Baker says she reacted as a friend, not a boss, offering specific advice on what the woman should do. Now she worries her approach was inappropriate for a boss, and she should have referred the woman to counselors at the hospital rather than giving off-the-cuff help herself.

Eventually, another manager told her that her hospital offers a lot of training for new managers, including a class called Peer to Boss. She enrolled in it, as well as in a basic-finance class. "Although you can learn a lot from your peers, you don't always learn the right way," she says. Last spring, just before starting her first training class, Ms. Baker agreed to become a permanent supervisor.

Without instruction, some managers just wing it. Heather Spyke says she has gotten no formal management training since being promoted in late 2004 to head the customer-service department at a small Georgia company that makes wireless medical devices. While drafting her first-ever performance review, she struggled with how to tell an employee to curtail his social chit-chat.

The company had a template for reviews, but it wasn't very detailed. So she went on instinct. She first praised his good qualities and then gently explained how his conversations consumed too much time and distracted co-workers. The approach worked. "I was lucky," she says.

But instinct has also led her to make mistakes. A couple of months ago, Ms. Spyke learned that an employee hadn't entered an order because he didn't know the product number. Rather than confront the employee, Ms. Spyke just entered the order herself. "I have avoided saying things because I don't like conflict," she says. "That's something that I've really had to work at."

Some middle managers who oversee first-time supervisors notice, and lament about this lack of training. For example, Nancy Meiers, a senior program manager at a government contractor in Washington , D.C. , has worked in management for two decades at seven employers, ranging from accounting to pharmaceuticals. Frustrated with the dearth of formal training, she devised her own curriculum for new managers. She tracks employees in line for promotion, and the skills they lack. Sometimes, she recommends external courses; other times, she teaches the employees herself after hours, offering pizza as an incentive.

Regardless of how its done, it is obvious that new managers, like all new employees, need and deserve professional training of how to be an effective manger/supervisor.

 (Adapted from Erin White, The Wall Street Journal)