Moving From Peer to Manager - Your Practice Ain’t Perfect - Joe Mull

In this episode of Your Practice Ain’t Perfect, we’re talking about Moving From Peer to Manager.

Joe Mull, M.Ed is a practice manager leadership trainer and keynote speaker who works with healthcare organizations that want their practice leaders to engage, inspire, and succeed. As an expert in employee engagement and healthcare leadership development, Joe gives physicians and managers the skills and tools they need to engineer teams that work hard, get along, and wow patients. After more than a decade in healthcare, Joe knows that when leaders develop skills related to leadership, communication, and teambuilding, they can stop putting fires out every day and prevent them from sparking in the first place. Bring Joe in to keynote your conference, design and facilitate a retreat, or beef up your practice leader training. For more info or to book Joe now visit www.joemull.com.

Congratulations, you got promoted! What’s that? It’s an internal promotion and you’re now supervising your old team? Oh. Well, congratulations, you will now try to navigate one of the trickiest professional transitions anyone can make … ever. Yaaaaay.

This topic – moving from peer to manager - is one I’m asked about by my clients constantly. If you do the right things early on, you will be wildly successful. But if you get it wrong, you could spend years in turmoil feeling frustrated, hurt, and ineffective. That’s why, in this episode of Your Practice Ain’t Perfect, I’ll tell you what you have to do to successfully evolve from peer to manager. Keep watching…

OK, so you’re now in charge of all your friends and former colleagues. Awesome. This should be a breeze, right? Because you were one of them and they all like and respect you? Au contraire, my friend, whether you realize it or not, you are now navigating a professional minefield. If you want this to work at all, there are 4 things you need to start doing as soon as you step in to this role:

First: Manage your own expectations. Don’t assume that everyone will be on your side because you were once one of them. It’s the opposite actually, you will be watched very closely by everyone and will have to prove yourself all over again, so take nothing for granted.

Second: Prepare for your relationships to change. And I mean prepare yourself and prepare others. It may not make sense for you to keep going to happy hour or friending everyone in the office on Facebook. The boundaries have shifted, so be ready for that. Then, tell others to expect that as well.

If you have close personal friendships with team members, sit down with them, individually, and get them ready for this change. Tell them that things will be different even if you’re not sure how. Be clear that how much you respect and care for them hasn’t changed, but that the interactions you have might be different. Be clear about how important it is to you that you both keep the lines of communication open at all times.

Here’s something else that’s critical for anyone making this transition: Be selective and conversational about change. Often, internally promoted leaders want to quickly fix EVERYTHING, all at once. Wait. You will be far more successful early on if you focus first on a different aspect: people. Make time right away to meet individually with employees. Solicit their ideas, opinions, and challenges. This demonstrates that you are committed to involving them and that you respect them. And when the time comes to initiate change, don’t announce it, discuss it. Don’t tell them about it. Ask them about their reactions to your ideas, plans, and goals.

Lastly, stay in the trenches for a while. While it may be tempting to retreat from the side-by-side work you previously did with your team, don’t. When employees see the manager working harder than everyone else at the work they are also doing, it keeps the lines of communication open and builds respect and loyalty. It also proves you’re just as committed to ALL the work and that nothing is beneath you. As time passes you can recede from some of that work slowly, but don’t totally remove yourself from it completely.

So there you have it: manage expectations, prepare for relationships to change, be selective and conversational about change, and keep working in the trenches for a while. Above all else, pick your spots when it comes to exercising and asserting your authority.

By the way, if you find this video useful, please SHARE IT everywhere… on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn! I love seeing you share these as it helps me help others who face these same kinds of challenges.

Let’s keep the conversation going! Please take a moment to tell me what you thought of this video by using the comments box below. In the meantime, good luck out there and I’ll see you next time.

Joe Mull- Speaker, Author, Trainer
www.joemull.com
Twitter:@joemull77

Видео Moving From Peer to Manager - Your Practice Ain’t Perfect - Joe Mull канала BossBetter with Joe Mull