Becoming a Better Boss: 4 Tips for First-Time Managers

Becoming a manager for the first time can feel exciting, gratifying, nerve-wracking, and even overwhelming. But being a good boss is not about following a checklist of what makes a perfect manager, as there’s no such thing, argues Sabina Nawaz in her book You’re the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need).

A former HR leader at Microsoft and executive coach for Fortune 500 decision-makers, Nawaz offers actionable frameworks in her book on how to become a better manager, backed by lessons from her clients and personal career wins and losses. Here are some top takeaways from the book on how new managers can best make the transition.

Being a good manager is a journey

It’s a common misconception that there are “bad” bosses and “good” ones, but according to Nawaz, we all have the capacity to teeter between good and bad boss behaviors.

“Just as no person is all good or all bad, the measure of a boss is neither binary nor fixed,” writes Nawaz. “‘Bad’ bosses are rarely bad people. In fact, most of them are good people with the best of intentions who unwittingly cross a tenuous dividing line between good intentions and bad behaviors.”

Acknowledging this can help you realize it’s an active practice to deliver skilled management—and quite common for negative habits to emerge if left unchecked. This mental shift of making continual progress towards productive behaviors and minimizing the emergence of lackluster ones often starts with reframing how you attain success.

Your path to becoming a manager was likely the result of being an ambitious professional delivering beyond expectations, but that’s no longer the case. “Showcasing your output may be what got you where you are, but now you need to rewire who gets showcased and what ‘output’ means,” writes Nawaz. “Recalibrating to focus on driving your team’s success is the critical distinction between being a standout employee and a standout boss.”

It’s a continual effort as a manager to reorient how you were incentivized to perform before, and do your best to avoid the slow slip into “bad boss” behaviors, writes Nawaz.

Communicate with greater precision 

Now that you’re a manager, the power dynamics have shifted when it comes to how you’re perceived by your colleagues. What you say, write, and do can carry more weight. Poor communication is the second most common perceived weakness of managers, according to Nawaz’s research. One of the most common mistakes is when managers give imprecise feedback or advice, resulting in a lack of clarity on appropriate next steps. This can lead to an overreaction like a colleague redesigning the entire pitch deck, when only one slide needed a revamp. Or too restrained of a response altogether.

When you’re a manager, the team often pays close attention to your every word, so Nawaz suggests using what she dubs “the scaling tool” to offset this pitfall and communicate with the intended level of impact and urgency.

She suggests saying something like: “On a scale of one to 10, I’d rate the importance of this task at a . . .” Or, “in terms of a rough sketch vs. polished, this can be a . . .”  Or, “On a scale of one to 10, how confident do you feel about your ability to deliver in the timeline given?”

Any professional could benefit from being a more calculated communicator by using the scaling tool, but it matters more when your team puts more weight to your message.

Another common mistake among managers is giving “uneven feedback” or only offering corrective feedback about what’s wrong and needs to be improved upon.

Solely delivering negative feedback is demoralizing and harmful to a team member’s productivity when they’re not getting motivating insights into what is working. “As human beings, we are wired to listen for the dangers, for the negatives, and don’t take in the positive until it’s repeated endlessly like this week’s top song,” writes Nawaz.

She recommends managers offset this by offering five positive comments for every piece of corrective feedback, keeping the positive stuff more feedback than praise, and making the delivery of positive feedback a frequent habit. This is important: A Gallup survey found that employees rank the “most meaningful and memorable recognition” comes from their managers.

Delegate effectively

Now that you’re a manager, you can’t continue to do everything yourself like you did when you were an individual contributor. You have to delegate. What’s not obvious about delegating is how to do it successfully. You can’t simply pass off tasks with a set of instructions and hope for results. 

According to Nawaz, delegation starts with identifying your direct report’s level of knowledge on a given subject or task. The next step is adjusting your coaching so employees are given the right level of support and independence.

Depending on how much support is needed, you could approach that in a number of ways. For instance, you could do the task and have them observe you, teach them the step-by-step process, ask what they need from you as they complete the task without your instruction, or make it clear you’re a resource as they finalize the task on their own.

These actions go in order of providing more coaching from you and less self-sufficiency initially to eventually scaling back your involvement and increasing their own autonomy to complete the task.

Delegation is critical for not only empowering your team to grow and contribute to the organization’s goals, but it also provides you with more blank space on your schedule for other tasks.

Recognize your triggers that lead to bad boss behavior

You’ll be exposed to different sources of stress and pressure as a manager. Some is avoidable, but a lot of it is not. The buildup of these forces is typically what leads a well-intentioned manager to delegate poorly, communicate haphazardly, or come across as cold.

To do your best to prevent a downward shift toward the bad boss lane, aim to control how you react to these strains by spotting the triggers that set you off.

Nawaz refers to these as your “pressure pitfalls,” and the ability to identify them as they’re emerging can help you deescalate and change how you react in the moment. She suggests managers ask themselves these types of questions and keep note of the scenarios when these moments bubble up.

• “What types of people tend to put me on high alert?”

• “What tends to get under my skin the most?”

• “What days of the week or cyclical or seasonal times are particularly pressure-filled for me?”

• “What do I experience physically when I get triggered?” 

• “When are the moments I am not at my best? (When you’re sleep-deprived? Hungry? In the mornings before you’ve had your coffee or late afternoons when your energy dips?)”

The answers you come up with can help you map your pressure-induced triggers and begin to adjust how you react through following a series of grounding exercises.

Once a trigger is activated, Nawaz recommends doing complex math or thinking through a familiar memory to help direct the brain out of a flight or fight moment and back to executive functioning.

To put this into practice—or any of these suggestions—Nawaz advocates for creating a “micro habit” where you practice the skill daily and keep it small, so “they’re tiny enough to sneak past our defense systems and start to inoculate us against change resistance.”

By small, she suggests so tiny that this habit takes two minutes or less a day, and may even feel absurdly minuscule on the surface, which means you’re off to a strong start.

Keep these management frameworks and recommendations in mind as you begin your journey of working to become a better boss for your team.

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