Learning to Be the Boss

By ERIN WHITE | Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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?"

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"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. An average of just 7% of employers' training budgets was aimed at first-line supervisors in 2003, down from 12% in 2002, according to the most recent data from the American Society for Training & Development. 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.
Big multinational corporations are more likely to offer comprehensive training than smaller companies, where instruction is hit or miss, consultants say. Among the worst offenders are organizations filled with professionals, such as lawyers, doctors and journalists, who consider themselves masters of their craft first and managers second.
Whatever the field, one of the toughest issues for new managers is supervising former peers. After mechanical engineer Donald Pierce was promoted to supervise a few employees at the National Institute of Standards and Technology several years ago, he had to confront an employee about tardiness. Mr. Pierce was good friends with the man -- they take an annual fishing trip together -- and with others he now managed at the government agency, and he sensed that his employees were watching to see what he would do.
Mr. Pierce hadn't had any coaching on how to handle this kind of tricky situation. He decided to talk to the employee privately, but firmly. "I didn't yell, but I was serious," he says. "I was like, 'I'm calling you in here not to B.S. about outside work stuff'" but about a job issue. "I told him, 'you know, part of my job is to make sure you're doing yours and that you're showing up on time.'"

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Although it was uncomfortable at first, Mr. Pierce says, the employee was "conciliatory" and agreed to start coming in earlier. Today, Mr. Pierce is confident he took the right approach.
Ms. Baker, the Pennsylvania nurse, faced a similar 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.
"I offered advice as a friend but that's not really what I needed to do," she says. Instead, she says, she should have listened to the woman and served as a sounding board.
Eventually, another manager told her that her hospital, a part of Main Line Health, 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.
Main Line Health has increased management-training offerings in recent years in response to requests by managers, says Betty Hulton, the organization's director of education and development. In the late 1990s, Main Line added classes on customer service and workplace rules on sexual harassment and family leave. But managers asked for more soft-skills training, Ms. Hulton says, which has led to courses like the Peer to Boss class.
Other times, the impetus for training comes from senior management. Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, a 160-lawyer firm based in Portland, Ore., is bolstering its formal management training following a merger and a round of new hires. Senior leaders decided the firm had grown too big to continue to rely on informal collegiality for training, says President David Bartz. Supervising attorneys weren't exactly clamoring for the instruction, though. "You find a lawyer that wants more training and I want to buy that lawyer," Mr. Bartz quips.
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, the lack of training. 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.
In her classes, she helps would-be managers work through tricky problems, such as handling a new employee who messes up from day one. She also explains how to manage budgets. If employers were training "and doing it effectively," she says, "I wouldn't have been doing all this."

Source:wsj.com