By Elaine Pofeldt
BNET Australia (www.bnet.com)

If the mistakes you’ve made as a rookie manager make you cringe, you’re not alone. Many people struggle with the transition to overseeing their colleagues — and they usually don’t get much help from their employers. Last year the Institute for Corporate Productivity surveyed hundreds of employees to determine how well their companies helped people make the switch to management. The results were dismal: More than 60 percent rated their firm’s performance as “fair;” 16 percent said it was “poor.”

So that leaves managers to learn from their mistakes, which is, of course, often the best way to improve. Here, five seasoned managers tell us in their own words some of their most painful lessons as newbies. 


My mistake: I let an employee intimidate me. 

When I first started managing in 1994, I oversaw a salesperson who was old enough to be my mom. She knew her job, but sometimes she chose not to do it. Some months she would make her sales goals, some months, she wouldn’t. As a new manager, I was hesitant to give her direction and intimidated by her age. When other people started mentioning that she was coming in late and taking personal phone calls at work, I made a serious mistake. I told her that other people were complaining about her, instead of reporting my own observations. She said, ‘Well, I do my job.’ Worried about her feelings, I said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ I should have said, ‘You may think you’re doing your job, but the business results show that you’re not.’ I lived with her uneven performance, even though it was stressful, and she stayed on after I left.

Now if I have a problem like that, I take immediate corrective action, instead of losing sleep over it. When I managed an administrative worker who consistently called in sick about three times a week, saying her stomach hurt, I was sympathetic for a short time. But I quickly realized what she was up to and insisted she seek medical attention. When she didn’t do that, I gave her 10 days to straighten up. After three weeks of perfect attendance, she called in sick again. I told her not to bother coming in. She showed up that afternoon and we never had a problem with her attendance again.

— Anne Brush Zimos, 43, manager of a design services team at IBM in Armonk, N.Y. 

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