Five Lessons I Learned in My First Year of Being a New Manager

You can’t lead others if you can’t lead yourself and you can’t pour from an empty cup

Photo by airfocus on Unsplash

About a year ago, I was promoted to a managerial role at my company. I’ve been working here for a little over four years now and this is the second time I’ve been promoted since I started.

This promotion, however, was a little more exciting since it was the first time in my ten years out of college where I actually had someone reporting to me. Needless to say, this was a pretty huge milestone in my career.

After essentially being in the same role for the majority of my career, it was exciting to finally be able to into a leadership role and have a team of my own. Of course, that didn’t come without a great deal of trial and error, many mistakes I made along the way, and brand new experiences.

But, like anything in life, doing something new for the first time can always be a little scary, but you always find a way to figure it out as you go. So, for anyone who’s heading in this same direction and becoming a manager for the first time, here a few big lessons I learned in my first year.

1. It’s important to check in

When I first became a manager, I made it a point to check in as often as I could. From the beginning, I immediately set up an ongoing weekly catch up and let my direct report know that I was there whenever they needed me. I did this because I wanted to make sure I always had a temperature check on workload, stress levels, and just develop a general rapport with them.

Thankfully, this is something that was important to both of us so it highly benefited our working relationship. And from personal experience, the best relationships I’ve had with past managers were the ones where they frequently checked to see how I was doing. At the end of the day, we’re still just people and it’s good to know that our managers actually care about the ins and outs of our work and life as a whole.

2. Lead with empathy

Aside from being an employee, we are all just regular people with our own set of opinions, emotions, and experiences. That’s something that a…