Some people are born to be managers, and others have management thrust upon them. In fact, a 2024 article published in the journal Leader to Leader reported that a third of US managers received no management training of any kind before or after becoming a manager.
Though managerial skills generally take time to master, they also don’t magically develop on their own — even great managers need support and structure to be successful.
If you’re a first-time manager, there are some techniques and mindset shifts you can implement immediately. This article will cover tips for new managers and give you a quick primer on people management and its key concepts.
What is people management?
People management is the discipline of developing, organizing, and growing the employee side of the business. As opposed to human resource management, which addresses more administrative aspects like compensation, people management emphasizes relationships and the more fluid aspects of working with people, and it’s necessary in almost all leadership positions.
Good people managers rely on emotional intelligence and strategic thinking to support their team’s work and optimize their performance, professional development, and wellbeing.
“It’s not just coming up with tasks and delegating them,” said Priyanka Tilve, senior executive producer at City Cast DC. “[It’s] also consistently checking back in and making sure everyone is feeling heard, understood, cared for, and being given the resources they need to succeed — while also trying to make sure they're succeeding according to company metrics.”
Why are people management skills important?
An evidence review by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) shows that strong people managers influence almost everything important to a company: employee wellbeing, engagement, performance, retention, and, of course, the success of strategic initiatives.
In a business context that’s constantly changing, successful people management skills (such as feedback delivery, decision-making, conflict resolution, and active listening) are all the more urgent.
In fact, according to Harvard Business Publishing’s 2023 Global Leadership Development Study, these were among the most in-demand leadership skills according to nearly 1,300 learning and development and HR professionals. In that survey, emotional and social intelligence, empathy when communicating and listening, and conflict management ranked among the most important leadership skills for addressing business challenges.
Your role as a manager is indispensable. How do you get started?
Below are seven tips for first-time managers on finding support, developing healthy mindsets, and leading with empathy.
7 Tips for Effective People Management
1. Take time to get to know your direct reports.
Your employees are all unique individuals, and it helps if you treat them that way. Learning about your employees individually can help you humanize them and better understand their particular working styles — like how they best receive constructive feedback or how productive they can be while multitasking.
“I share a getting-to-know-you worksheet where we learn about each other’s communication style and what motivates and inspires us,” said Kelly Moon, head of content and integrated marketing at AssemblyAI. “I tailor my management style to each individual because everyone is different.”
During Lattice’s 2021 Career Progression Survey, 76% of employees reported that they would be somewhat or very likely to leave a company with lackluster career progression opportunities. Moreover, 26% of respondents said their managers don’t even talk to them about opportunities to progress their careers. As a manager, you can help fix that.
Learning about your employees’ goals and needs can give you context about their behaviors, tendencies, and roadblocks in the workplace. This nuance can help you share performance expectations more effectively and identify the right professional growth opportunities for your reports.
2. Use one-on-ones for strategic problem-solving and growth.
Using your one-on-one as a checklist for current projects can be tempting, but face-to-face time is better used for high-level conversations around problem-solving, growth, and strategic discussions.
“One-on-ones give us the space to talk about the big picture — like our production process — how is it working or not working, how should we maybe revamp it?” said Tilve. “If we weren’t doing the small things on a day-to-day basis, then the weekly one-on-one would get bogged down in that stuff.”
As long as you have other ways of communicating project statuses (like through Lattice Updates or Slack), spend your synchronous time more wisely — especially if you have more than one direct report. Try Lattice’s one-on-one meeting agenda template to help you structure your weekly conversations.
“In those one-on-ones, we identify problems that people are feeling (especially around impending burnout) and then find ways to either mitigate that or prevent it from becoming a problem in the first place,” Tilve added. “Seeing those solutions come to fruition has been really rewarding.”
Spend time reflecting together on larger patterns that come up in your workflow, as well as team members’ professional goals. “What were the successes, what worked or what didn’t work? How can I support them?” Moon said. “Then they have a safe space where they’re able to open up honestly, and we can troubleshoot together.”
If you have multiple team members, prioritizing regular, productive one-on-ones with everyone can be a challenge. Lattice 1:1s can help. It allows you to work with individual team members on meeting agendas, ensure you’re keeping up with your meeting cadence, and track and resolve action items related to your discussions.
3. Make continuous feedback the norm.
It’s a manager’s job to create a safe and consistent environment where employees feel comfortable and empowered to share feedback, whether in annual reviews or regular check-ins.
"It’s very difficult to give candid, direct feedback, and the more space I can give for that [the better],” said Trevor Sutley, senior account executive at BioRender. “The more you can get that kind of open feedback system, the more comfortable they feel.”
He deliberately asks team members for feedback in every weekly one-on-one meeting. “They’re just meant to be open conversations, back and forth,” he said. “If they don’t fill it out in the Lattice Update, I always ask them verbally."
Don’t be afraid of sharing feedback frequently. Open communication can be conducive to employee engagement and a healthy work environment. Gallup data shows that employees are 3.6 times more likely to be motivated to do outstanding work when their manager provides daily rather than annual feedback.
Lattice Feedback allows you and your direct reports to request feedback from everyone, including peers, clients, and customers. You can share or request feedback and control its visibility through multiple channels, like Slack or email. When performance review season comes around, Lattice produces AI-generated insights based on the feedback your report has received, saving you time.
Moon said the key to getting useful, tangible feedback from a new team is to ask good questions.
“Asking, ‘Do you think I’m a good manager?’ is not a great question that will solicit a meaningful response because it’s too open-ended,” Moon explained. “Instead, ask for feedback on more specific aspects of your leadership style, such as the way you communicate to others or share updates, how you facilitate conversations or meetings, if you’re providing opportunities for individuals to feel challenged and excited.”
4. Deliver criticism with care and empathy.
Sharing critical feedback can be nerve-wracking, but waiting until a formal performance review can leave employees feeling blindsided. “Give people the chance to address it as quickly as possible,” advised Sutley. “You might be nervous to say it, but if you just do it and have that good conversation with them one-on-one, it means a world of difference.”
To facilitate these conversations, Moon, Sutley, and Tilve recommended the following:
- View employees as partners in problem-solving. “I’m trying to see it as a problem that affects both of us, and we will work together to try and find a solution to it as opposed to thinking that as manager, I have seen this problem, and it is my job to tell you how to correct it,” Tilve said.
- Remind yourself why the conversation matters. “If I’m going into a difficult conversation and I'm feeling anxious about it, I make sure to remind myself that having that conversation is important, valuable, and necessary for the success of the individual,” Moon noted.
- Prioritize respect and empathy. “We need to give this feedback, but emotionally, how can I deliver it in the most well-received, well-respected way?” said Sutley. “The best managers are able to hold their team accountable, but they do it in a way where it’s empathetic and they actually are there to support and offer ideas.”
- Accept that the learning curve may require repetition. Tilve said repetitive conversations can ease pressures on both sides. “It’s not a specific behavior I’m trying to change, so much as a mindset,” she explained. “We just keep having conversations around how we navigate our differences, what are better ways for us to communicate our disagreements, and how to move forward from those disagreements.”
Give team members a chance to share why they might be underperforming — like mental health needs, process pitfalls, or workload issues. Active listening can help you build trust each time you check in and help employees understand that your feedback is meant to support them.
Remember, employees need a balance of praise and criticism to thrive. If you only praise good work, employees may not take your feedback seriously. But if you only share criticism, your team will be on edge and demoralized. That doesn’t mean lying to your employees about how well they’re doing or forgoing constructive comments. Instead, it’s about recognizing when, where, and how to give praise.
5. Be transparent about goal-setting.
Setting goals is key to keeping individual contributors focused and aligned. But if you’re responsible for setting your team’s goals (as opposed to just implementing them), you might be stuck accounting for your team’s capacity and the company’s needs simultaneously.
“The most stressful part is making sure we’re not coming up with goals that are too easy, and that will make us kind of complacent or bored, but also not so overly ambitious that we could never reach them,” Tilve said. “It was a fear of setting ourselves up for failure.”
While not every manager is in charge of setting their team’s goals, managers play a key role in helping employees connect their contributions to the team and the broader organization’s success. Educate your employees on how their daily work supports team goals and why those goals were selected in the first place.
Sutley had three recommendations for new leaders on setting goals:
- Encourage employees to participate. “I lean toward oversharing with my team and making it very clear on why we have the expectations set for what they are. I want them to challenge me on different things because I think it helps me think differently or think about areas that I might not be thinking about.”
- Put yourself in their shoes. “I think it’s fair to ask, ‘Hey, how, how did we come to these goals?’ The more transparent you can be and the more trust you can build with them, the more they know that you’re advocating for them behind the scenes.”
- Help them connect to the big picture. “Whatever you can do to make them feel more connected in a genuine, authentic way adds a lot of value to their day-to-day. You can only motivate people with fear for so long.”
Lattice OKRs & Goals is designed to be collaborative: Together, managers and teams can set, track, and align individual and team objectives with organizational success metrics.
If goal-setting is one of your new responsibilities, download our workbook How to Set Meaningful and Effective OKRs.
6. Try not to take team performance personally.
Lattice’s 2024 State of People Strategy Report revealed that performance management is ranked at an all-time high as an HR priority in the report’s history. So, if your team’s performance keeps you up at night, you’re not alone. But you must find a way to manage that stress — it could make all the difference to your direct reports.
“Management involves a tremendous amount of emotional regulation,” Moon said. Taking matters personally may come naturally when feeling so responsible for others, but it can get in the way of meaningful and effective performance management.
“I’m so attached to goals and to my team that when we don’t perform, I kind of take it personally. And you just can’t do that, otherwise you’re not gonna survive,” Sutley said. “You’ve got to put your ego, your needs, and your feelings aside to say, ‘Hey, it’s not about me.’”
Being low-ego is key to leading high-performing teams, and it helps when you’re managing employees with more experience than you. It’s a crucial part of the servant leadership model to which Moon subscribes. She said this mentality keeps her open-minded to learning and adapting her management style.
“Sometimes folks in leadership positions not only put a lot of pressure on themselves, but they feel a need to exert and display immense power,” Moon noted. “But I really wanted to approach it differently and challenge that way of thinking — I’m really here to serve the people I’m supposed to support.”
7. Be open to learning from others.
Take advantage of management training and courses offered by your organization. Their curriculum likely includes the fundamentals for your specific work environment, including company expectations, leadership skills, resources for conflict management, and mentorship opportunities within the organization.
But newer and smaller organizations might not have this infrastructure yet. It’s okay to explore other ways to build new skill sets. Tilve said she leans on peer managers for insights and ideas.
“We get together once a month without any of our direct reports and without any of our managers to be able to talk,” she said. “It is really cathartic, and supportive, and so needed. If we could find the time to do that more often, that would probably help alleviate a lot of stress for all of us.”
Don’t discount the perspective of people outside your company, either. Former colleagues, mentors, and external leadership courses can all provide helpful insights. “Seeing what other companies are doing that we haven’t thought of can be really useful,” Tilve said. “Because it’s a little bit of an echo chamber sometimes.”
Moon also encouraged new managers to think about what kind of leaders they learned from early in their careers, both as managerial inspirations and caveats: Consider what kind of manager you don’t want to be, and watch your team for cues as to how well you’re matching up to your own ideal.
“Be open-minded when you’re first starting out because over time your philosophy or leadership style will evolve. Leave room for that evolution,” Moon advised. “Challenge what you think is the best practice, even if it might be. You’ll never be a perfect leader, but you can strive to be a more effective leader than you were the day before.”
Key Components of People Management
When trying on your new shoes as a first-time people manager, it’s good to have a structure for thinking about your role and duties. The 5 Cs framework is a great model to start with.
The 5 Cs
Each C represents one of five main components of running a team: create, comprehend, communicate, collaborate, and confront.
Create
Creating refers to developing a competent and motivated team. Tasks involved include:
- Recruiting the right people.
- Growing them by providing learning and development opportunities.
- Creating the conditions needed for high performers to stay with your organization.
Comprehend
Comprehending involves gaining sharp, layered insights into your teammates’ strengths, weaknesses, goals, frustrations, and motivations. This means:
- Recognizing and valuing your reports and what they bring to the table.
- Practicing active listening and empathizing with their perspectives, challenges, and needs.
- Keeping an eye on employee performance and morale through indicators on platforms like Lattice Engagement and Lattice Performance.
Communicate
Effective communication encompasses empathy, understanding, conflict management, and trust-building. It can go a long way in creating a cordial and psychologically safe atmosphere within the team. It involves:
- Making goals, expectations, and feedback clear.
- Facilitating healthy, two-way communication among team members.
- Providing constructive, continuous feedback.
Collaborate
Collaboration is the cooperative effort that goes into achieving a common aim. You can foster this by:
- Creating an inclusive environment where everyone feels valued and heard.
- Setting SMART goals together as a team.
- Encouraging team members to share ideas, concerns, and feedback without fear of judgment.
Confront
Confrontation requires addressing conflicts and issues directly, sensitively, and constructively. Though it can be uncomfortable, you will have to regularly:
- Facilitate difficult conversations between employees in conflict.
- Make tough choices when necessary, such as reassigning roles and enforcing unpopular decisions.
- Address your own biases that might influence your stance in conflict situations.
New managers, let Lattice help.
You’re never “just a manager,” setting deadlines and moving resources around. You’re also a leader of people, empowering them with clarity and direction.
Let Lattice's people platform relieve the tedium of staying on top of things like one-on-one schedules and employee experience surveys while you focus on being present with your people. Talk to your HR department about integrating Lattice into your workflow.
People leaders and HR professionals — do you want to learn more about how you can support your managers? Download our People Strategy Playbook: Empowering Managers to Be Their Best.
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