Ask any business owner what the key to success is, and you’ll likely hear the same thing: a great manager. Managers allow business owners to focus on other aspects of the business while giving employees the support and encouragement they need to succeed. But sometimes, you may lose a manager due to new job opportunities, retirement, or a life change — it’s something that every business owner has to deal with at one point or another. As such, finding and training a new manager becomes the focus of priority.

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And this is exactly where the trouble begins. Finding a new manager is only half the battle. If you’ve never hired a new manager and you have no management-specific onboarding or training programs, your manager’s new role can exist without transparency or direction. This leads to a bevy of issues that you can avoid entirely just by creating a new manager training program. If you’re not sure how training a new manager can help your business or where to start, here’s a guide to push you in the right direction.

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Training a New Manager Quickly and Why It Is Essential to Your Company

Training an effective manager is more than just having someone run your day-to-day operations. It’s about having the respect of team members and the leadership skills to build an entire culture, improve employee engagement, and boost morale. This is quite the mix of responsibilities, and while these all shouldn’t hinge entirely on management skills, your new manager still plays a vital role in productivity and employee retention.

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According to a study from DDI consultants, 57% of employees quit their jobs simply because they don’t like their boss or manager. Moreover, 82% of employees say they would potentially quit a job due to a poor manager.

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Those are some staggering and sobering statistics — especially when you consider that proper management training can often separate a poor manager from a good manager.

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And that’s just why training a new manager is essential to your business. Beyond being an individual contributor and project manager, a great manager wears many hats. They’re good leaders, communicators, decision-makers, and more.

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When you see the upside of new manager training, you wonder why you never prioritized it before. It’s really the glue that keeps your business cohesive while unlocking the full potential of your employees.

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The Shift to Your Vision and Mission

Although you can’t see it on a resume, managers — whether first-time managers or veterans — must be great leaders. However, this doesn’t mean that great leadership is inherent in most people. Like other types of skills, it’s part of a skill set that needs development.

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But one of the most overlooked aspects of a training regimen is getting a manager to shift their mindset to your vision and mission. Without their true understanding of your mission and vision, how can they possibly convey the same idea to your staff?

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That’s why you should always put your focus on the paradigm shift from a previous job to your business mission and vision. This lies within inspiration and excitement. Evoking a sense of excitement that can inspire your manager and result in a trickle-down effect is the cornerstone of training a new manager, regardless of their experience and competencies.

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Make sure that your vision and mission are front and center on your in-house documents, one-on-one meetings, and any other correspondence.

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Leadership Skills Development

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As mentioned before, leadership isn’t necessarily a skill naturally possessed by managers, yet its importance in a management role cannot be understated. You don’t have to be a natural-born leader to succeed, but cultivating leadership skills is one of the most important things you can do when training a new manager.

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To truly ascertain why leadership skills are important for a new manager, you only need to look at one of the most important aspects of a manager: team-building and employee engagement. Around 70% of employee engagement relates directly to the leadership abilities of the manager, according to a Gallup poll.

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Leadership Development Ideas

More importantly, training a new manager to embrace situational leadership is one of the best approaches in the modern age. This theory posits that no single leadership style is superior to others. Instead, it embraces the idea that the willingness to work and the skill set to do so are linked — it embraces specific situations and the skill of each worker to come to a conclusive management decision.

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Obviously, this idea can be tweaked to your specific company framework. But with leadership training, you can craft a leadership role that’s intertwined with the inner workings of your company. The results will speak for themselves.

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Soft Skills Development

Hard skills are one thing — every manager needs to have the knowledge, experience, and job-specific expertise to succeed. But one thing that many business owners ignore in the recruiting, hiring, and training process is the development of soft skills.

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Soft skills are those intangible qualities that separate the elite managers from the rest, such as:

• Time management skills
• People management
• Communication skills
• Critical-thinking skills
• Decision-making skills
• Conflict resolution
• Flexibility
• Organization

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This is by no means an exhaustive list of soft skills. It simply points to the idea that training a new manager or a new leader requires more than just a business-centered approach. It’s a holistic approach that incorporates vision, mission, procedural, and soft skill-based ideas.

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Continuing Education

Even if your new manager is working out well in both an in-person or remote environment, the need for continuing education is a foregone conclusion — or at least it should be. Continuing education provides the stepping stones to new ideas that can lead to high-performing teams, new skills, emotional intelligence, employee development, and more.

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The interesting concept behind continuing education is that you can opt for internal or external programs based on your budget and capabilities.

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Smaller companies may find more value in an outsourced approach to continued training for a new manager, such as webinars, retreats, mentorships, or leadership programs. However, larger companies with better resources can make this internal.

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Whatever you choose, the idea remains the same: the status quo won’t work in a dynamic work environment. You must constantly adapt when training a new manager or a first-time manager, and continuing education gives you the edge in a competitive marketplace.

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Transparency and Accountability

New managers can’t steadily improve if they’re not sure what’s expected. That’s where accountability and transparency become vital.

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Accountability is a type of performance management from the top down. Just because you’re an owner doesn’t mean you’re necessarily relieved of your own management duties. It’s just a different type of management.

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Having somewhat frequent performance reviews (every two to three months at first and expanding to six to 12 months), check-ins about once a month, and having direct reports to you are all ways to create focus and avoid blurring the line between owner and manager.

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Moreover, this leads to transparency, which is a tenet of a strong manager-owner or manager-employee relationship. Expectations are paramount to training a new manager, and these set the tone for the future success of the manager.

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The Productivity vs. Empowerment Equation

Employee performance is central to the success of new manager training, but how to do it is an ever-changing scenario. Decades ago, an iron-fist approach to management was effective, but as workers learn to voice concerns and have more responsibility, this has become far less effective.

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Rather than mandate a productivity-based approach, training a new manager should provide them with empowerment that they can pass on to employees.

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Empowerment is the idea that each employee has the skills necessary to succeed on the job. This self-awareness — like many other things in the business world — isn’t always present in each worker. But whether an introvert or an extrovert, everyone likes to hear that they’re doing a great job.

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Praise doesn’t necessarily empower each individual, but it’s definitely something that propels them to work harder. When training a new manager, empowerment over productivity should be a central theme. Prioritize this in your training, you should see positive results more quickly.

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Embrace the Measurable and Quantifiable

If you’re not familiar with SMART goals, training a new manager is the time to support them. This mnemonic device stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART). It’s how managers can quantify their work and successes.

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In the grand scheme of training, this is a novel way to provide a reachable goal. When managers can apply this model to employees, it can improve focus, cohesiveness, and team-building all in one fell swoop. You can even create templates that illustrate this idea and pave the way toward future successes.

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SMART goals also go hand-in-hand with empowerment and productivity, as well as giving you a quantifiable way to measure your new manager in the future.

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Start this idea during the training process, and you should find that your manager engages employees and your vision more readily.

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The Tweak

Training a new manager can’t simply rely on a single rubric or idea. It’s a living, breathing idea that will need constant changes over time. The workaday world is simply too dynamic to leave something set in stone.

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While new manager training may require a bit more effort on your part, the results will speak for themselves. You can’t put a price on that.