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Top Book Picks for New Managers

Just got promoted to manager and wondering how you can excel in your new role? Establishing yourself as the boss is vital, according to Bruce Tulgan, founder of research and management training company RainmakerThinking and a leading expert and frequent speaker on the changing workplace.

Tulgan, whose new book, It’s Okay to Be the Boss, is due out in March, says the best way to take charge is to slowly and systematically establish your authority. That means not playing false nice guy or soft-pedaling your authority. It means setting up your employees for success by spending a lot of time with them to establish priorities, spell out expectations, and monitor, measure and document their performance. It means assisting them in breaking big deadlines into smaller timeframes and encouraging them to identify shortcuts, avoid pitfalls and follow best practices. And it means helping them solve problems as soon as they occur.

But learning management skills like these takes training and hard work. To help new managers succeed, Tulgan -- an author of 16 books -- recommends his latest work. He also recommends these books:

The One Minute Manager
by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

“It’s still the easy-to-digest masterpiece that warmly conveys three basics of managing: Goal-setting, praising and scolding,” says Tulgan. But, Tulgan says, the only problem is that since managing takes so much more than a minute, the one-minute premise of the book encourages managers to look for easy ways that don’t exist. That’s why Tuglan secretly prefers one of the sequels: The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey by Ken Blanchard, William Oncken and Hal Burrows. “I love the metaphor of monkeys as next steps. If you are the manager, the key is keeping those monkeys off your back…. You can’t take care of all the monkeys while your employees are waiting for next steps. Give those monkeys to your employees to care for.”

Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership
by Linda Hill

“Linda Hill is so smart and so tuned in to the mindset of the new leader (that) she starts at the beginning: ‘What does it mean to be a manager?’ I love that she asks that question instead of ‘what does it mean to be a leader?’ which is so much fuzzier,” explains Tulgan. “Hill gets right to the heart of the matter. She focuses first on the very difficult psychological shift that is necessary, the shift of identity: Finding a comfortable identity as ‘manager.’ She tackles the difficult interpersonal dynamics of wielding authority before she walks you through the necessary steps to make the transformation.”

The New Manager’s Handbook: 24 Lessons for Mastering Your New Role
by Morey Stettner

“Stettner walks you through the basic tactics (like feedback and delegation and performance reviews) before getting into things like strategic thinking and building alliances,” Tulgan points out. “Read this book most of all for the simple tactical advice, like how to pose penetrating questions and how to deliver criticism, but beware that his tactics drift a little toward what I call ‘false nice-guy syndrome.’ For that kind of very tactical advice, also check out Meryl Runion’s Perfect Phrases for Managers and Supervisors: Hundreds of Ready-to-Use Phrases for Any Management Situation.”

Winning and the sequel, Winning: The Answers
by Jack Welch and Suzy Welch

“These are just great, because they have Welch’s accumulated wisdom from running the biggest company in the world for 20 years and his great, down-to-earth voice. But the books are beautifully done because of the tremendous writing and editing ability of Suzy Welch. Read these for a dose of the real world from a guy who knows better than most. Along these lines, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy (also a former CEO) is a great book.”

The Harvard Business Review On… http://www.amazon.com/Harvard-Business-Review-Leadership-Paperback/sim/0875848834/1/ref=pd_sexpl_esi/monstercom

Tulgan recommends new managers fill their knowledge gaps with relevant issues of the Harvard Business Review and other reference tools. The Harvard Business Review On… series “includes a book on virtually every subject of even possible interest to a manager,” he says.

“If you are a new manager, you need to take a deep breath and say to yourself and to your employees: ‘Great news, I’m the boss! I consider that a sacred responsibility. I’m going to live up to that responsibility,’” adds Tulgan. “It’s OK to be the boss. You just have to be great at it.”

To learn more about management from Bruce Tulgan, listen to our podcast http://podcast.monster.com/articles/tulgan/.